When the Chancellor sat down after delivering her first budget speech, she probably didn’t expect to find herself in the crosshairs of Jeremy Clarkson. Never shy of miring himself in controversy, he has suggested that, by reducing the scope of agricultural inheritance tax relief, “Reeves and her politburo” have declared “all out-war on the countryside”. The more sober and much more powerful National Farmers’ Union (NFU) is no less incensed, and is also now campaigning strongly against what it dubs the “family farm tax”. A noisy tractor-led demonstration in central London is planned for next week, and some farmers’ groups are also threatening to block ports and withhold non-perishable produce to disrupt supermarket supplies.
In another failure of communication, the government has allowed what the Chancellor would have viewed as a reasonable and measured tax change, affecting mostly the very wealthy, to become another distraction, upsetting an important economic interest and energising its political opponents. The government has also underestimated the degree to which farmers in particular, and country-dwellers more generally, distrust the Labour Party and its largely urban activist base. Despite having some of the lowest wages, most insecure employment and increasingly thinly spread public services, rural Britain has not traditionally been fertile ground for Labour. It hardly helps that former Labour advisers have been taking to the airwaves to suggest the government can do to farmers “what Margaret Thatcher did to the miners”. The row over the inheritance tax change is becoming one about establishing sociopolitical boundaries as much as it is about any threat to individual livelihoods.
Rachel Reeves will not have understood the importance still given to continuity and tradition in rural Britain and, in particular, the symbolic link between its inhabitants and the land itself. In The South Country, Edward Thomas described meeting a farmer and how “to look at him is to see a man five generations thick”. That was in 1909, and the much-celebrated owner-occupied small family farm being passed down from father to son is far from the default arrangement. And Agricultural Property Relief (APR) is not an ancient medieval right but was granted by the Inheritance Tax Act of 1984. It has also been open to tax avoidance abuse – Jeremy Clarkson himself has openly admitted that he originally bought the £4.25m Diddly Squat Farm as an inheritance tax dodge. Nonetheless, perception is everything, and the tax changes have become the catalyst for the expression of a much wider discontent.
It needn’t have been like this. Farmers had been growing increasingly dissatisfied with the ineffectual Conservative government. In 2023, Thérèse Coffey, then Environment Secretary, was roundly booed at an NFU conference. In February this year, tractor protests took place around the country. Contrary to public perceptions, farmers hadn’t voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU, and many were troubled by the post-Brexit trade deals, increasing red tape and the loss of subsidy. Rural crime – including farm thefts, fly-tipping and sheep rustling – has also been a longstanding problem. When the election came, rural communities led the way in ejecting the Tories, voting for Labour or the Lib Dems. But Labour appear to have squandered this opportunity for a tax change that is unlikely to raise any significant revenue, at least not during the lifetime of this Parliament. One report for the i newspaper found that, at worst, the change could cost the party 59 of its most marginal seats.
Upsetting farmers is one thing. The Labour government also seems set on antagonising rural inhabitants much more widely. Keir Starmer has pledged to use planning reform to “get Britain building” and secure the manifesto promise to build 1.5 million new homes during the next five years. The detail is unclear, but the main changes will involve chipping away at the green belt by redesignating parts of it as “grey belt”, providing local authorities with mandatory housing targets and increasing government level oversight. This is a government “for the builders, not the blockers”. But it is also one with scant regard for those whose neighbourhood is set to become blighted by excessive development. Already towns and villages are being squeezed right out to the edges, and most who live in these environments will not appreciate losing any remaining green space.
The loss of green belt land is, in many cases, quite significant and it isn’t only housing that is urbanising previously rural districts. Labour’s commitment to Net Zero and its fanciful ambition to decarbonise the entire electricity grid by 2030 will see large areas of countryside adorned with wind turbines and pylons, or covered by extraordinarily large solar farms. In July, Ed Miliband made his intentions clear by lifting the de facto ban on onshore wind farms and approving, against local opposition, three solar farm developments in eastern England. Each of these solar farms is around the size of Gatwick Airport and will effectively industrialise over nine square miles of prime arable countryside. Of course, the proposals had been in development long before Labour came to power. But the haste in which Miliband has given permission means that he and his government will have to own the inevitable blowback.
Over 600 miles of new power lines are also thought to be required if the UK is to decarbonise the network. At the Labour Conference, Keir Starmer promised to make the “tough decisions” necessary to get the pylons built. But when opposition to part of the plans includes the Green Party – citing “the impact on agricultural land, on traffic, on local communities, on the landscape” – the Labour government must know it is in for a rough ride. In the face of such spirited opposition, the war on the countryside is not one Labour can win – but it is also one it cannot afford to lose.
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