Starmer vs the farmers: who will win?

Thousands of farmers have descended on Westminster today to protest at changes to agricultural inheritance tax set out in last month's budget which have been branded a "betrayal" by union leaders.

Among the changes is a tax of 20% to be introduced on inherited farming assets above £1 million. Farming groups warn this will have a "catastrophic" impact on family farms and have threatened to go on strike and blockade ports unless there is a change of course.

"It's not exactly the fuel protests that paralysed Britain under Tony Blair (yet)," said Politico's London Playbook. "But it's still quite a moment."

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What did the commentators say?

Parallels are already being drawn between Labour's growing stand-off with farmers and the miners' strike 40 years ago. Last week, Keir Starmer was forced to distance himself from comments by former Tony Blair adviser John McTernan, who said Britain "doesn't need small farmers", and that he was in favour of doing to farmers "what Margaret Thatcher did to the miners".

That is the "existential fear" that is driving thousands of farmers to London this week, said Will Lloyd in The Times, that "farmers are to the 2020s what miners were to the 1980s. The unfortunate casualties of progress, punished and then abandoned by the state."

It's "easy to sympathise with their concerns at what they see as an assault on family farms," when British agriculture is "already struggling to cope with the effects of Brexit, Covid and the relentlessly tight margins imposed by supermarket pricing", said Donald Macintyre on the i news site. But while farmers are "furious" with Rachel Reeves, her policy is still the "right one".

Labour have argued that only a quarter of the largest landowning farmers will be affected by the tax changes. In an article for The Telegraph, Steve Reed, secretary of state for the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, accused the Tories of making "false claims" about their impact. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the Budget, Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told Sky News farmers will "still be better treated than anyone else in terms of inheritance tax".

Far from representing a "new communist dictatorship", argued Will Hutton in The Guardian, the changes will actually drive down inflated land prices and enable priced-out young agriculturalists to start their own farms. "New life and ideas will be brought to the rural economy as innovative, energetic farmers enter the market", he said, reinvigorating life in Britain's countryside.

What next?

Labour has more rural MPs – 145 – than any other party, but though the party would never admit it, of all the special interest groups to take on, farmers are one of the "most politically feeble", said The Economist. The National Farmers' Union may have called for "militant protest" but "when it comes to imposing their will on governments, British farmers have little practice" or "political nous", said the magazine.

The closure of the coal mines brought "social devastation" and made Britain "pathetically dependent" on international energy suppliers, said Lloyd, and now the government "seems keen to repeat this process with food". "As the world turns inwards and tariff walls begin to bisect continents, it's an interesting risk to take. It's a hard thing being cold. Being hungry is another."