Britain's farmers will take Starmer down with them

New Statesman​

2 days ago

Photo by Oli Scarff/AFP
The cows step forward gingerly at first, padding out from their tunnel and looking around expectantly. Once they emerge, the auctioneer spits out numbers. The farmers watching from the concrete amphitheatre above are impassive. They bid with such subtle nods that I struggle to tell who had bought which animal.
But they are well-used to it all. The farmers of Thame have been doing this since the 12th century. Then, the livestock were traded on the high street of this handsome Oxford town. The market, owned by a cooperative of local farmers, was built in 1951.
This culture has survived nearly 1000 years but may not, if you speak to the people here, survive another ten. Market and meteorological pressures have long made farming difficult. The market itself has only narrowly survived bids to buy its increasingly valuable land and turn it into a supermarket. But now, farmers are angry about a hostile government and political elite that they feel are deliberately accelerating the end of their profession, for the sake of political capital. One Buckinghamshire farming leader told me Keir Starmer would be brave to show his face in any rural pub in Britain.
Watching the auction is John Mayer. He is 85 years old and the movement of his legs is severely restricted. He reached his seat in the amphitheatre's third row only by leaning forward at an impossible angle and swinging his body up, step by step. He is thankful he has a son to take over his farm. As creamy white Charolais cows mooed past through the pen, John tells me wistfully about a childhood spent on his father's tenant farm. As soon as they were able, he and his brother began hedge cutting in order to save up to buy their own land. Now, they have 930 acres. John has travelled to Australia, Sweden and America to research handling setups. He grows wildflowers, lets his hedges sprout and has never shot a badger.
But, Mayer says, he would not encourage a young person to go into agriculture now. Farms cannot survive financially. 'There are good people who've been in farming for generations. We're losing those sort of people,' he says. 'If my farm came up for sale, people from the City would buy it to avoid tax.'
According to the estate agents Strutt & Parker, more than half the English farmland sold in 2023 was bought by non-farmers. Last autumn, the government announced plans to raise money from such purchases by reducing inheritance tax relief on agricultural property. But farmers were apoplectic. Generally, the value of their land has risen with no corresponding rise in their incomes, which remain low. Without the relief, they could not afford their death duties, so would be unable to pass their farms to their children. Some reportedly confronted Keir Starmer about this at a pub near Chequers, just a 20-minute drive from the market.
At the margins of the auction, farmers gather in a whitewashed room with a roof of corrugated iron to exchange gossip and talk shop. Discussing the state of the industry, they share a litany of woes. 'We're getting extremes of weather,' says Bill Walding, who raises cattle and sheep near Luton. 'One year we've got a soaking wet February where everything's under water. And the next year, we've got a very dry February and it's a very wet May.' While high beef prices had been a rare bright spot, they are now slumping again, he says.
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Approaching 60 and preparing for Labour's inheritance tax changes, Walding ought to be thinking of estate planning. Older landowners he knows are terrified. 'It's literally a death sentence to some of them. You can either live or you can give your farm to your family.'
Beneath the political rage is a deep, existential fear. Farmers see the way they live their lives, and the way their ancestors lived their lives, slipping away. And they have little hope that their traditions will be preserved for their future generations. They believe they are hated by the political class and misunderstood by the metropole. Farms are being consolidated in the countryside, while new build developments push in from the suburbs. 'They're being squeezed from both directions,' the cattle market's auctioneer, Simon Draper, told me.
Thanks to higher costs in southern England, Mayer and Walding say, it is impossible to make a living on anything less than 600 acres of land anywhere south of Leicester. 'In the Farmers Weekly five years ago you would have seen farms up to 100 acres up for sale,' says John. 'They're all gone now and the farms which are coming up for sale now are the 200-300 acre farms, which are non-profitable to farm. That is the next scenario we're coming into – the little farms are gone. They cannot earn money.'
Walding has built himself a way out, but one it would hurt him to use. Over the past 25 years he has quadrupled the size of his yard and prepared it for conversion into an industrial estate. 'I do not want to be the man to do it but that is the fallback position for the family,' he says glumly. As I stand up to leave, he tells me he thinks the recovery of British farming can survive but it will require the public to go hungry. Only then will they realise its importance.
At a farm of a very different scale, at a smallholding on the edge of Exmoor, Baroness Mallalieu is trying to sell some sheep. The Labour peer has lived on in the area for 25 years. She says the inheritance tax changes have imposed an economic stasis. 'They're not investing in their businesses because why should they if it's going to be taken from them,' she says as we sit underneath a vast painting of the death of Nelson in a House of Lords lobby. 'They're not taking on more people. The damp that's been put on growth, it's the exact opposite of what's wanted.'
Mallalieu, the president of the Countryside Alliance for the last 26 years and a lifelong Labour supporter, is well-placed to understand the gulf opening between Starmer and rural voters. She believes Labour politicians have been led astray by their urban milieu and a belief that all farmers are class enemies. 'I'm just met everywhere by people saying to me, and the same phrase has come up a number of times, 'why do they hate us?' And that is the picture they've got from what's happened. It's not just on inheritance tax, it's a whole range of things.'
Still, the baroness remains convinced that many in the countryside are natural supporters of her party. 'They're people who should be Labour voters because they're people with very little money, very low income, a portfolio of little jobs like cleaning holiday cottages or agricultural work or mucking out horses.'
She sees a similarity between this moment and the furious protests against Tony Blair's move to ban fox hunting. class enemies. Mallalieu recently heard Steve Reed, the secretary of state for Defra, telling the party's rural MPs to inform their constituents to expect the government to follow through on a manifesto commitment to ban trail hunting. 'I think they've gone into a bunker now on the countryside,' she says. 'I think they're just saying, 'Keep the defences up and carry on.' They've got so many other problems.'
With 59 of its 100 most marginal constituencies in rural or semi-rural areas, the government can ill afford a revolt. In the run up to May's local elections, though, the man who helps with Mallalieu's sheep told her he was raring to get out and vote Reform. She has seen rural Conservative party members defect to Farage en masse. 'I think it's anything but the other two, it's not because they're particularly embracing Reform,' she says. 'They think they can see the country's in trouble and they think the opportunities they had are not going to be there for their children and they're not going to have the same standard of living that we have.'
When I approach a group of elderly farmers at the cattle auction to ask who they support, they reply one by one: 'Reform!' They express a familiar litany of complaints: the government is stealing from people who have worked all their life; asylum seekers are handed free television licenses; Starmer is really a communist. Largely former Conservatives or non-voters, they are keen to stick it to the political class at the next election. 'The Tories are useless, Labour are worse, the Lib Dems are just a bunch of crap,' says one. 'If I were 50 years younger I'd emigrate,' adds another.
Standing outside in Hunter gear and summer dresses, one young family looks as if they have stepped from the pages of Country Living. 'Most of the world hates rural life,' says Ian Sweetman, a gunmaker from a farming background. 'People only see the bad, they don't take the time to see the good.' Dismayed by the lack of respect shown to field sports and agriculture online, he and his wife have developed an app to connect ruralites online. The modern world, its website complains, 'pushes country life into the corner and dubs it as outdated and unpopular'.
Across rural Britain, this perceived disregard is metastasising into fury. For Labour's plans for economic growth to succeed, something else must give. Nuclear power stations, housing estates and solar panel farms will have to go somewhere. For many in the countryside, there is a sense their world is being sacrificed to bail out SW1. Whether farmers can build a broader coalition remains unclear, however. Starmer must hope they do not spark a conflagration. But there is no doubt that unless the government changes its approach to rural constituencies, the tractors will be back in Whitehall.
[See also: A day out with Jeremy Corbyn's new party]
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