WITHOUT BREXIT it would be easy to predict what the coming year will bring in Brussels.

By the end of January, the European Commission will begin a consultation on the future of the CAP. This will be based around a range of options, from effectively leaving things as they are to truly radical reform. The Commission will then publish its favoured options in the autumn, so that by this time next year this will have become the only show in town, in the drive to get a new CAP agreed by farm ministers, the Commission and European parliament before 2020.

If the UK had not decided to leave the EU, reform would be the burning issue of the next few years. However instead it will push the UK more and more to the periphery. Whether the forum is the farm council, the farm lobby, or the European parliament's agriculture committee, the UK will have nothing to contribute to the big debate.

The prime minister, Theresa May, has effectively taken the UK out of discussions on issues that will happen after Brexit, and it would be wrong for London to seek to influence the future of the CAP. This will reduce the role of UK ministers and officials to observers, intervening on agriculture only when decisions affect the immediate workings of the CAP or markets.

As the reform debate develops, other member states will come to realise that the UK traditionally played a significant role. It helped rally those opposed to an increasingly centralised policy, and helped protect the interests of paymaster member states. It was a bulwark against the view from France that what is says is good for farmers and the CAP must be true, and the UK was one of the greatest defenders of the Single Market.

As they go down the CAP reform road without the UK, others will come to realise that they should have done more to keep it on board. However they missed that opportunity, and as 2017 goes on, the growing disconnect between the UK and rest of the EU will be more and more clear.

As agriculture pulls away from the CAP, it will put more pressure on the government at Westminster to get more real about the future of farm support. This means having a vision of a new UK agriculture policy, ideally built around a globally competitive industry that protects the environment and delivers high quality food. That looks a simple vision to pursue, but to date the Defra minister, Andrea Leadsom, has show little vision, or indeed real interest in the future for agriculture.

She is a far cry from the great agriculture ministers the Conservative party once produced, but the plans she develops will decide the future of farming across the UK for the next twenty years. Since the referendum we have had only shadow boxing. Ministers are saying little, although the junior Defra minister, George Eustice, did hint at a new risk management approach with aid for disadvantaged areas.

This has to be the year when the shadow boxing ends. If ministers are not prepared to put ideas on the table then the farming lobby must do so. It is also up to the devolved administrations to make clear what they want for their respective regions – and to then exert pressure in London to see that delivered. The farming lobby needs to decide whether its current, largely academic, setting of priorities is the right approach. If this cannot be an alliance of equals, rather than one dominated by the NFU in England, then it cannot work. This entire debate is suffering from a lack of vision and passion, and if that continues farmers will find themselves sleepwalking to the end of support.

If the European Commission is beginning now to forge a new policy the UK must be doing the same. It may be easier to agree a new policy for the UK alone than for 27 member states, but we are starting from a blank canvas.

During the referendum campaign, Leave supporters had a vision for a new policy for UK conditions. The promise was that this would be less bureaucratic and more market focussed. That thunder has disappeared, and it has to come back in 2017.

So my message to the farm lobby organisations and regional politicians is that they must embarrass a weak Defra into finally delivering a vision for the future of UK agriculture – or even better, a budget to let the regions go it alone.