LATER this month, thousands of farmers and their supporters were due to descend on London to protest about Rachel Reeves’ declaration of all-out war on the countryside.
But then it was called off by the National Farmers’ Union for “legal reasons”.
Arthur Edwards / The SunJeremy Clarkson has been an important voice for farmers since he started his own farm in Oxfordshire[/caption]
AFPClarkson fumed after it was revealed a farmers’ protest was called off by the National Farmers’ Union for ‘legal reasons’[/caption]
Gaza? Gay Pride? Just Stop Oil? You can protest about those things whenever you like.
You can glue yourself to the road, smash windows and throw soup at paintings.
But farming? ’Fraid not. You lot have to just grin and bear it.
This didn’t go down well with some farmers who have organised an independent “we only want to feed you” march of their own.
I’ve never been on a protest before but I’ll be there, and I’ll lay on a coach so that my neighbours can come too.
Why? Because what’s happening is serious.
Stupid far-left agitators have got it into their heads that the countryside these days is mostly owned by people like me who bought farms to avoid paying inheritance tax.
I daresay Rachel Reeves, who’s from Lewisham, shares this view.
So why didn’t she impose her new tax on people who “have other income streams, apart from farming”?
That wouldn’t have been difficult.
Basically, why didn’t she use a sniper’s rifle to take out the wealthy land owners?
I wouldn’t have liked it very much, but I would have understood.
She’s an admirer of communism and that’s the sort of thing communists do.
But she didn’t use a sniper’s rifle.
She used a blunderbuss.
And as a result, she’s managed to hit all the traditional family farmers as well.
She claims that because she’s set the tax threshold at £1million, 73 per cent of farms won’t be affected, but that is absolute nonsense.
Literally, she could have said this after inhaling helium and it would have been no less risible.
Only this week I met an old skool family farmer who has 600 cows.
And on their own, they are worth £1.2million.
So even before he adds in his barns and his land and his equipment, he’s over the threshold.
This means that when he dies, to pay the new tax, his children will be forced to sell the farm.
And who will buy it?
Not a farmer, that’s for damn sure.
GettyChancellor Rachel Reeves’s recent Budget has slapped farmers with destructive taxes[/caption]
Because the one thing farmers don’t have is spare cash lying around.
This week in the commons, the always impressive Reform MP, Lee Anderson, asked a Defra minister called Daniel Zeichner to look him in the eyes and tell him how many farmers support Labour’s hare-brained policy.
Zeichner — whose only job in the real world was as a computer programmer for a county council — stood up and said, with a straight face, that he’d spoken to a farmer who “congratulated us on what we were doing”.
I simply do not believe him.
Because it’s not just the inheritance tax change that was announced by Labour.
They’ve reclassified double cab pick-up trucks as cars so the tax on these farm vehicles will shoot up by as much as 211 per cent.
They’ve put a new £50-a-tonne “carbon tax” on already expensive fertiliser, and they’ve announced that the basic farm payment system will be phased out earlier than expected.
So, it wasn’t even a blunderbuss.
It was a machine gun.
And Zeichner expects us to believe he’s found a farmer who’s happy with all of this!
Where is the farmer he found? Holland? Denmark? Or in his own head?
The truth is, there are no farmers who are happy with what Reeves and her politburo have done.
And when you see what happens to the countryside and the cost of your food, you won’t be happy either.
It’s OK for the Labour Party.
They’re all in Kentish Town, living on a diet of quinoa.
They’re even telling us now it’s more environmentally friendly to import an avocado from Ecuador than it is to eat beef from a cow that lived at the bottom of your garden.
That’s a lie. And I know it’s a lie because a Labour politician said it.
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.
That’s why they had a Budget which makes farming nigh on impossible.
And that’s why I’ll be in London on the 19th.
I may even bring some Diddly Squat sausages to show Londoners what they’ll lose if they let Reeves get away with this.
PAFarmers protest outside the Northern Farming Conference in Northumberland[/caption]
I’m not buying it, Ed
ED MILIBAND, who can’t eat a bacon sandwich, announced that by 2030 Britain will have so much green energy, we could be exporting it.
This means that in just six years, we will need to double the amount of wind farms and treble the number of solar parks.
GettyEd Miliband – who can’t eat a bacon sandwich – has announced that by 2030 Britain will have so much green energy, we could be exporting it[/caption]
We will also need to bulldoze the planning system so that 620 miles of power lines can be hung from more than 2,000 pylons.
What’s more, households will be told when they can use power and when they can’t.
And on top of all this, we will need to keep gas power stations operational so they can step in when it’s cloudy and still.
Sounds a bit far-fetched and expensive if you ask me, but Neso, the newly formed energy overseer, says the plans are “credible”.
Well it would, wouldn’t it? Because it’s a state-run operation.
Good show, Kemi
KEMI BADENOCH’S performance at her first ever despatch box ding dong with Sir Starmer’s adenoids?
Not bad. Not bad at all.
Off you pop
TOM HANKS reportedly said he would leave America if Donald Trump became President.
And that gives me an idea.
GettyActor Tom Hanks reportedly said he would leave America if Donald Trump won the election[/caption]
Tom, if you want to live in a socialist woke state, why not move to England?
You could buy a farm.
Lots will be available very soon.
Migration issue wrapped up
SIR Starmer has agreed to share people-smuggling information with the authorities in Kosovo and Macedonia.
So we can all relax.
Small boat problem solved.
Well done, Keir.
Verstappen takes it to the Max
WE learned two important things during last weekend’s Grand Prix in Brazil.
Well, three, if you count Lance Stroll, who crashed his freshly repaired car on the formation lap.
APMax Verstappen is one of the F1 all-time greats[/caption]
GettyMax may even be the greatest driver we’ve ever seen[/caption]
And then drove it into a gravel trap.
First of all, Max Verstappen is one of the all-time greats.
He may even be the greatest driver we’ve ever seen.
And second, Lewis Hamilton is past his prime.
He blamed his car for his tail-end qualifying session but his team mate, George Russell, was on the front row.
Of course it’s possible that because Lewis is moving to Ferrari next year, the team are filling his fuel tank with lemon barley water instead of petrol.
But that seems unlikely.
It’s far more probable that he’s now too old.
Air-Spier
APPARENTLY, Chinese-made air fryers are spying on us.
They’re watching our every move and reporting back to Beijing.
Which means that today, President Xi Jinping is fully aware that I’m out of milk and I’m having my hair cut this afternoon.
Kam she do it? No.
THE US Democratic party is still sitting in a state of shock, wondering how on Earth they lost to a man like Trump.
It’s simple.
GettyKamala Harris was a terrible pick for the Democrats[/caption]
If they’d fielded a candidate who was sensible, they’d have won.
But they didn’t. So they didn’t.
Kamala Harris laughs at jokes she hasn’t thought of yet, she got her policies from Instagram teenagers, and she strings words together like she’s picking them at random from a Scrabble bag.
She was never going to win.
And she hasn’t.
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