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 countryside 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.
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