Apocalypse Cow

On taxing farmers, and saying things are wars when they're not

I don’t know if you follow the news, but if you do then you may well be aware that there is a war going on in Ukraine. This has been in the news a lot. There is a war going on in Gaza. This has also, I think it’s fair to say, been quite well-publicised. There is a war going on in Sudan, which you would be forgiven for not knowing about if your main source of news is the news. And there are a number of other armed conflicts happening around the world,¹ with varying levels of media interest.

There are wars going on in the UK too, according to new Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott.

“The Budget last week declared war on business and private sector workers, and on farmers, as we have just heard. It seems that today the Secretary of State wants to add students to that list.”

Whether you support it or oppose it there are many ways you could characterise a 3.1% rise in tuition fees - a rise which universities say may be inadequate to stave off the financial pressures they face - but the idea that it amounts to a declaration of war on students is, you might well think, an exaggeration. Imagine how embarrassed Laura Trott will be about this choice of language, you might well think, when she finds out about the invasion of Ukraine.

Trott is not alone among Conservative frontbenchers when it comes to not knowing there is a war on. Here’s Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride, perorating.

“This is a Budget of broken promises, and when the dust has finally settled and this lot have gone, as we step over the fallen—the former farmers, the pensioners, the one-time businesspeople, the poor and the vulnerable—there we will find the shattered remains of the working people of this country, betrayed by a party that lied to them, and they will never forget it.”

Believe it or not - your mileage may vary on this, but I found this astonishing - Stride was actually wearing a poppy as he used this metaphor. Paying tribute to our war dead while saying that pensioners losing their winter fuel allowance are basically in the same category as the boys who got machine-gunned at the Somme. I realise that while it is crass it is not intentionally crass, but it is not obvious to me that this is less disrespectful than defacing a war memorial.

This is not a defence of the Budget, nor a denial of the Conservative Party’s right to oppose it, nor a squeamishness about political knockabout. The Tories should attack the Budget: it’s their job. But it shouldn’t be too much to ask people who use words for a living to think about the meaning of words.

Of course, the Conservatives are by no means the only people to describe things as wars when they are not wars, and by no means the only people who use words for a living to have little regard for what words mean. 

Here are some recent headlines: Labour’s war on the countryside; Labour must back down from their war against farmers, or risk disaster; Labour’s war on farmers threatens Britain’s food security; Labour’s War on Farmers: Now They Want to Crush the Backbone of Rural Britain. And here’s Jeremy Clarkson in The Sun, on what he calls “Rachel Reeves’ declaration of all-out war on the countryside”:

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.

War and carpet bombing and ethnic cleansing. It’s one way of looking at it. There are other ways of looking at the Government’s plans to lower the inheritance tax threshold for family farms - see for example this piece on his Substack by my colleague Tim Leunig, which sets out how the existing system contains, like any tax system, distortions and incentives which stand a chance of being replaced, via this reform, with better incentives which do not prevent family farms being passed down through the generations if that is what the families in question want to happen. But this post is not about discussing the pros and cons of the policy. It is about whether or not it is a war. The answer to that is easy: no, it is not a war.

To the Conservatives’ credit, they have not quite - Trott and Stride, above, excepted - gone all-in on the language of war on this issue.² But they have decided to oppose the tax change and to make it a major early campaign issue, complete with petition.

This decision reflects both the location of some significant post-Budget anger and, for the Conservatives, the path of least resistance, but there are a couple of interesting things about it. The first is that from a campaigning point of view we have seen this movie before, very recently indeed. In the last stages of the general election campaign the Tories made a surprising pivot towards focusing on rural constituencies and issues. I wrote about this at the time: it was evidence that they knew that they were losing very badly, and in their defence they were, and they did.³ A confident opposition would not, ideally, start by appealing to what was their very last line of defence less than six months ago.

The second is that as Sam Alvis, another of my colleagues with another Substack, points out, it is simplistic to think that the rural vote and the farmer vote are the same thing. Most rural voters are not farmers. Polling shows that “rural voters care about the cost of living, the quality of the NHS, the state of the economy, and immigration. The same as any other group. Relative levels of support for those things vary slightly. Immigration, for example, is more intense, as are concerns about the NHS and other public services”. Rural voters want the things the inheritance tax change, and the other tax rises announced in the Budget, are intended to pay for.

So, as it turns out, does new Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. In a very revealing moment at PMQs last week, Keir Starmer made a completely predictable challenge reflecting the new political dividing lines the Budget set up, and Badenoch completely failed to deal with it:

Keir Starmer: We have produced a Budget that does not increase tax on working people—nothing in the payslip—and is investing in our NHS, investing in our schools so every child can go as far as their talent will take them, and investing in the houses of the future. If she is against those things, she should say so.

Kemi Badenoch: I am not against any of those things… Of course not; none of us is against any of those things.

This is elementary stuff. If you support investment, you have to support a means to pay for it. If you oppose the tax rise but support what the tax rise is being spent on, you are not being serious. Starmer took the gift Badenoch offered him:

Keir Starmer: Let me get this straight: the Leader of the Opposition does not want any of the measures in the Budget, but she wants all the benefits? The magic money tree is back after two weeks in office. The Conservatives have learned absolutely nothing. We have put forward a Budget that takes the difficult decisions, fixing the £22 billion black hole that they left and investing in the future of our country. They say that they want all that, but they do not know how they will pay for it—same old Tories.

Badenoch has already committed to reversing this tax change, along with Labour’s proposed imposition of VAT on private school fees. Indeed, these are I think the only two specific policies so far confirmed by the new Conservative leader, who campaigned (rightly, as I said before the leadership election result) on a platform of focusing on principles rather than on announcing a full set of policies immediately.

In that context, these are interesting choices for early commitments. They are both spending decisions, because they involve raising less tax than the current government is budgeting for. They both involve choosing to provide financial support to people who you would expect, all things being equal, to be core Conservative voters already - landowning farmers and the very richest parents of school-age children - rather than people the Conservatives need to win back. They both send a message about Conservative priorities, not just to those who will benefit from them but to those who won’t. And they will both have to be paid for, either with different tax rises or cuts in spending. I would not assume at this stage that either of them will make it all the way to the next Conservative manifesto, but Labour won’t be disappointed if they do.

Making tax and spend decisions from opposition is hard - as, it’s fair to say, Labour has been finding out too. But there are certain kinds of language it is best to avoid, because they box you in. If Laura Trott really thinks that Labour’s tuition fee rise amounts to a declaration of war on students, then surely she must want to reverse it - if she doesn’t, it surely exposes that she doesn’t actually think it’s a declaration of war, which in turn exposes that we should be wary in general of taking her words seriously. If Mel Stride really wants to characterise the farmers, pensioners and businesses who have seen their taxes rise in the Budget as “the shattered remains of the working people of this country”, then he is going to have to have a proper argument (not, let’s be clear, a war) with his leader, who says she supports the spending those tax rises pay for, over whether his words actually meant anything.

And if politicians want to use the language of war, there are plenty of real ones for them to talk about.

I haven’t quite left Twitter, but I’m there a lot less, because it’s increasingly useless. I’m on Bluesky at @tomhamilton.bsky.social, and you can follow me there if you like. But you don’t have to, obviously.

1. The Council for Foreign Relations’ Global Conflict Tracker has an interactive map, which is interesting but includes some confrontations that seem to me not to count as armed conflicts. Still, there’s a lot going on, is the point.

2. Kemi Badenoch has described it as a “cruel attack on family farms”, and given that this Substack is about what I myself describe as political attack I am not about to start complaining about people who use the word “attack” in contexts that refer neither to muggings nor airstrikes. I would draw one distinction, though. Political attack is about criticism and argument. The alleged “attack” here is a tax.

3. Incidentally, the Tories do have a leg to stand on in claiming that their pre-election warnings about Labour increasing inheritance tax on family farms were correct. Only one leg, though. The Tories said that Labour was planning a “£1bn tax raid on farmers”. As it turns out, the amount the Treasury says it will raise from the tax change is about half that, because Labour has gone significantly less far on this than the Conservatives warned they would. It’s never as easy to claim vindication as you want it to be.