Farmers’ Protests: Solidarity, Romanticism, and Populism

Last month, thousands of farmers descended on central London to protest the new Labour government’s inheritance tax change. Previously, farms had been exempt from the tax, meaning that land could be passed on across the generations. But under Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s proposed plans, estates worth over £1 million would be subject to inheritance tax. Especially for farms in areas where land values are high, this means that with each new generation, a portion of the land will have to be sold. Family farms will shrink, become commercially unviable, and be bought up by investors and agribusiness, accelerating pre-existing trends and destroying a traditional way of life.

The government and its supporters claim they are driven by both financial necessity—the oft-cited “black hole” in the budget—and social justice, with tax increases falling upon those they claim are the most privileged. The less charitable interpretation is that they’re trying to find tax increases that the average voter believes will be paid by someone else. Inheritance taxes that affect million-pound estates, and sales taxes that fall upon private school fees, seem like popular and just measures from the perspective of the British center-Left.

On paper, it makes sense. But the reality is far more complex. Farms might be worth huge amounts when sold off, but family farmers are operating on very small profit margins, have to invest heavily in machinery and chemicals, and lack the cash to pay inheritance taxes. The idea of the family farm is deeply resonant in Britain, and even urban populations feel a deep emotional attachment to the land and the traditional rural economy. Shoppers buy bags of vegetables, cartons of eggs and milk, and cuts of meat, all plastered with Union Jacks and images of farms and tractors. More than five million Britons are members of the National Trust, which manages stately homes and areas of natural beauty. Fifty-five percent of the British public support striking farmers, and only 13 percent oppose them.

Such solidarities are complex and transcend traditional left-wing accounts of class struggle and competition. The striking farmers are hardly a modern-day peasant’s revolt. Quite apart from being one of the most polite and dignified protests London has seen, a stark contrast with BLM and Palestine rallies, those taking to the streets were often notably well-heeled. The uniform of the farmers was gilets, barbours, and wellingtons, with plenty of tweed and corduroy completing the picture of a very Tory protest, with red-faced gentleman farmers marching alongside battalions of pretty Sloanes. Leading the charge, their modern-day Wat Tyler was none other than celebrity motoring journalist Jeremy Clarkson, a gleefully offensive avatar of unreconstructed masculinity. His role in the protests stemmed from his surprising success in “Clarkson’s Farm,” a reality television show in which he gets in touch with his sensitive side and gives a genuine glimpse into the difficult realities of modern farming as he struggles to manage his own farm.

The protests reflect the sheer novelty of modern populism. In one sense, it’s a version of the Brooks Brothers Riots, in which an elite conservative group suddenly appropriates the campaigning zeal of the Left. When Saul Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals, he probably never dreamed that its best students would be members of the radical Right. Populism has been extremely disorienting for the center-Left, because it has seen groups that seemingly shouldn’t have mass appeal not only take effective direct action, but garner tremendous public sympathy in the process. Progressive groups, meanwhile, have adopted a “conservative” strategy, dominating traditional elite institutions and maintaining hegemony at the top, rather than seeking to mobilize mass support.

Who is privileged, who is a victim, and who attracts solidarity has taken on new dimensions in the past decade. The old 1960s-’70s world of mass employment, low inequality, fast growth, and high tax has been shattered. The idea of welfare as social insurance, undergirded by a sense of national fraternity, has fallen apart. Increasingly, state spending goes to a growing “underclass” of dysfunctional welfare recipients, while the fruits of economic growth are realized by a small number of ultra-wealthy asset owners and the upper managerial classes. Those in the middle are caught between rising taxes and rents and stagnating wages, keeping them precariously balanced on the edge of prosperity, unable to grow lasting intergenerational wealth.

Complicating this picture further, mass migration of an increasingly chaotic and unconstrained kind has further weakened social unity. People are keenly aware that the money raised from measures like private school VAT (Value Added Tax, a British sales tax newly applied to private school fees) and inheritance tax changes will be dwarfed by the expense of housing a growing population of illegal migrants, with costs already rising to the billions each year. Legal migration is scarcely less expensive, with a growing number of dependents and welfare claimants among recent arrivals. Indeed, in London, nearly half of those living in social housing are listed as being headed by a person born overseas.

In this context, many feel that the benefits of both economic growth and investment in public services won’t reach them, and even among Labour voters, only 27 percent believed the recent budget would benefit them personally. This attitude is also reflected in lowered trust in every major profession and institution. Indeed, the Left–Right spectrum in Britain today is effectively a measure of relative trust in institutions. According to polling, trust in institutions and professions was highest among Labour voters, lower among conservatives, and lowest among Reform voters. Likewise, support for changing the voting system, and hostility toward the police, are now increasingly true of those on the populist Right, not the center-Left.

With both the free market and the welfare state seen as unfair, and trade unions reduced to special interest groups, not only do new mistrusts explode, so, too, do sudden surges of solidarity. This is the element so many miss in Donald Trump’s success, and a crucial aspect of a rising populism in the UK. Farage and Clarkson, like Trump, are both irreverent reality television stars, able to connect with voters the mainstream can’t. Whether it’s the farmers’ protests, Farage’s pub meet-ups, or Trump’s rallies, anger toward the system can unite everyone from dissident elites, to a disillusioned middle class, to a furious and excluded white working class. 

Yet it’s not just anger, but affection. Though most Britons will never take the wheel of a tractor, the romantic idea of farming as a symbol of national identity is extremely potent. In the same way, though many Trump voters will never be weekly church attendees, growing numbers identify as evangelical.

Because love of the past is so sneered at in progressive circles, the nostalgic element of populism is reduced to a mindless history-worship, or more sinisterly, to a form of white racial atavism. Nothing has been a greater blind spot for the Left, and so strong is the elite cultural cringe away from tradition, that this element of populism is also the least developed and explored intellectually, even among sympathetic academics and writers.

The reality is that romanticism about the past is often a spur to radical politics, as we see with the medievalism of Victorians like Ruskin and Morris, which went hand in hand with their Christian socialism. The memory of a far more recent era of greater growth, equality, and social unity is a radicalizing reality, and it is the center-Left that is increasingly the reactionary force seeking to suppress this powerful folk memory. The unexpected popularity of groups like farmers stems from their centrality to ideas of national belonging and reciprocity; a great collective desire for a timelessly stable way of life, rather than the endless churn and chaos of our globalized system.

Those who want to break the grip of a deadening globalist managerialism will need more than anger and romance, however. What is vitally needed now is creativity—new ways of living and revived traditions that can offer an alternative to a political economy that is failing everyone. At present, populism is largely at odds with the intellectual classes who live within a shrinking bubble of old ideas and assumptions. Yet both groups desperately need the other—academia is afflicted with all the same problems of stagnating pay and shrinking opportunity, alongside a spiritual crisis as to its meaning and purpose. It badly needs a scholar’s revolt to match that of the farmers. At the same time, populist movements largely lack radical systematic approaches to match their radical messaging and methods. It’s an improbable marriage, but no stranger than Britain’s Cotswolds revolution.

Image by Kevin Eaves and licensed via Adobe Stock.