I HAPPENED to be travelling along Edinburgh’s City Bypass last Saturday on my way to Glasgow at the same time as the farmer’s protest against Starmer’s inheritance tax (IHT) had taken to the busy route.
Since 1984, agricultural property relief has allowed land used for crops or rearing animals – as well as farm buildings, cottages and houses – to be exempt from inheritance tax. But the UK government has now announced that a 20% rate, will apply ver a £1m threshold from April 2026.
This, the farmers claim, will sound the death knell for many smaller, family-owned farms which will not have the means to pay the tax.
Hence the demonstration on the Bypass. Thankfully the protesters were going in the opposite direction at the time, but their convoy of slow-moving tractors, about 40 of them all tooting their horns in a cacophony, caused huge tailbacks in their wake.
It must have been hugely irritating and frustrating for other drivers on the route to be caught up in the logjam, not least those heading to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary to visit friends or relatives. Indeed, at least one ambulance with blue lights flashing had to negotiate its way through the queues of gridlocked traffic, which can’t have been much fun for crew or patients inside.
All of which set me wondering whether such protests might ultimately end up being counter-productive. I suspect that among the thinking general public there is at least a modicum of sympathy for the farmers’ case. Few people wish to see families deprived of their means of livelihood, and as they rightly say no farms equates to no food, not produced domestically anyway.
However, prolonged or repeat episodes of disrupting the public to emphasis your cause can turn opinion against you. Just look at what’s happened with Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. Both organisations were founded by Roger Hallam, an environmental activist, along with various other entities and probably had for a short time some sympathy for their declared aims.
But a series of increasingly hysterical stunts – closing the M25, throwing paint over buildings, stopping traffic etc – turned public opinion against them, and the imprisonment of Hallam and some of his swivel-eyed acolytes has been met with general approval. They just took it too far.
The danger for farmers is that they might fall into the same trap. So it got me to thinking about a concept I will call “positive protest”. What do I mean by saying positive protest – and bear in mind this is a new idea (for me at least) and still in embryo form. The essence of it is that rather than disrupting people’s everyday lives to draw attention to your cause, you enhance or enable them to do what their purpose is in their everyday lives.
So, for example, as opposed to stopping them using the road or preventing them getting to work/visiting elderly parents/attending a GP appointment, you seek to help them do it.
How? Well, the sky’s the limit here when it comes to ideas, and I have by no means the monopoly of the possibilities. But how about, instead of disrupting our towns and roads, farmers set up their stalls in lay-bys and open access common ground and entice the public in with the offer of free/heavily discounted produce in return for listening to the arguments and taking a few leaflets?
Or maybe taking on the scourge of litter and fly-tipping (a blight on many farms too I know) and publicising what would be a popular exercise in citizenship and social responsibility and demonstrate public benefit. Or possibly inviting members of the public on to the farms (health and safety being an important consideration I understand) to show them what actually happens on a farm – surprisingly few will know – and sending them on their way with a goody bag with some milk and fresh vegetables or the like?
Farmers themselves will be able to come up with more and much better ideas I’m sure.
I am left wondering what the outcome might have been if XR and JSO had adopted positive protest rather than sitting down on the road or showering national treasures with paint and soup. Maybe public opinion would still be on their side and their activists not wasting their lives in jail?
So what I would say to Britain’s farmers is this; we have heard you and we sympathise with your plight, but please don’t overdo it and turn us against you. Adopt positive protest methods and carry the rest of us with you!
Stuart Crawford is a social and political commentator living in East Lothian in Scotland.
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Image of a protesting farmer courtesy of Adobe Stock.
