Labour must back down from their war against farmers, or risk disaster

Labour have given out mixed messages on the importance of farmers to the Government
Labour have given out mixed messages on the importance of farmers to the Government - Henry Nicholls/AFP

I refuse to propagate the sort of political behaviour I have often denigrated, of claiming that a politician’s poor choice of words in the heat of a debate somehow defines her – and worse, defines her as an unfeeling, heartless ogre in thrall only to the interests of her party rather than her constituents.

Rhoda Grant was one of the first cohort of MSPs elected to the Scottish Parliament in 1999, and she has served both her constituents and her party loyally and successfully in that time (she missed out on a seat between 2003 and 2007), serving in a series of various front bench positions under a succession of Labour leaders.

She is now Scottish Labour’s rural affairs spokesman but this morning she might be craving the anonymity of the back benches once more. During yesterday’s debate on whether the recently announced change to farmer’s inheritance arrangements should be reversed, Grant was challenged by Conservative MSP Finlay Carson.

The Galloway MSP raised the plight of a constituent who runs the family farm with his son but, as a recent cancer survivor, is concerned that if he dies within the next seven years, he will bequeath a million pounds tax bill to his family.

It was a moment for calm reflection and an exercise in emotional intelligence, not to mention sympathy. This family are not alone in their concerns about how to sustain family farms in the wake of a tax change – subjecting farms to inheritance tax for the first time – that none of them saw coming.

But Grant chose instead to dismiss the farmer’s, and his MSP’s, concerns with a regal display of Marie Antoinette-like disdain: “He needs to put his affairs in order,” she replied slowly and precisely, almost as if she had carefully considered her response and decided that this was the bon mot.

It was an unfortunate phrase that will haunt Labour candidates in rural seats up until the next Holyrood elections in 2026. Unfortunately, for those who yearn to see a pattern of Labour language that might betray the party’s deep contempt for the rural way of life, it was only the second gaffe of the week.

As with Rhoda Grant, I have a great deal of time for John McTernan, who was Tony Blair’s political advisor in Downing Street during the Great Helmsman’s later years in office. McTernan is what you might call a political bruiser, one of those people who is forgiven his occasional ill-chosen phrase because he is so often on the money in his broader analysis of politics.

During a discussion about chancellor Rachel Reeves’s tax changes for farmers and the prospect of demonstrations against them in central London, McTernan responded: “If the farmers want to go on the streets, we can do to them what Margaret Thatcher did to the miners,” evoking images of armed battles between striking miners and police officers during the prolonged strike of 1984-85. This is not normally the kind of language that Labour – or at least the sensible parts of it – likes to use. Tony himself would certainly never have touched that class war blue touch paper with a naked flame.

But McTernan then doubled down, suggesting Britain doesn’t need family farmers: “It’s an industry we can do without.”

The Prime Minister himself, when challenged on the remarks, was obliged to distance himself from them.

There are two important lessons to be learned here. The first is that Labour still has some way to go to convince voters – and perhaps some of its own members – that it represents the interests of residents of rural areas as much as it does the residents of inner city and suburban areas. The fact that so many rural seats fell to the party in July should have achieved this, but apparently not everyone is convinced.

The second lesson is the more important one, and it is that class warfare continues to play a small though important part in Labour’s agenda. Apparently, there remain some comrades reluctant to emerge from the jungle and accept that the class war is over, terms of surrender agreed long ago and we should all be the happier for it.

But the class warrior on this occasion isn’t McTernan, it’s the chancellor herself. Much of Labour’s defence of the so-called Tractor Tax has been based on how few family farms will actually have to pay it. And that is correct: the Treasury itself predicts that in five years’ time it will gather into its coffers barely half a billion pounds of extra revenue as a result of this change.

Which begs the question: why bother, then? If the sums to be raised are negligible – and in comparison with almost every other measure included in the Budget they are – why suffer a disproportionate degree of political damage? It makes no sense, until you realise that maybe that’s the whole point.

This change will impact on relatively few people, but they are exactly the kind of people whom some in Labour deeply resent. This tax change is not being levied to raise crucial funds; it’s being levied as a punishment, just as when in the 1970s, higher taxes on the super-rich were an end in themselves, punishment for success, rather than a way of raising money to pay for services.

Rhoda Grant and John McTernan might be dismissed as fringe voices who are not accurately representing this Government’s agenda. The problem for Labour is that they may be doing exactly that.