Editor’s View: Bravo to all who came to make their voices heard
© MAG/Steve Behan Any farmer who has been victim to flooding, fire, a disease outbreak or other calamity will know what it is like to see the work of 12 months or more disappear overnight.
The patient, careful work to build soil health, improve a bloodline or upgrade infrastructure can be gone in an instant.
People say that Labour doesn’t understand much about farming, but after the events of this week it certainly knows what it’s like to see its hard work go up in smoke.
See also: Clarkson urges Labour to ‘back down’ at Westminster rally
About the author
The years of toil that farming minister Daniel Zeichner has put into building good relations with the farming community when he was shadowing the role have been wiped out.
At a parliamentary reception for Rabi on the evening of the Westminster rally, he looked like a man who had the weight of the world on his shoulders, delivering some clipped remarks to the audience and striding out of the room without a backward glance.
Just a few hours earlier, his boss, Defra secretary Steve Reed, was brittle and argumentative in front of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs select committee, side-stepping all opportunities to show empathy.
How humiliating for both to be in a position of apparent power and yet have to spend their days defending a policy that they were reportedly not consulted on and will actively undermine everything else they may want to achieve.
Contrast that with the dignity NFU president Tom Bradshaw showed on Tuesday (19 November), as he kicked off the union’s lobbying event.
Anyone who has met him will know he has a vaguely professorial aura; a farming academic, able to recall statistics and six-point arguments on trade policy without hesitation, deviation or repetition.
Yet while the outward man appeared unchanged as he stepped on stage at Church House – the NFU’s base for lobbying operations – it was not facts and figures that burst out of him this time, but raw emotion.
“We know that any [inheritance] tax revenue will be taken from our children and raised from those that die in tragic circumstances or within the next seven years.
“The human impact of this policy is simply not acceptable,” he said.
Long pause. Then, voice cracking, he dragged two more heartfelt words from deep within him: “It’s wrong.”
There could not have been a more accurate representation of the whole industry than this.
For while the NFU’s (and others’) pleas to Defra and the Treasury is rooted in tightly marshalled economic data, the response of industry has been a howl of despair and fury.
It was this raw emotion that propelled thousands of people to stand in the sleet at the rally on Whitehall for hours and make their voices heard too.
The organisers – Olly Harrison, Clive Bailye, Martin Williams, Andrew Ward and James Mills – deserve a huge amount of credit for what they have achieved so far, without any formal backing.
The message was clear: if necessary, this is just the beginning.
Your move, Labour. It’s not too late for a rethink.