UK Protests: It’s Folly to Pick a Fight With the Farmers

Britain’s farmers don’t pack anything as powerful a political punch as their Indian counterparts. There are much fewer farms in the UK. And most British cultivators are prosperous and don’t vote for the governing Labour Party, so their political influence at the moment is low.

But the arresting sight of thousands of farmers demonstrating last week in Whitehall in the centre of London, within hailing distance of parliament and of the prime minister’s office, is a sharp reminder that they have a political voice. Farmers’ leaders complained they had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by new tax levies. Placards read: ‘No Farmers; No Food; No Future’. And in London as well as in Delhi, it’s best to avoid a head-on fight with the agricultural lobby.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

In schools, pupils are taught that Britain no longer has small-scale peasant agriculture. That’s not quite true. In the Highlands of Scotland, crofting – a form of subsistence farming on very small landholdings – persists; across the country, sheep farming in particular is often small-scale and unremunerative; and where I grew up in industrial West Yorkshire, my neighbours were in essence peasant farmers, trying against the odds to make a living growing onions, radishes, cabbages and rhubarb on plots of not very fertile land.

But most British farms are relatively large, capital intensive and highly mechanised. Just one-in-a-hundred of the county’s workforce labours on the land. in India, this figure is more than 40 times higher. In recent years, British farmers have become regarded as stewards of the environment as much as providers of food, and many are paid in some measure to protect and safeguard the countryside. 

Farmers are furious that one of their tax privileges is being diluted in measures announced recently by the new Labour government to fund an increase in public spending. Until now, agricultural land has been exempt from inheritance tax. When a landowner dies, the farm can be handed down to the next generation without the need to sell off some of the land to meet what many people still call death duties.

But the new government believes there’s no case for privileging farms over other forms of wealth. And it also wants to stop a loophole in the tax system whereby wealthy individuals have been buying farms simply as a mean of sidestepping inheritance tax. So in future, farms will face inheritance tax, but at half the standard 40% rate; and holdings worth under £1 million (that’s 10 crore) will be exempt. The government says that because of other exemptions, only farms worth as much as £3 million are likely to face any inheritance tax charges – and just 500 farms a year will be affected.

Farmers’ organisations dispute the government’s figures. They say that many medium size family farms will be affected. And they insist that British farmers are often asset rich but cash poor. On paper, their land is worth a lot of money, and the notional value of the capital equipment – tractors, harvesters, milking sheds, specialist storage units – is also substantial. But their net income is often very modest. So if any inheritance tax is levied, land will have to be sold to raise the money and that could make the farms uneconomic. In other words, this could spell the end of the family farm.

 This issue has led to an outburst of political anger in the British countryside greater than any since the ban on the rural sport of fox hunting 2- years ago. In the words of one of the thousands of protestors outside Parliament, it shows that the Labour government ‘doesn’t understand the countryside’.  That may be true. Given the landslide Labour victory in July’s election, there are scores of rural constituencies which now have Labour MPs – but hardly any of those MPs have any hands-on experience of farming.

The Conservatives and other opposition parties have rallied to the farmers’ support. And public opinion also seems to be siding with the farmers. Yet, the Labour government is so far refusing to back down or even modify its proposals. That’s rash. No government can afford to give the impression that it is riding roughshod over an important part of the country. The tax proposals have stirred up a much bigger row than ministers expected. And it’s not just farmers that are aggrieved but many of those who live in rural areas and value the role of farming in conserving the countryside. 

Achieving a compromise in politics is often not a sign of weakness but of strength. After all, the art of politics is in redressing grievances not nurturing them. And in Britain as in India, it’s folly to pick a fight with the farmers.