Beef stood for courage, manliness and the fighting spirit; indeed, as Ben Rogers mentions in his sparkling book on the subject, Georgian British sailors consumed a ration of over 200 pounds of beef a year. It also stood for freedom, the independence of landowner and smallholder and tenant. In those marbled veins ran the blood of John Bull, the political antidote to the pettifogging high-taxing Whiggish government and the corrupt effeminate Hanoverian court.

To be a Tory, then and now, was and is to believe in these two things: beef and liberty. We like eating cows and we don’t like big government. What wasn’t an issue then, however, but is now, is the question of where the cows come from.

Among the many reasons for supporting Brexit were the freedom us to manage our own countryside, and the ability to negotiate international commerce for ourselves. So last week the Agriculture Bill passed the Commons, the first proper piece of agricultural legislation for 50 years. And coming down the track are the trade deals we can now strike with other countries.

But these two fruits of emancipation are in tension. The Agriculture Bill’s purpose was to protect the environment, ensure high standards of domestic food production, and improve the support system for farmers. The purpose of the trade deals is to open Britain to the markets of the world.

The danger is that, having legislated for top-quality British food standards, and set ourselves aggressive targets for carbon reduction, we simply offshore our environmental exploitation, our carbon emissions and our animal cruelty to other countries who are not so squeamish as us, and import their food once it’s neatly packaged.

As Daniel Zeichner MP, the Labour shadow farming minister, said in the Committee stages of the Bill, we could end up with a two-tier market in the UK: lovely sustainably-farmed British food for the rich, and cheap foreign muck for the masses.

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How to reconcile the Agriculture Bill and the trade deals — British beef and liberty? Mr Zeichner’s solution, backed by the NFU and a number of my Conservative colleagues, was to attempt an amendment to the Bill that would impose restrictions on our future trade deals: no food could be imported to the UK that is produced to lower standards than food made in Britain.

This sounds good, till you realise it would criminalise a lot of current imports from Europe and Africa, and impose an impossible expectation on our trading partners. As I cleverly tweeted last week, “are Labour proposing that we’ll only deal with countries that adopt our farming methods? Are we telling the Americans they should accept British rules, without having a say in making them? We tried something similar once and it ended up with a lot of British tea in Boston harbour.”

In the wrangle between the Agriculture Bill and the trade deals Conservatism needs to resolve what some call its essential contradiction, and others (including me) its fruitful tension. Which comes first, rural tradition or economic dynamism? Beef or liberty?

Libertarians remind us that trade and prosperity depend on comparative advantage. Different countries exploit their differences to specialise and compete, and the ‘loser’ in the race to make a particular product (say, food) wins too, getting cheaper food to buy and a wealthy foreign market to sell different products to (say, financial services and computer games). Global trade is an Olympics in which all get prizes: what you lose on the track you win in the velodrome.

And while we might have lost some of the agricultural races, we won’t lose all. As Owen Paterson has argued, we should be selling our beef to the US and our chicken feet (which we currently just bury, domestic demand being limited) to China, where demand is huge.

Surely British beef farmers should have the confidence in their product to pit it against all comers in the global market? To libertarians, the job of government in the food market is simply to enable frictionless free exchange across borders, so that the food people want — which usually means the cheapest food possible — is available on the shelves. Dan Hannan put this argument powerfully here. He would also say (I know, because he is a Wiltshire neighbour of mine and the proud possessor of a cloth cap and tweed jacket) that the rural way of life is best preserved by a small government.

And yet, and yet. Land is not a commodity like other commodities. It is finite, and they’re not making it anymore; and while the production of food may be best managed through the free market the other roles of the countryside — its somewhat central contribution to the health and wellbeing of the planet, and of people — are not. Nor is food really a commodity like other commodities, but a vital national resource we can’t trust entirely to vulnerable global supply chains.

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These factors force us to disapply the usual market logic, and acknowledge that government has a role to play in setting the terms of trade and the management of the rural economy. In free market theory the interests of producers are subordinate to those of consumers. In agriculture things are not so simple. The objective of food policy should not be ever-cheaper food: we already have the third-cheapest food in the world, after the US and Singapore (what is called ‘food poverty’ has nothing to do with food and everything to do with poverty, and should be addressed through family, welfare and employment policy).

The objective of food policy is more complex than product prices: it involves a complicated mix of security, environment and consumer interests, as well as respect for the almost spiritual identification of the nation with the land, its look and feel.

How, then, can we look after these interests? The Agriculture Bill paves the way for a new system of farm support, with payments for farmers for taking care of externalities like wildlife and water quality as well as food production: “public money for public goods”. The next imperative is to stop our farmers being too badly undercut by inferior cheap imports.

We can do this by insisting on high food safety standards, especially on pesticides; by good labelling so shoppers can clearly see what production values went into the food on offer; and by ad hoc bans on real horrors like chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef. We should put massive moral and regulatory pressure on the supermarkets to take responsibility for the food they offer us, and to be very scared of being discovered in a supply chain scandal.

But this might not be enough. And if not, we may need to reappraise the governing doctrine of conservative (really liberal) economic thought: frictionless trade. If necessary, tariff schedules in the trade deals should be used to drive up the prices of imports on food made with practices we don’t use here.

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Before Dan Hannan chokes on his Peruvian ceviche, I emphasise that tariffs should not be used to eliminate real comparative advantages. We musn’t hike the price of Spanish oranges because they get more sunlight than we do; and it could be argued that if American farmers can get Mexican labour cheaper than British pickers, good for them. But we can use tariffs to discourage the most egregious behaviours: the pesticides and stocking densities that drive up yields at the expense of good husbandry and animal welfare.

Of course the obstacle here is not just the free marketeers among my Tory colleagues but the World Trade Organisation, which does not recognise animal welfare or environmental damage as reasons to restrict trade.

Here, then, is a noble mission for global Britain: to use our influence as the world’s third largest food import market to press for higher standards in global food production, both directly through our trade deals and indirectly through reform of the WTO. Let the world’s farmers compete on comparative advantages that are good and natural — soil and sunlight, tradition and expertise, the value of local techniques and supply chains — not on the advantages achieved by the abuse of nature.

Many rural Conservartive MPs, like me, voted for the Agriculture Bill last week on the understanding that our farming constituents would not be sacrificed in the coming trade deals. This is the great opportunity and challenge for British conservatism: to create a strong domestic base for our bold international ventures. Let us power our foreign conquests, as the Royal Navy did in the 18th century, on prodigious quantities of British cow. Beef before liberty.

In this, he also gave Conservatism its heart. I read The Meaning of Conservatism (1979) with some effort — rewarding, but hard work, like reading Oakeshott or Hayek. Scruton’s writings on music and aesthetics are beyond me; but his later popular work, crucially On Hunting (1998) and England: An Elegy (2000) got me in the guts. Scruton explained to me why I love my country.

On Hunting, is a pure delight. It is a deeply personal story of love and terror in the saddle (phrases have stuck: the sight of his future wife Sophie, “aloft in Beaufort colours”; the “stone teeth” of the dry-stone walls coming towards him “at the speed of the turning earth”). It is also the distillation of Conservatism, an account of the Hegelian experience in which the individual loses himself and finds himself among a community of fellows.

England: An Elegy, written in the cold dawn of the New Labour era, is provocatively nostalgic, written in the past tense, a “memorial address… to the civilisation that made me and which is now passing from the world.” Reading it now, you detect a self-mockery in the backward view. For surely Scruton’s philosophy is as current as ever.  Today, 20 years after the book was published, we are seeing its fruit.

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An old-new narrative is taking form in Conservatism, combining culture, place and community, with the particularly British spirit of enterprise and invention. Both halves of this combination resist a stifling central state, and the totalitarian impulse of the woke agenda; whether you want to live in a village or to start a tech business — or both, for doing both these things is now possible — you want economic and intellectual freedom, and you want to feel part of a tradition or a community that is bigger than you. This combination of freedom and belonging is the English inheritance Scruton explains to us; it is the inheritance we need for the future.

As a Wiltshire MP, albeit from the chalk downlands a few miles south of his clay country, I claim Roger Scruton for the county. He wrote at length (particularly News from Somewhere: On Settling [2004]) about its manners and its people, among whom he made his home, raised a family and became, as a foxhunter and bellringer, replete with function and with purpose.

Yet for all Scruton’s Aristotelian preference for the known and the vernacular, he was a Platonist too: he argued that England belongs to a universal European civilisation, to a classicism made gentle by Christianity and tempered by national feeling. His Anglicanism was properly catholic, which explains his own brave work behind the Iron Curtain, stoking the low fires of national identity during the long communist winter.

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Just now, Conservatism has everything before it, but there are several paths ahead. It can take the easy one: follow the money and the zeitgeist; denigrate the past and embrace modernity; seek an accommodation with one of the sterile new powers of the world, America, Europe or China; further erase the particular character of the people.

Or it can take the harder path, through the thickets of metropolitan scorn. This means seeing people primarily as producers not as consumers, needing more purpose not more stuff; rooted in places, not mobile units of labour; capable of virtue, capable of sin. It means fashioning a particularly British model, independent of the great powers, based on a distinct conception of the British person as both free (free-thinking, bloody-minded) and attached (fond of home, and quietly deeply patriotic).

The British are tolerant and accommodating to strangers and strangeness because they know who they are, and are secure in the knowledge. Scruton showed in his own career how hard it can be to transmit this knowledge; but he did it, and perhaps in future it will be easier.

I interviewed Roger Scruton some 15 years ago for The Spectator. He said then, with a little bitterness, but not much, how he was entirely neglected by the Conservative Party. This continued, until the sudden surprising knighthood awarded by David Cameron, and then his appointment by Theresa May to the chair of the commission reviewing the future architecture of England.

These late honours were fitting, and one hopes are the harbingers of the judgements of the future. As Edmund Burke — famous but not revered in his own time — was to the 19th century, so should Scruton be to the 21st: the lodestar, from which all Conservative thought and action takes its bearings. His passing away, earlier than we might have hoped, comes yet at the end of a complete life. He fulfilled his purpose, to Wiltshire and the world.

Roger Scruton: Conservative lodestar

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