What a change it was to have a demonstration of Britain’s great right to protest without the day descending into vile racial slurs, attacks on the police or communists trying to torch the Cenotaph.
Farmers demonstrated the best of Britain when they came to Westminster today, on their best behaviour and in their finest countryside clobber.
Never in the field of SW1 rallies was so much Barbour worn by so many for so few.
The mullets and placards were on full display, and the Government should not mistake the well-behaved meeting for a lack of fury among farmers over these tax changes.
Signs accusing Rachel Reeves of being a “grave robber”, and accusing the Government of wanting to “starve” farmers were in abundance.
Over the past week, and into today, ministers and Labour MPs have continued to gaslight farmers – who I reckon are clever enough to understand the real-world implications of these tax changes – into believing just 500 farms will be affected.
If that’s the case, it was jolly nice of yesterday’s 10,000 to take a day off their essential fieldwork to come to Westminster and protest on behalf of just a few hundred multimillionaires.
Torsten Bell, who used to head up the studiously politically neutral Resolution Foundation before conveniently becoming a Labour MPs, spent much of the day on Twitter writing post after post in defence of the policy.
Unfortunately for Bell, Reeves and the rest of this Government, in a row between the country’s most popular television presenter and the Office for Budget Responsibility, there is an obvious and easy winner.
The tractor tax row has shown up precisely the big problem at the heart of Keir Starmer’s administration – namely that it can’t do personal or emotional politics.
We shouldn’t have expected anything else from a Prime Minister and Chancellor who sound like over-promoted technocratic civil servants, but to them farmers are simply deluded and too stupid to understand why their tax plans are actually brilliant.
They must be really struggling to understand why the public overwhelmingly backs our farmers, and can’t be won over with a bureaucratic argument over lines on a spreadsheet.
A poll out today found that Jeremy Clarkson is the second most popular person in Britain, only being pipped by money man Martin Lewis.
Keir Starmer, by contrast, is the single most unpopular politician or key figure in the country, coming stone-dead last behind Elon Musk.
Today was a major PR victory by the farmers, and will only solidify support for their cause.
Labour think they can ride this one out – perhaps they’re right, until the next election at least.
