The farmers remain polite – but they are furious

Blower
Blower

London has grown very used to protests recently. From the regular round of Palestine marches to the occasional disruption by the privileged agitators of Just Stop Oil, the capital grinds to a halt so often nowadays that it barely even registers. Today, however, was different – a protest unlike any other.

There were food mountains that would make the EU blush; every attendee at the farmers’ march has been asked to bring donations of British produce for the City Harvest food bank. The organisers began by thanking the Met for allowing the march to proceed and held a minute’s silence for farmers who had kept the country sustained during two world wars, and for those who had sadly taken their lives since the policy’s announcement. Needless to say, by the end of the afternoon, Whitehall remained un-graffitied and the streets looked, if anything, tidier than they were before.

This was the country come to town; a sea of muddied wellies and weather-beaten faces, of worn, waxed jackets that smelt of dog, of immaculately turned-out children pedalling toy tractors on Parliament Square. On Whitehall you could hear every regional accent, and encounter all types of people; young and old, from labourer to landowner.

I met two elderly farmers from the West Country, both in their late-60s, who’d left home at 3am to be there in time. Not for these unlikely protesters the fair-weather troublemaking of the summer months: today was rainy and bitterly cold but what does that matter when you are used to early starts and wet mornings?

A supremely British sense of awkwardness prevailed. These were not natural chanters or rabble-rousers. Nor was there much by way of expletive, apart from one furtive yell of “Starmer is a w----r” in a lull between speeches. I suspected many attendees had never been on a march like this, or perhaps last did so when a previous Labour government targeted the countryside vindictively. As a child, I remember sitting beside a farmer’s wife on a coach to the 2002 Liberty and Livelihood march who had never been to London before. For all of the attempts by the Left-wing media to present this as a gathering of millionaires, there were shades of that spirit today. This was the backbone of Britain making a stand.

Yet for all the politeness, for all that this spoke of a deeper England (not to mention Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) people were furious – and rightly so. We heard from tenant farmers, from cash-strapped fourth, fifth and sixth generation family farmers, all terrified this might be the end. Much of their anger was directed at individual ministers. The PM and Chancellor featured heavily; not least because, as it turns out, both have ideal names for placard wordplay. There were countless variations on “Thieves” and “Starmer the farmer harmer”. There was Reeves the Dalek, the exterminator of rural life. Another had mocked the PM up as Sir Oinky, with the strapline “pig ignorant”. This was more like the revenge of the sausages. Most moving were those carried by the next generation; “Please Mr Starmer, I want to be a farmer”, read one.

Of course what these decent and dignified people got in return for their efforts was more profound idiocy. Rachel Reeves’s most recent (and deeply Dalekian) line was that farmers simply had to stump up to save the health service. There does come a point where it’s insulting to pull the “R’NHS” cord; especially when the destruction of family farms comes at the price of about 24 hours of healthcare spending.

Still, it gives a vision of Britain’s future; a foreign-owned wasteland still grinding what little productivity it has on the millstone to maintain its deranged national worship of the continent’s least effective medical system.

On TV, Environment Secretary Steve Reed repeated his well-worn lie that it wouldn’t actually affect anyone really. Sir Oinky himself gave a bizarre interview where he said he couldn’t be treating farmers badly as “my first job was on a farm”. As what? Silage?

Naturally, neither of them had the guts to meet the farmers face-to-face. Ed Davey and Kemi Badenoch won cheers for promising to oppose and, in the latter’s case, to reverse the tax if in office. Nigel Farage received a hero’s welcome.

But the real star of the show was Jeremy Clarkson who’d come, against medical advice, to address the crowds. “Everyone took a kick on the shin with that Budget”, he boomed. “You lot took a kick in the nuts!”

There was a wonderful moment where Clarkson asked attendees to raise their hands if, having gone over the details with their accountants, they believed their family farms would be affected. A great sea of hands, thousands upon thousands of them, shot up. This alone was many times the figure that the Starmtroopers had spent the morning defending.

The whole afternoon – polite, dignified, but with an unmistakable rage simmering beneath – recalled Kipling’s words from The Beginnings.

It was not part of their blood,

It came to them very late,

With long arrears to make good,

When the English began to hate”.