Theresa May’s government appears to be backing the Soviet-style policy of “land expropriation without compensation” aimed at dispossessing South Africa’s white farmers.
Breitbart London has seen a letter written by Harriet Baldwin MP, Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), to Sir Paul Beresford MP, who enquired what the government’s stance on the policy was on behalf of a concerned constituent.
“The British government understands the need for land reform in South Africa”, Baldwin asserted, adding that they “welcomed” promises from President Cyril Ramaphosa that “the process of land [re]distribution would be orderly within South African laws” and be carried out “without negatively affecting economic growth, agricultural production and food security”.
In a follow-up email to the constituent from the Africa Department (Central and Southern) of the FCO, also seen by Breitbart London and confirmed as “reflect[ing] Government policy on this issue” by the FCO newsdesk, the department confirms Theresa May is satisfied with having been told that “[the] process would be taken forward on a multi-party basis, through Parliament, and… within the bounds of the Constitution and carefully designed so as to avoid damaging food security or deterring investment”.
That the ANC government intends to make the seizure of white-owned farms without the owners being compensated legal, through parliamentary fiat and constitutional amendments, says nothing about the justness of the policy, however — and while Ramaphosa might insist he can confiscate land without “deterring investment” the national currency took an immediate hit when the policy was announced.
Minister Baldwin and the FCO Africa Department also dismissed the constituent’s concerns that white farmers, who own a majority of land being put to use for agriculture in South Africa but only a little over a fifth of land overall, were being deliberately targetted in racist attacks.
Many white farmers, including British nationals, have been brutally attacked and sometimes murdered on their homesteads, often following a prolonged period of torture — indeed, by some measures farming in South Africa is the most dangerous occupation in the world outside an active war zone.
But Baldwin and the FCO bureaucrats played down the phenomenon, claiming: “Attacks on farmers are generally opportunistic and on the whole not based on racial grounds.”
This is despite the fact that the FCO also acknowledge that “Crime statistics as released by the South African Police Service are not categorised into racial or ethnic groupings so official data is not currently available.”
The SAPS did release racial/ethnic breakdowns in the past, but stopped doing so in 2007 at the behest of the government — a calculated attempt to cover up the situation, according to critics.
Many observers believe the result of the land expropriation without compensation policy the ANC is pursuing — allegedly in response to electoral pressure from Julius Malema’s black nationalist Economic Freedom Fighters party — will be an exodus of the country’s white minority, followed by a collapse in agricultural production and the wider economy.
This was certainly the experience of neighbouring Zimbabwe when Marxist kleptocrat Robert Mugabe seized white-owned farms in the early 2000s and allowed violent mobs to forcibly eject and often kill the former occupants.
Ironically, one of the first moves of Zimbabwe’s new leader Emmerson Mnangagwa following the nonagenarian tyrant’s ouster was to offer the expelled farmers compensation and invite them back to the land, in an attempt to revive the fortunes of the former ‘Breadbasket of Africa’.
Even Mugabe himself seemed to tacitly acknowledge their vital contribution to the agricultural economy, by quietly leasing some of the 21 farms he took for himself to businesses with white shareholders.
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