A rural revolt? On recent farmer mobilisations in Britain

Neither purely expressions of rage on the part of precarious smallholders nor an anti-tax revolt by the wealthiest landowners, recent farmers’ protests articulated outrage at Labour Party interventions in agricultural land ownership. What economic forces and political desires underlie this, and how can ecosocialists respond? 

In response to tax changes announced by the Labour government in last month’s budget, 19 November saw thousands of farmers protest in London, alongside a lobbying meeting by the employers’ organisation the National Farmers Union (NFU). The demonstration heard speakers from across the main political parties, including the recently elected Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, while media attention focused on the presence of right-wing celebrity landowners such as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jeremy Clarkson who had appeared supporting the farmers. In contrast to the kind of reception that Palestine solidarity, environmentalist and trade union demonstrations receive in the mainstream press, coverage from major outlets was broadly positive, with the Daily Express supporting the demonstration as a recently launched ‘crusade’ to ‘Save Britain’s Family Farms.’ The London demonstration was accompanied by warnings from farmers threatening further upheaval and the deployment of direct action tactics if the government did not concede to their demands.

What is going on here? And what do these events mean for the revolutionary left in Britain?

Causes

The immediate trigger for the farmer mobilisations is a change to inheritance tax relief proposed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves in the budget on 30 October. On the grounds of needing to raise further revenue to fund public services and to challenge efforts to use land ownership to avoid taxes, Reeves announced changes to agricultural property tax relief. This would result in more farmers paying a 20 percent inheritance tax when passing down farms when previously a tax exemption was in place. There is disagreement over the number of farms and farmers affected by this fiscal change and the implications of the policy. The Treasury and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) claim that only a small number of so-called family farms will be impacted. Farmers’ organisations such as the NFU claim numbers will be significantly higher, partly because of how the inheritance tax relief change relates to business property relief which affects other farming assets e.g., agricultural equipment. They argue that the change may result in many farmers being forced out of business. Such claims are echoed by major media outlets, particularly those on the right, and by the Tories.

This immediate trigger has to be situated against the wider background of tensions within British agriculture and the wider European context of farmers’ mobilisations. After a postwar focus on increased domestic food production, as highlighted in David Edgerton’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, recent decades have seen Britain rely more heavily upon food imports. British farmers have had conflicted relations with supermarkets in terms of prices and struggled through varying crises (e.g., the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic and the fallout effects on rural economies). They were affected by shifting subsidy and trade policies, particularly around the Common Agricultural Policy, Brexit and recent moves towards green transition, all of which have added extra pressures on British agriculture. Earlier this year farmers in various parts of the country engaged in demonstrations around subsidy policies, paralleling wider protests by farmers across Europe which have often taken on an anti-green and anti-regulatory state register. In this situation, Reeves’ tax change, whatever the actual nature or scale of its effects, has clearly ignited a combustible situation. 

Compositional Problems

If we were to restrict our attention to the kind of reporting offered by the Daily Express or GB News, for example, then we would be left with the impression that the majority of farms within Britain are small scale family affairs being unfairly penalised by the Treasury. Such a narrative takes aim at Labour’s narrative that the policy will impact only a minority of landowners and is therefore a progressive exercise in asking those with the broadest shoulders to contribute towards rebuilding the country’s public services after years of Tory misrule. To arrive at a concrete analysis of the farmers’ disputes, it is necessary to clarify some of the dynamics of the movement. One key dimension of this is unpacking the meaning of ‘farmers’ and ‘family farms’ as categories, which are rather vague and imprecise despite their widespread use. 

In reality, a label like ‘farmers’ refers to a wide range of stratified layers, from the heads of mega-agribusinesses to sizable aristocratic landowners to smaller self employed landholders and tenant farmers who are renting their land off the larger landowners. Patterns of agricultural land ownership vary significantly between Scotland, England and Wales and between different regions, with some areas dominated by particular landowning entities while in others acres of land are divided between smaller owners. The sizes of farms can be incredibly divergent in terms of acreage, constitutive buildings and infrastructure, with references to “family farms” conjuring up images of small holdings. In reality the category refers to any farm operated and owned by particular families regardless of its size or specialisation.

In addition, it is important to note how the rhetorical emphasis on those who own land in these discussions sidelines agricultural workers, particularly hyper exploited migrant workers, whose labour sustains the various sectors of British agriculture, e.g., horticulture and poultry, which rely heavily on seasonal workers. Such agricultural workers can be found working for the smallest family firms and for the larger agri-businesses. 

In recognising these aspects, we can come to see that the farmers’ mobilisations are neither purely expressions of rage on the part of immiserated and precarious smallholders nor simply an anti-tax revolt by the wealthiest landowners (it is worth noting here that other tax arrangements which benefit sections of the landed gentry remain in place). The mobilisations are better understood as the actions of a broader cross-class alliance between larger landowners, smallholders and tenant farmers, in which the NFU as an employers’ organisation serves as a major anchor. Uncertainty and unease over the wider effects of the tax changes brings such farmers together, as smaller scale farmers and tenant farmers do not believe government claims that they will be unaffected, believing instead that the arrangements of their businesses and their so-called “asset-rich, cash poor” status mean that these changes will have material repercussions for them. As a result, despite the differences between the layers, they are able to rally to the common cause of wanting to halt the proposed tax changes. 

Formations of farmers from across these disparate class layers, facilitated by major social media platforms and industry specific discussion forums such as The Farming Forum, play their role in helping to organise mobilisations and to articulate particular perspectives, such as the anti-net zero agenda of the No Farms No Food current. While the official leadership directly concentrates on parliamentary lobbying, the ‘rank and file’ are publicly open to using direct action to achieve their goals. An action by farmers in Dover on 27 November illustrates this dynamic: a go slow tractor protest on local roads involving several farmers directly organised by the campaign groups Save British Farming and Fairness for Farmers against the inheritance tax changes and other agricultural issues (food imports, carbon taxation), publicly endorsed by the NFU.

Some of the political arguments emerging from the movement parallel more general small business perspectives, with resentment towards regulatory state institutions, taxation and bigger fractions of capital, forces understood as economically squeezing them. At the same time, rhetoric around producerism, stewardship and conservationism emerges from the movement’s participants, as rural landowners understand themselves as hardworking providers (see the slogan We Just Want To Feed You deployed by some of the farmers in their actions) and as maintaining the countryside for the benefit of wider society and the environment. Such perspectives inflect the broader politics of the current mobilisations, with a vox pop offering a striking illustration of this when the Duke of Rutland (a hereditary peer) complains that the tax changes will cause smaller farmers to financially go under and leave the land at the mercy of more sizeable firms, while declaring that urban dwellers are able to enjoy their access to the countryside because of the upkeep maintained by farmers. Such perspectives further unify farmers together across material divides, with different farmers seeing themselves as having shared interests as rural producers under assault from an out of touch metropolitan government.

As some analysis highlights, there are material bases for some of the concerns of the layers involved going beyond the actual (or potential) impacts of Labour’s tax changes. The relationship between smaller scale farms and retailers has contributed towards economic pressures fuelling current grievances. The relative cheapness of domestic food products over recent decades is partially the result of producers not being paid much by supermarkets for their produce, and middlemen outside farms taking their cut out of the payments. Milk offers a good example. A self-employed dairy farmer will only receive a few pennies from the standard milk carton or bottle sold at the local Tesco, whereas other chunks of the price will have been taken out by the milk processing firm, the supermarket seller etc. Dairy farmers like this do not make much day to day profit to sustain themselves and therefore perceive the imposition of further taxation as an existential threat, even when they hold major assets in terms of land and farm infrastructure. Criticisms that they are privileged above other middle class and working class layers (which they are in so far as the average worker does not have legal ownership over hundreds of acres of land) are dismissed as insensitive to the day to day economic stresses faced by small scale producers, and can become bound up with wider rural resentment towards urban and metropolitan areas.

Similarly, tenant farmers reliant upon the land of bigger landowners and who face similar pressures to the small landowners see the introduction of new tax measures as a threat, in the absence of meaningful protections against being turfed off the land by the owners trying to find means of navigating their new fiscal requirements. In this respect, despite their class antagonisms, renters and rentiers can develop a shared interest in preventing the implementation of the tax changes.

Added to these tensions is the extent to which segments of the movement understand themselves as familial producers engaging in particularly skilled forms of craft, with this kind of intergenerational occupation common in parts of the countryside. The possibility that inheritance tax changes might drive many farmers out of business and prevent their children from being able to pursue the family livelihood proves emotionally resonant, with the presence of children riding toy tractors at the London demonstration a visual demonstration of the charge that Starmer and Reeves threaten opportunities for future generations. 

Reactionary mobilisations?

The kind of farming communities mobilising at the present time as a whole are not likely to be predisposed to support socialist politics. Such communities are often ones with historical affinities with the Tories, although political plurality still exists within these rural communities (the Liberal Democrats’ strength in Cumbria for example comes from farming communities) and Labour’s 2024 electoral success in many rural constituencies indicates the declining strength of the Conservatives in such places.

It is important to recall that New Labour’s period in office saw several instances of rural opposition which provide additional historical context for current activities. In 1999, Tony Martin, a farmer arrested for shooting teenage traveller Fred Barras during a burglary, was transformed into a cause celebre for the right to use firearms, marking an unnerving trend in rural reactionary politics. The Countryside Alliance’s mobilisations against the ban on fox-hunting relied on similar rhetoric around urban/rural divides and metropolitan class warfare against country folks to that which we see circulating now. Farmers participated in the 2000 fuel protests which forced the government to change its fuel duty measures in response to the use of disruptive tactics.

Farmer demonstrations which took place earlier this year against the devolved Welsh Labor government’s rural policies received support from Sunak, while the No Farms No Food current involved in these demonstrations and others around Britain has articulated anti-environmentalist politics and has connections to anti-Covid lockdown/anti-World Economic Forum conspiracist milieus. Reform UK and far right currents are trying to take advantage of the current anger although the NFU as the mainstream leadership of the movement are trying to sideline Farage because of concerns around how divisions over Brexit might impact their campaign. It is important to recognise that although some layers of farmers were supportive of Brexit others favoured continued European Union membership, with post-Brexit trade arrangements having had wider negative repercussions for some of the movement.

The potential for the farmer protests to assist in the formation of a pole of right wing opposition to Labour should be of concern to the revolutionary left. Clarkson’s prominence as a relatable celebrity figurehead for the mobilisation, cheered by farmers as he appeared last week, has involved him pushing a conspiracist narrative that the tax measures constitute an effort to ‘ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers’ in favour of ‘immigrants and net zero wind farms.’ Clarkson’s remarks come several months after far right pogroms against migrants and Muslim communities and invoke the wider fantasies of mass migration and the Great Replacement circulated by the reactionary right. It would be reductive to assume on this basis that the broad mass of the cross-class alliance analysed here simply constitute a far right mob consumed by fears of the Great Replacement and the machinations of Davos, but there will be segments who find such formulations convincing. The NFU itself favours more mainstream lobbying efforts against the Treasury rather than playing off xenophobic resentments. 

The farmer mobilisations could help to bolster the Conservatives’ further pivot towards being a party of petty-bourgeois reaction. The perspectives offered by the ‘Conservatism in Crisis’ pamphlet co-authored by Kemi Badenoch, with its presentation of Britain being economically and socially held back by a bureaucratic elite and the overbearing regulatory state, indicate that the leadership of the Conservative Party is committed to playing off the grievances of middle class layers. The farmers protests, with their basis in decades of economic and social pressures (pressures which Conservative governments of course have done little to meaningfully address) and hostility to a Labour leadership seen as pushing people to the brink of financial ruin can be incorporated into such a politics. As with some elements of the anti-Covid lockdown protests and anti-net zero/anti-ULEZ activities of recent years, the protests could further cultivate a right populist sensibility that metropolitan Westminster does not care about the financial hardship of the middle classes. It is obvious that the Conservative leadership are going to do their best to gain from the dispute, using them to push an anti-environmentalist agenda and present themselves as a populist force.

Responses of the revolutionary left?

In contrast to mobilisations generated by the cost of living crisis in recent years, such as the strike wave and the Don’t Pay campaign, motivated by direct economic pressures and attacks on waged workers and wider sectors of the class, revolutionary socialists are faced with the more complicated situation of a social movement defiantly taking to the streets in what amounts to a defence of private property in the face of state taxation. Commentary from some quarters of the left suggests that this should therefore be interpreted simply as a reactionary petty-bourgeois movement backed by landed interests and right wing media outlets best left to be destroyed by the implementation of Labour’s policies. While such a response is understandable on some level, it does not get revolutionary socialists all that far analytically or organisationally in a situation which could escalate significantly if layers of farmers act on their threats to challenge the government and the political right seek to capitalise on this. In terms of developing responses to these developments from the revolutionary left, there are therefore multiple dimensions which need engaging with.

One key dimension is understanding what the dispute says about the government. In the same way in which the Labour leadership has made it clear that they are committed to the removal of winter fuel allowances for pensions and promise a more punitive welfare regime, it seems that the Starmer government overall remains committed to implementing such tax measures. Media coverage of the dispute indicates that Defra has been sidelined by the Treasury when it comes to this policy. It is unclear whether there will be any significant u turns (some coverage indicates modification may be made), but there seems a willingness on the part of Reeves’ team to drive through these measures in the face of active hostility and warnings about severe repercussions for particular sectors. It does not seem wild to speculate that such a determination will pose wider challenges for working class organisations going forwards in terms of the Treasury being willing to push through unpopular measures.  Polling from More In Common indicates strong public support for the farmers, likely helped by sympathetic media coverage. Analysing how the Treasury navigates the challenge from the farmers could offer lessons for how the labour movement and other organised sectors of the class can face down Starmer and Reeves’ wider programme.

Conversely, if farmers do engage in significant disruptive action and force a u turn from the government this should serve as a lesson that the exercise of industrial and direct action on key sectors can have meaningful effects. As noted earlier, the farmers’ movement involves both the NFU as a formal employers organisation and pressure groups such as Save British Farming, Kent Farmers for Fairness and Enough is Enough (not be confused with the labour movement campaign) working in tandem to threaten and coordinate activities such as strikes to bring about food shortages, go-slow protests on roads and blockades of infrastructure. In this way, farmers operating in formal and informal organisations are able to use their sectoral position and logistical capacities to deploy a repertoire of tactics to exert pressure against the government. 

If the farmers’ movement can take such action in defence of their material interests, we as socialists should be posing the question to fellow trade unionists and other workers regarding the merits of effective disruptive rank and file activity in order to challenge further attacks on living standards.

The farmer mobilisations also pose wider questions for how revolutionary socialists need to respond to the politics of agriculture. A localist politics that valorises small rural producers is definitely not one that we need in such a dispute, and it is doubtful that the current situation will lead to the historically progressive liquidation of petty proprietors. It is even less likely that the farmers movement as it is currently composed is going to lay the foundation for eco-socialist struggle on its own, given its overall class composition, its central focus on taxation and the role played by sections of the right. Nevertheless, it is important to think about how to concretely  mobilise in response to its emergence. In the short term, can some layers of the farmers’ movement be peeled away and brought into common struggle with environmentalists, as Just Stop Oil hopes? How can the wider revolutionary left engage with the work of those such as the Landworkers Alliance who have spent years organising smaller farmers on a more anti-capitalist and who are trying to develop their own response to the tax changes? What can revolutionary socialists do to better support those seeking to unionise agricultural workers such as Solidarity across Land Trades, who as highlighted above are sidelined in this dispute? In the face of Clarkson and the far right articulating the farmers dispute in xenophobic and anti-environmentalist terms, how can socialists effectively respond to such reactionary efforts, and in doing so engage with currents such as Land in our Names who focus on land access as a form of reparations and anti-racist and ecological struggle? If the right is aiming to capitalise on the farmers’ dispute to bolster their political strength, how can sufficiently powerful organs of working class power be built to create an alternative pole against the right and Starmerite Labour?

In the longer term, the revolutionary left needs to seriously engage with the question of what a socialist organisation of agriculture looks like in Britain, from achieving the common ownership of land to ensuring sustainable food production and distribution is in place. The current system is unsustainable on multiple fronts, and whatever the outcome of the farmers’ dispute it will be important for socialists to organise on this front as ecological crises intensify.