Farm Offensive

Look at how the newspapers describe the farmers' marches and you'll notice a very different attitude to their usual reports on protests.

Previously: The columnists' prayers

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Protests are good… for today only! Where the right-wing newspapers generally focus on disruption and inconvenience for commuters, they could not be more delighted that thousands of farmers, some in their tractors, descended on London. And where other protests are immediately tagged as the product of left-wing agitators, the political positions of those attending the farmers’ marches were treated as not relevant, despite the presence of Kemi Badenoch and a large contingent from the Shadow Cabinet, as well as Sunday Times and Sun columnist Jeremy Clarkson leading the charge. That’s because to papers on the right, being right-wing is just common sense and hardly worth commenting upon. It makes you a ‘normal’ person.

The Telegraph’s daily politics email unironically included this vox-pop:

Julie and Don Elworthy, 65 and 62, are not farmers themselves but their daughter has a small holding and they have lots of farming friends. And rather than catch their breath in Cornwall, they have come straight from a two-week Caribbean holiday to be part of the demonstration.“We’ve come from Barbados today, we’ve just landed… We’ve been following it since whoever’s inside made such a cock-up of the whole thing,” Julie says. “Since Labour got in, it has gone right down the pan and they have only been in for a few months.”

The Sun, which snarled about Just Stop Oil’s “plot to cripple [the] capital” in 2023, has had a major change of heart about protesting in London. Its front page today hails “Clarkson’s Farmy Army” and boils down the changes to inheritance tax allowances to a catchy two-word slogan, the “tractor tax”. It’s a trick familiar to anyone who remembers Theresa May’s “dementia tax” or George Osborne’s “pasty tax”.

Over at The Daily Telegraph again, things went beyond parody with a piece headlined, I’m a Duchess but I will be on the farmers’ march today. The author is the Duchess of Rutland, whose father was a farmer, which makes her decision to turn out for the protest pretty understandable but the headline is obviously a trap.

Jeremy Clarkson on stage in London telling protestors that they “got a knee in the nuts and [a] light hammer blow to the back of the head” as a result of the budget will get far more sympathetic coverage than Keir Starmer at the G20 summit in Brazil reiterating that most farmers won’t be affected. He told the BBC:

If you take a typical case, which is parents who want to pass on their farm to one of their children… by the time you’ve built in other income tax thresholds, it’s only those with assets over £3m that would begin to pay inheritance tax, and that’s why I’m confident that the vast majority of farms will be totally unaffected. 

It’s the complexity of talking about tax thresholds versus the simplicity of screaming about the “tractor tax”. The government says it won’t back down but I suspect it will if the media onslaught continues for weeks.

The story has already expanded into an opportunity to direct some kicks in the BBC’s direction. When Newsnight’s Victoria Derbyshire interviewed Clarkson on Whitehall and asked, “So it’s not about you, your farm and to avoid inheritance tax?”, he replied: “Classic BBC there. Classic.” But Derbyshire was referring to a Sunday Times column from 2021 in which Clarkson wrote:

Land is a better investment than any bank can offer. The Government doesn't get any of my money when I die. And the price of the food that I grow can only go up. But there is another, much more important reason: I can now have a quad bike.

The TV presenter and self-pointed avatar for all farmers now claims he only claimed he bought the farm to avoid inheritance tax because it would have upset more people if he’d said he’d bought it because he wanted to go shooting. Since when has Clarkson worried about saying things that upset people?

In a Sun column earlier this month, Clarkson wrote:

I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves 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.

Those are very clearly the words of a man who wouldn’t want to cause offence or over-dramatise a situation, right?

Already the Daily Mail has framed Clarkson’s encounter with Derbyshire as him “scolding” her, while the Telegraph gleefully repeated a line from his speech which branded the BBC “the mouthpiece of this infernal government”. Remember how many years Clarkson willingly cashed cheques from that demonic organisation, a relationship that only ended when he punched a Top Gear producer when he was unable to procure him a steak?

Clarkson’s tactic of using the farmers’ protest as a bucket for a host of other culture war talking points is unsurprisingly the same one being used by Nigel Farage. After turning up at the march in Toad of Toadhall cosplay, Farage made an appearance on The Daily Telegraph’s Daily T podcast to honk about “North London elites” hating the countryside:

I think North London hates rural England. They think they’re too white. Things like that. Net zero, of course, being pushed upon them. [They are] just different people. There’s a complete disconnect, I think between town and city in the most extraordinary way. 

That’s former City of London commodities trader and Dulwich College alumnus, Nigel Farage, talking about the realities of rural life.

My prediction for how this story ends is that the right-wing newspapers will keep up the pressure and continue to treat further protests from farmers entirely uncritically. That pressure will eventually cause the government to backtrack on the inheritance tax changes while pretending that no such U-turn has taken place. The Daily Mail, The Sun, and The Daily Telegraph will hail it as a triumph for them and Jeremy Clarkson will get more series of Clarkson’s Farm commissioned by Amazon.

Small farms that are genuinely struggling will continue to struggle but the attention of the right-wing press will drift away once this ‘battle’ is won.

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