We are ex-farmers. We now live happily in this ancient market town in the middle of some of the best farming land in the area, so it was a given that we would today support the farmer’s march against the ill-thought through government policy of 20% inheritance tax (IHT) on land. It is not that we are keen for city slickers to push up land values by buying land for tax exemption; far from it. It can’t be difficult to tax them without killing off traditional landowners and farmers.
It wasn’t exactly sparrows when we got up, but it was a good game to spot other fellow marchers on the train, and we were certainly up in time to join a sea of khaki-ish greens and browns, and gumboots, covered in their attendant mud and other substances, up Whitehall to about the mid-way point where there was a huge covered wagon slewed across the road, properly electrified for the speakers.
Some speeches were bumbling and humbling by the ordinary small farmer, and some uplifting and very good. But they were all short. Ed Davey (Lib Dems) came rabble-rousing saying everything we all wanted to hear. Kemi (Con) was also ridiculously good, saying she “had our backs’” and would reverse the policy asap. Then, (sorry politicians and farmers) arrived the patron saint of farming and free speech, Jeremy Clarkson…
Needless to say, he was excellent. He had a very bad back and shouldn’t have been there at all, and he said he was “off his tits on painkillers”. But he was measured and got resounding responses and cheers, pointing out a few painfully obvious financial and agricultural facts to our wonderful chancellor. For instance, you may be able to buy an elderly Honda Jazz for a couple of thousand (I did!) but that a medium tractor capable of proper land work, was a couple of hundred thousand. And of course, you can buy an imported chicken for supper for twopence ha’penny, but that it tastes of chlorine, like a swimming pool with a beak.
Jeremy ended with a very considered and quiet plea for the government to think this rushed policy through again, and be big enough to admit that they may just have made a mistake and reverse it.
In these warmongering times, you might think that even the most amateur government would feel that the means to food security should be treasured rather than angered.
Throughout all this emotional turmoil (I found myself crying needlessly at a stupid tractor!), it was raining steadily. Nothing drenching, but quite wetting after an hour or two. Nothing to farmers, of course, who work in all weathers and temperatures. Unlike the majority, who are tucked up cosily in a warm office tippy-tapping on a keyboard with a steaming latte at their elbow.
Image Credits: Col Everett .