Dominic Cummings accused of hypocrisy after his farm took £235,000 in EU subsidies
Dominic Cummings in Downing Street. Picture: Jonathan Brady/PA Wire/PA Images - Credit: PA Wire/PA Images
A farm that Boris Johnson's chief adviser Dominic Cummings co-owns has taken £235,000 in EU subsidies.
Cummings, who masterminded the Vote Leave campaign, has claimed he wanted to end the "absurd subsidies" that the EU pays out to the UK.
But he has been accused of hypocrisy after the Observer revealed that he too had benefited from the money he wants to stop farmers from receiving.
Farmsubsidy.org reveals that a farm that Cummings jointly owns with his parents and another person received roughly €20,000 a year for most of the last two decades amounting to around £235,000.
Cummings previously claimed that the use of agricultural subsidies "dreamed up in the 1950s and 1960s" because they "raise prices for the poor to subsidise rich farmers while damaging agriculture in Africa" in his blog posts.
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Lib Dem MP Layla Moran said: "It shows sheer hypocrisy from Cummings that his farm has raked in hundreds of thousands from the 'absurd subsidies' he so often criticises."
He is not the only leading Brexiteer to claim a subsidy for his farm.
Despite already being one of Britain's richest men, Sir James Dyson's own farm - Beeswax Dyson in Lincolnshire - received £4.2 million of European subsidies between 2016 and 2017.
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