Labour has forgotten one of the first rules of politics

Britain is provoking the ire of the countryside over a policy that will raise little money

It may not be the number one rule of politics but it certainly should be in the top 10: don’t mess with farmers. And, if a fight can’t be avoided, you had better be damn sure you have an ironclad battle plan.
The cautionary tales of ignoring this rule are legion. And it’s not like we’re talking about events that are lost in the mists of time either. Just look at the mess that Brussels made of its European Green Deal earlier this year.
As a result of this net zero plan, which is supposed to make the EU carbon-neutral by 2050, farmers were going to be forced to leave a chunk of their land fallow to promote biodiversity and cut their use of fertilisers by a fifth.
Cue completely predictable uproar. In France, farmers traded blows with police. In Germany, they tried to storm a ferry carrying the country’s economy minister. In Brussels, they rammed through police barricades with tractors. In the Netherlands, they made bonfires out of asbestos on the sides of major roads.
The Dutch protests even led to a huge surge in support for a relatively new populist political party, with the Farmer-Citizen Movement winning 16 seats in the Dutch Senate and seven in the House of Representatives.
A totally predictable turnaround by the EU ensued. Brussels decided that on second thought it would exclude farming emissions from its 2040 climate roadmap, shelve a law to cut pesticide use and delay the implementation of a programme whereby farmers would have to set aside 4pc of their arable land for “non-productive purposes”.
Bear in mind this was a plan that, whatever you might personally think of the individual and collective measures, was supposed to protect the environment and stop the planet from overcooking.
In contrast, the UK Government seems to have accidentally blundered into a spat with farmers by expanding the scope of inheritance tax. And that’s before you throw in the star power of Jeremy Clarkson – who has said the Government is “waging an all-out war on the countryside” – into the mix. Naive doesn’t even cover it.
From April 2026, inherited agricultural assets worth more than £1m, which were previously exempt from inheritance tax, will have to pay a levy of 20pc. Critics have already branded it the “tractor tax”.
The National Farmers’ Union has organised a protest march in London on Nov 19. But with numbers capped, rival groups are mobilising. There have been reports farmers are discussing plans to blockade ports and food distribution centres or hold back produce to create a spike in demand.
Defenders of the tax point out that it will only affect a tiny handful of farms each year. But, of course, you can quite easily flip this argument on its head and ask whether the relatively paltry amounts raised over the course of this parliament are worth the tremendous disruption that could be caused by rolling protests.
It would be one thing if the Government had deliberately decided to take on vested interests in the countryside. That’s not a very popular strategy but it’s not one that can be dismissed out of hand.
On one hand, farmers are proudly independent business people who baulk at regulations and restrictions on their way of life. On the other, many are practically wards of the state who are dependent on generous subsidies and protectionist policies.
The result is a powerful lobby that is certainly not shy of deploying contradictory arguments, getting upset when governments tighten up environmental or animal welfare standards but then also complaining vociferously about trade deals that open them up to competition from farmers in countries with lower environmental and animal welfare standards.
Sometimes you need a little distance to see things in perspective, so perhaps it makes sense to look at the mess Europe has made of its agricultural policy. Farmers are responsible for just 1.4pc of the European Union’s economic output but suck up something like a third of the bloc’s budget.
The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy was designed to maintain food security by protecting farmers from market forces. But it has worked so well – and provides subsidies so lavish – that the bloc has become a net exporter of agricultural products.
The best example of the tension this creates is provided by the Netherlands. For years the government strongly championed the industry until the country became the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural products by value behind just the US – selling over half of all the food it grows abroad.
Now the government is trying to deal with the environmental problems of so much resource-intensive industrial farming in such a small country, especially the vast amounts of nitrogen that are leaching into the soil and the water. Yet any new rules run into opposition from the now immensely powerful agricultural industry. The Dutch have created a monster.
Farmers justify their exceptional status by pointing out that they are responsible for a product we can’t do without: food. But the energy industry also produces an essential service that creates a lot of pollution (and/or must be heavily subsidised in order to be economically viable) and is therefore tightly regulated.
And you just need to look at the brickbats thrown in the way of the water industry in the UK to see that the relative free passes handed out to farmers on the Continent are also distributed here.
Sewage treatment works and waste water, including storm overflows, are responsible for causing pollution to 36pc of water bodies in the UK, according to the Government’s figures. But do you want to guess what is responsible for causing pollution in 40pc of the country’s water bodies? Yep, farms.
All in all, there’s undoubtedly a case to be made for rethinking how states subsidise and regulate agriculture and asking whether taxpayers are spending too many quids without getting enough pro quos.
But that’s not the argument the Government is making. Instead it risks provoking the ire of the countryside over a policy that won’t raise much money and will win it even fewer votes.
It’s yet another reminder of the huge difference between a policy that sounds like a clever wheeze in opposition and one that can sensibly be implemented in government. A marginally more savvy operation would have known to keep its powder dry for the much bigger battles with the countryside to come.