KNEE-JERK reactions to farmers’ protests over inheritance tax underrate the potential of the right to mobilise around the issue.
Protests whose spokespersons include Jeremy Clarkson — on record stating he bought farmland to avoid tax — are easily mocked. Opposition to changes to agricultural tax relief has been whipped up by the biggest landowners, billionaires like James Dyson, who owns an estimated 33,000 acres of land worth £500 million.
These people are not representative of “family farms,” and their interests are different. The use of farmland as an investment pushes up land prices, making it harder for small or tenant farmers to stay in farming.
Non-farmers bought more than half of the farms sold on the market in England in 2023, and more than twice as much land as farmers, since investors’ purchases tend to be larger.
As an article put it in Farmers’ Weekly back in 2020, “the market for farmland in this part of the world now closely resembles the final stages of a savage game of Monopoly,” with ordinary farmers squeezed out “now that the vacuum manufacturer has bought Park Lane and Mayfair and built hotels on them.”
But the No Farmers, No Food slogan strikes a chord. It feeds on anxieties driven by the real crisis facing rural Britain, and fears around sustainability and food production shared by millions.
These issues are not confined to Britain. Last month the Morning Star observed that “Britain is an outlier in that crisis-ridden agriculture has not yet prompted tractor columns descending on the capital,” noting such protests in Belgium, France and Germany. No longer.
If the left does not engage with farms and rural communities, these movements can become straightforwardly right-wing. Their demands often run against policies designed to mitigate climate change, as early this year in Wales, where some farmers objected to new conservation requirements attached to subsidies. Across the EU, opposition to restrictions on pesticide use has been a prominent cause, unfortunately given mounting evidence of a catastrophic decline in insect populations.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has built support among farming and fishing communities by making demands which have little in common with its generally Thatcherite approach to markets: an enforcement on fish caught in British waters being landed and processed in Britain, or requirements for public institutions from councils through schools to the army to source 75 per cent of their food from Britain. It then ties these policies to climate denialism (opposition to rewilding, solar and wind farms) and protection of tax dodges for big landowners.
The left needs to show it has answers for rural Britain too. This is particularly so given the devastating impact climate change is already having on food production. It is therefore noteworthy that the farmers’ protests drew sympathy in unlikely quarters, both from Greenpeace and Just Stop Oil.
And the most effective way to do this while exploding the false association between landbankers and agricultural workers is to take on the rich.
Confront the big supermarkets and food processers, currently threatening job cuts in revenge for National Insurance hikes despite an eyewatering increase in profit margins since the pandemic. Campaign for price controls that protect producers and consumers at the expense of profiteers.
Take on the water privateers too, whose reckless pollution of rivers and the sea is resented across the countryside. Nationalising water is a prerequisite to cleaning it up.
And address the realities of climate change. Extreme weather events mandate greater investment in the resilience of our farms as well as our cities. It will be easier to win farmers to adapting practices if transitions are funded. The funds exist, in the huge accumulation of wealth at the top.
US tycoon Elon Musk accuses Labour of going “full Stalin” when it comes to farms. The truth is a class war on food and land profiteers would benefit farmers — and everyone else.
