November 19, 2024 - 5:00pm
Westminster, London
In recent years, Whitehall has found itself as the designated trauma zone for Britain’s discord. Forever protests paralyse the centre of government usually to little avail, attended to by jaded policemen and viral influencers looking to stoke tribal frenzies online. For anyone familiar with such protests, the descent of tens of thousands of farmers into the capital today to protest against the government’s new inheritance tax on agricultural estates felt like a distinctly different flavour of protest for the Starmer era.
Contrary to its reception on social media by wonks and commentators, the concerns of those gathered in Westminster went beyond just one tax. Here was a protest about a bigger existential crisis facing the countryside that reaches back decades. The remonstrances of this rural populism were broad: rewilding subsidies gobbled up by the National Trust, predatory corporate supermarkets, farms ravaged by unsolved crime and burglary, stagnant wages. A visceral sense of unfairness that pervades the yeomanry and petit bourgeoisie of the shires.
The demographic of the protest alone spoke to these material concerns far removed from warring narratives in the media: big families visiting London for the first time in years, fourth generation farms facing extinction, those employed in the wider rural economy living paycheck to paycheck. Though there was hand-wringing on social media over footage of a tractor breaking through a barrier, the mood was peaceful and stoic: a two-minute silence by the cenotaph, an amateurish charm to the signs, speeches and proceedings.
Many had never attended a protest, nor been to London in years. And when charged with the futility of their cause (the Government as yet shows no sign of backing off) there was not resignation but quiet anger. One young farmer from Devon, holding a Reform banner, carefully worded the prospect of a French style revolt involving rogue tractors, blockades and manure sprayed on government buildings. “So far we’ve been peaceful but we can’t rule out more European style tactics if this carries on.”
Attempting to speak on behalf of this mood was a strange mix of celebrities and attendant politicians. Ed Davey and Kemi Badenoch spoke to the crowd. Jeremy Clarkson had a hostile interview with the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire over the Chancellor’s line that it was a crackdown on wealthy landowners to pay for the NHS. But it was Andrew Lloyd Webber who bluntly captured the mood, describing an undeniable concern among the crowd that foreign capital and big agribusiness were lying in wait: “The farms will all be bought by foreigners, outsiders, people who are not buying it for the love of the countryside,” he told GB News.
This mood came armed with facts and a deeper sense of paranoia. Above all the Government’s bungling assessment of the impact: Defra estimates that 66% of farms will be impacted, while the Treasury put its half that amount. There is a sense no one knows what the impact will be, with many arguing the £1 million cap is a comic underappreciation of the combined value of land and assets on small farms. Ulterior motives were suspected, with frequent angry mentions of the Labour advisor John McTernan who had previously said that “It’s an industry we could do without. We don’t need small farmers.”
“This is great, these are our people,” said a spritely Robert Jenrick walking back towards Parliament Square. When pointed to the ambient support for a lurking Reform presence (Rupert Lowe and Richard Tice had been seen holding court with young men in Barbours), he spoke explicitly of the need to recapture the spirit of provincial England: the hardworking families who work to pass on an inheritance.
But the mood arguably goes beyond the electoral targets of CCHQ. This was a broader coalition of the shire aggrieved by a sense of injustice at the hands of an already historically unpopular government regarded in terms of deceit, incompetence and spiteful motivation. Unusually for a ruddy faced mass of tweed and waxed jackets, these protests were a vector for a broader public mood. And with this came a sense that this time the public were more receptive to the cause. “As a farmer” said one elderly gentleman from Northampton, awed by the size of the crowds, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such popular support for the countryside”.
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SubscribeI was socialist till I took a walk through the country. Hopefully for those who never get out and experience it a bit of the country coming to them might rub off?
They’re right about foreign capital and big agribusiness. The politicians know very well this tax falls on small farmers the worst, and they don’t care. Driving out small farmers for more “efficient” multinational corporations and giving the financial sector a speculative market is entirely the point because it’s good for the economic bottom line in the short term, which is all most western leaders and businesses understand or care about. The system is corrupted by greed and money. It’s that simple.
Western leaders? Corrupted? What do you think would happen if leaders, wherever, served merely the humble people’s demands to pay less? Rather than, say, served some selected persons to make more?
Big agribusiness and solar farm operators.
This has been bubbling under the surface for years.
A lack of understanding and interest in a rural economy.
Small groups who have little to no voice, even with a majority of the Shires voting blue.
Ignorance of how the idea that increasing fuel tax will push people on to public transport. (one bus on a Tuesday where I used to live, Market Day!).
Madness of the of the old CAP subsidies and the abuse of these. Over industrialisation of the whole food production supply chain. Pigs travelling 50 miles to the Abattoir and then the carcasses brought back to sell locally after regulations made the smaller local Abattoirs uneconomic.
Stranglehold of the supermarket buyers and their disgusting practices (how I cheered when a guy I knew refused the new, reduced, price offered for his mushrooms and the said chain had no mushrooms to sell for a month. They had no idea he had planning for his sheds for housing on the edge of town).
The bizarre “Islington” view that farmers are all rich. On these marches someone commenting that they all had tractors worth £100,000 so of course they were rich!! Just no knowledge or understanding.
Weather, rules, paperwork. Small farmer who was my neighbour had great fun when the rules changed so that all cattle movements had to be logged online on the day. great fun when where you live has no internet (a few years ago) and his wife drove to the local town and used the internet in the Library.
Red, Blue, Green, Yellow; no understanding and no plan and no thought. Just ignorance and jealousy.
The UK desperately needs something like a Senate, where the less populous areas get more representation. I guess in the old days, the Lords may have represented the countryside (to some extent) but they’ve been neutered completely.
A return to rotten boroughs?
No, no, no! Equal misrepresentation for all!
As you note, we had it, it was called the House of Lords.
A living witness to learned wisdom, custom, history and the inherited traditions of a thousand years. A trust “committed…by old and lawful descent” as our first King Charles said of his own office during his trial.
Imagine, if you will, a system whereby private wealth and public honour were linked constitutionally and generationally to public service and local association. Where rootless power met and deferred to physical place. Not perfect, by any means, but the envy of many less lappier breeds, I assure you.
The best and most practically useful constitution in the world, trashed in a generation because it offended against abstract theories of ‘equality’.
All privileges, nay all rights, are inherited by accident of birth. From the Duke of Norfolk to, now we realise too late, the simple yeoman farmer. The freeholder and the smallholder will be next.
Your words are both tragic and very moving.
The worst of it is that we have no means of preventing this, and the ones with a high regard for the history now being destroyed are the very ones being ejected from the HoL
If the Russians are going to nuke us can someone suggest they start with Oxford University which is where all these useless, ignorant and bigoted politicians are cloned.
Would Betjeman be adjusting his poem: “Come friendly H-Bombs…”?
This is all nonsense. The people who will be affected by this are the Clarksons of the world who bought their farms specifically to avoid paying inheritance tax – in his own words.
Small farms under 3 million pounds will not be impacted. Do your homework.
Ah, little fizzy is back. Now run along, fizzlet, and go and play with your Fisher Price farm people set – maybe you’ll learn something.
I don’t doubt fizzet would abuse his own little Fisher Price farmers in the same manner?
The Champagne Socialist fan club is out in force today!
Stick with me lads, you might just learn something!
CS long ago learnproofed his mind. He hasn’t had an original thought in years. He buys his opinions off the rack at the Grauniad.
The Government has scraped together a lot of assumptions to reach that £3M figure and, don’t forget, in some parts of the country a very modest farmhouse in a lovely rural location will be worth close to a million on its own.
Here is a potentially unwelcome view. As one who grew up on a farm and lives in the countryside, it seems to me that the farmers have not won hearts and minds. Unlike big lobbying groups like the National Trust or RSPB who champion something positive, the farmers come across as rich toffs or complainers. Yes, there are injustices, as James Rebanks’ recent article eloquently described, and most farmers barely make a living. But that isn’t the perception put across by the media or our day-to-day experience. Yes, we need food security for the country. It’s hard to see that when supermarket food is so cheap.To win public support there needs to be something more than injustice to catch the public attention.
A major rethink and rebranding by the NFU is needed, in my view.
Farming is The Archers. Comfortable, middle class, idealised. No farmer commits suicide in Ambridge.
I disagree. This campaign has more public support than any previous countryside protest, despite the ‘perception put across by the media’ which of course is right behind the government narrative. Witness Victoria Derbyshire’s comical TV interview with Clarkson. As an ex-employee of the British Propaganda Corporation he clearly enjoyed putting the knife in with great gusto.
I believe far more people support the farmers than they do the National Trust or the RSPB – both organisations have deteriorated in recent years.
Protesting farmers, beware of the party that cut your farm payments to the bone while inflicting deeply damaging trade deals upon you, notably while Kemi Badenoch was President of the Board of Trade, as you noted in no uncertain terms at the time.The idea is to hand your farms over to the giants of American agribusiness, who would then employ the former politicians, advisers and officials. This Government is determined to do that. The same thing is planned for the NHS and the American healthcare corporations. The only people who could successfully oppose either are those of us who opposed both.
Sounds awfully familiar to what we see here in Canada. Wealthy private-sector housing development corporations stuffing regional and provincial government seats with people that are more than willing to rig the system against the will of the constituent in exchange for a future on one of their boards of directors, all so they can rake in massive profits paving over our towns and farms with subdivisions full of newcomers, whether we like it or not.
We import over 40% of our food and there is nothing farmers or the Government can do to reduce that to any meaningful degree (except reduce the population). So, without trade deals that remove tariffs on unavoidable imports, you are simply advocating for more expensive food. A great idea in the midst of a “cost of living crisis”.
If you’ve lived in a closed estate village as I have, you’ll understand that tenant farmers have to turn out to support whatever landLords say is the agricultural interests, to even hesitate would put their family’s future at risk. Thank goodness Labour is coming to the rescue by measures which will reduce rents and make it easier to buy a lit of land themselves.
In this, as in all things, be careful what you wish for.
Too much romanticization of agriculture risks turning the countryside into a national park, populated by horny-handed sons of toil rented from Central Casting — picturesque and uneconomic.
Too little attention to the special economic needs of farmers — such as inheritance laws that make passing the ownership of land to heirs a very expensive proposition — and agriculture passes into the hands of corporations with enough political clout to make farming profitable, but control goes to distant managers.
“…Here was a protest about a bigger existential crisis facing the countryside that reaches back decades….[including] rewilding subsidies gobbled up by the National Trust,… farms ravaged by..”
Can someone please tell me what’s up with rewilding in the UK? It’s one of my favorite things, but there seems to be a lot of opposition.
Here in the States the only opposition comes from ranchers concerned about the threat to their livestock. I don’t think anyone else, except for me, really cares.
The United States has 94 persons per square mile and imports 12% of the food it consumes doemstically. The United Kingdom has over 740 persons per square mile and imports, currently, 40% of the food it consumes.
The two cases are not directly comparable.
When Lord Stanley, the first born son of the 19th Earl of Derby – whose forbears fought with Charles I at Marston Moor and Charles II at the Battle of Worcester and died for him at the Market Cross in Bolton, whose family has farmed the Derbyshire Countryside since 1385 – can be effectively disinherited by a policy paper drawn up by one Arun Advani a middle ranking scrivener in the professional manageriate shows where abolishing the House of Lords has got us in a single generation.
The Whigs have pulled it off at last and The Country Party never saw it coming.