Farmers have every right to complain – but their gripes are being hijacked by right-wing chancers

The recent farmers’ protests have been portrayed by right-wing politicians and media as a great eruption of discontent from Britain’s silent majority. 

Unlike the general election, say, or larger protests about climate change, Gaza, or public sector pay, we’re told the tractors rolling through Whitehall represent the true will of the people. 

Everyone’s getting in on the act, from TV’s Jeremy Clarkson, to Nigel Farage’s Reform party, to the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists of the Together Declaration.

“This feels to me like a bigger war,” boomed Farage at the 19 November demo. “This is the start… and this needs to be happening in market towns up and down the country.” 

PR executive James Melville, who runs the Together-allied ‘No Farmers, No Food’ group, called the issue “probably the most important fight for the very fabric of British society right now”. 

Clarkson wrote in the Sun that Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves was “an admirer of communists”. He added that she and Starmer “have a sinister plan”: “They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms. But before they can do that, they have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers.” The Sun’s fact-checkers are presumably in a coma. 

As has been noticed, Clarkson’s an odd choice of revolutionary, having told the Sunday Times in 2021 that he only bought his farm to avoid inheritance tax. The ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ presenter – who, as people tend to forget, was sacked from BBC’s Top Gear in 2015 for punching his producer – has since been asked by the National Farmers Union to leave the protesting to them. 

Even Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, whose Brexit trade policies saw similar protests in March, turned up at the demo to tell farmers: “This policy is cruel and unfair and it’s going to destroy farming as we know it.”

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Badenoch has used the farmers’ protests as a symbol of public opposition to Labour’s budget. At prime minister’s questions on 21 November, she told Starmer: “While he was in Rio de Janeiro [for the G20 summit], hard-working farmers were protesting outside the Downing Street gates at his cruel family farms tax.” This week the Tory leader is organising an opposition day motion in parliament to reverse the policy.

Now, farmers have every right to complain about having to pay inheritance tax – even if it’s at a lower rate than everyone else, and only on land worth £1m, with loopholes that make it more like £3m. But as these examples show, their gripes are clearly being hijacked by right-wing chancers who have more than agri on their mind.  

This follows a trend in Europe, where farmers in France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands protesting a range of issues have been portrayed by far-right parties as a revolt against green policies and out-of-touch governments. 

There’s history here. The potent symbol of the sturdy farm worker has been used as propaganda by the extreme left and right, including Nazis and communists. The first party to call itself populist, the People’s Party in 1890s America, was a movement of agrarian workers built out of the Farmers’ Alliance. But those populists were taking on the moneyed interests of their day (land creditors and rail monopolies), and working with the Knights of Labor, an early trade union, to fight the social injustice of the Gilded Age. 

Contrast this with the class-blind debate today. First, politicians and media hacks pretend that the interests of rich agricultural landowners are the same as those of “family farms”. Second, they talk as if farmers somehow represent the “real people” of Britain, (a mistake also made by the 1890s populists). 

This conveniently ignores, for example, big landowners like vaccum billionaire James Dyson buying up small farms – or the many “families” who will never inherit property, and who rely on crumbling public services like the NHS. 

Thus the farmers’ protests expose the hollowness of a populism which tries to ignore class divisions, and reduces politics to a puppet show about “the elites” against “the people”. 

The fact that this propaganda is obvious nonsense doesn’t mean it can’t be effective. As the election of Donald Trump in the US shows, you can always get people to blame the government (or immigrants) for their problems, even if it means voting for policies which would hurt them or serve the rich. How’s Brexit going, by the way?

As John Harris argues in the Guardian, a cautious Labour government which is bad at explaining itself or telling a better story (ideally one based on the facts) is especially vulnerable to this sort of attack. This is a dangerous political situation, and it won’t be solved by half-measures or dodging the argument. 

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