Will’s World: Reeves’ double trouble delivers special gift

Of all of us, who do you think had the best Christmas? The writers of Gavin & Stacey, perhaps, after 12.5 million viewers eagerly tuned in to see Barry’s and Billericay’s favourite fictional families make their emotional final TV appearance?

Liverpool fans, jubilant about their team seemingly already cruising to victory in the Premier League?

Or maybe it was Taylor Swift, who further cemented her superstar status throughout 2024, both around the world and within the Evans household (pipe down, haters – “Love Story” is an absolute banger).

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About the author

Will Evans

Farmers Weekly Opinion writer

Will Evans farms beef cattle and arable crops across 200ha near Wrexham in North Wales in partnership with his wife and parents.

Read more articles by Will Evans

But no, it isn’t any of them. The group that categorically had the best Christmas of all are the manufacturers and salespeople of double-cab pickups.

I imagine they collectively toasted Rachel Reeves with the finest champagne over their turkey lunches after she announced, in her infinite wisdom, that they’ll be reclassified from commercial vehicles to company cars for tax purposes from April 2025, increasing the tax burden on a typical vehicle by as much as 211%.

A hearty “season’s greetings” to the working people of the countryside, with much love and fondness from the Labour party.

I’d hoped to get a new pickup in my Christmas stocking this year but, as usual, I didn’t make the good list.

As ours was a fair few years old, and we’d been thinking of swapping it anyway, Ms Reeves made the decision for us.

We now have a shiny blue model sitting in the yard and are secure in the knowledge that it’ll be categorised under the current tax rules.

We were fortunate to go shopping when we did, too, as it was the very last unsold one in the depot. “We’ve never seen anything like it,” the salesman informed us with a barely restrained smirk.

Start me up

I’m quite pleased with it so far. It beeps and flashes at me more than R2D2 did to Luke Skywalker in his X-Wing.

It’s going to take me a while to get used to the auto-correction thingy that turns the steering wheel itself when I’m looking over a neighbour’s hedge and stray too close to the white lines, but other than that, it’s a pleasure to drive.

My numerous daughters are enamoured with the plush leather interior and, as a middle-aged farmer with the usual associated lower back issues, I’m particularly excited about the heated seats.

Wisdom of the ages

I sometimes wonder what my granddad – who started his farming career sitting on a cast-iron seat and wrapped in an old Army greatcoat with a potato sack over his legs to keep him warm and dry – would think about how soft we all are now with our fabulously comfortable farm vehicles.

I don’t suppose he’d have much good to say about it.

I know he’d have even less good to say about the way the current government is seemingly hell-bent on alienating and “othering” the people responsible for producing the nation’s food, let alone the numerous small businesses based in rural areas who rely on double-cab pickups every day of the week.

Load luggers

Perhaps the Labour party thinks we should be taking cattle and sheep to market in the back of a Transit van, or piling our kids into a trendy electric go-kart to take them to school on our often dangerously crumbling rural roads.

Or maybe this is just another revenue raising exercise, with no thought to the genuine human impact that these decisions are having on farming families at a time when many are already stretched to breaking point.

I haven’t been so disappointed in a government since the last one.