There is no progressive future for Britain without the farming community on board

British farming is in deep, deep trouble. The constant push to provide ever-cheaper food to supermarkets, in competition with ever-cheaper imports, has resulted in consolidation of family farms into gigantic quasi-industrial operations. This has massively accelerated nature loss, turbo-charged air and water pollution and soil deterioration. The supermarket model is extremely convenient for city dwellers, but it is doing more than its fair share in dismantling the very future of agriculture - as an economic sector and as a societal strata, with implications we are only beginning to understand.

The same changes have also impacted farming communities on the human level. Between the economic downturn, their own housing crisis, the energy crisis, the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and the impact of recurring avian flu outbreaks; the obviously bungled transition from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy to the UK’s Environmental Land Management after Brexit; the impact of the same Brexit on exports to Europe; the looming prospect of ever more cheaper imports from overseas, again thanks to Brexit; the devaluing of farming in the popular culture; historic operation on extraordinarily narrow margins; and decades of net emigration into cities and towns, all leave farming communities simultaneously pressed down and pulled asunder. 95% of farmers surveyed earlier this year reported mental health problems. In 2023, 36 farmers took their own lives - as James Rebanks notes in a recent Time interview, one of the highest suicide rates in any sector. 

After years of Tories extolling the virtues of British farming, while simultaneously bulldozing farmers into the ground, a new government comes along - and the first bit of direct attention it offers farmers is a tax raid.

So where does Rachel Reeves’s inheritance tax hike fit into all this? Farmland has long been exempt from inheritance tax - a practice meant to reduce incentives to break up family farms, but today abused voraciously by wealthy non-farmers like Jeremy Clarkson; investors like himself acquired more than 50% of farmland sold in 2022, precisely because they won’t have to pay any inheritance tax on these assets when they pass them on. Labour’s proposal is to tax the inheritance of farms worth more than £1m at 20%, payable over 10 years (which still risks being a final straw for small farming operations); if the assets are handed over seven years or more before death, no tax is paid at all. The number of farms that are small enough to be owned and operated by a farming family, but big enough to be worth in excess of £1m, is relatively small; plus at least a third of all British farmers are tenants, meaning they don’t own any farms at all.

But while in the scheme of things, the injury might not be as deep as advertised - or as widespread - the insult rankles.

After years of Tories extolling the virtues of British farming, while simultaneously bulldozing farmers into the ground, a new government comes along - and the first bit of direct attention it offers farmers is a tax raid. It doesn’t even bother with the extolling bit. And when farmers protest, the most memorable reaction they get from a minister is the suggestion they should talk to their accountants - which might be the practical thing to do, but very hard to read as anything but condescension.

Labour - and progressives generally - need the farming community on board if Britain is to have a green or a progressive future. Farmland covers 63% of the land area in England. While farming has been responsible for some of the worst pollution and erosion of nature in the UK, it’s also in a much better position to help nature restoration than cities or freshly deindustrialised areas. Farmers have also been responsive to well-crafted, well-funded initiatives subsidising more sustainable farming practices, and much, much more can be done to accelerate transition to green energy specifically in the farming sector.

But in case the positive incentives aren’t enough for us lefties, here’s a negative one: the space and attention not being occupied by progressive voices are being rapidly and formidably overtaken over by conspiracy theorists and far-right groups. Thousands of them, to judge by social media, seem to have discovered the travails farming simultaneously in the past two weeks or so. But at least they (and their bots) are talking up those travails. That’s more than can be said for their progressive counterparts on the the same social media.

If Labour is determined to go ahead with the IHT reform, it needs, at the very least, to reframe it; ideally, it should also tweak the reform to make an explicit exemption for owner-operators, and possibly even raise the £1m bar slightly. But much more importantly, it needs to open a wide-ranging dialogue with farming communities to forge a new social contract, bringing together support for the sector, economic reform to undo some of the damage done by supermarkets and globalisation (and its snake-oil purported antidote, Brexit, while avoiding peevish told-you-so triumphalism); and foster sustainable green transition. Labour has already shown it can think big - what with renter rights and worker rights bills making their way through parliament. It can and should think even bigger on agricultural reform.

Call it popular policies or populist ones; it’s better they came as demonstrable results from a left-wing government rather than enticing promises from the Right. Because 20,000-odd farmers in Parliament Square is not yet a British version of the gillet jeune. But unless Labour begins speaking with farmers rather than talking at farmers - or, sneeringly, about farmers - just such a movement may well arise over the next few years, joining the surge of right-wing populism that is only too likely to be the greatest single threat facing Labour in the 2028 election.