Perhaps it was growing up in inner-city Bradford. But the idea of country-living always appealed. When my late-wife and I chose to abandon the mania of London, we lit upon a village called Over Wallop.
By name, straight out of PG Wodehouse. By nature, a place – like thousands of other English villages – where the soul of our nation resides.
This weekend the war memorial at Over Wallop will be encircled by villagers for the annual Service of Remembrance.
On the years I joined them, I was always awestruck by how such a small village could yield so many war dead.
On the commemorative stone cross on which they were listed, one surname was repeatedly engraved. It belonged to a family that could trace their history in the village back centuries.
When I lived there, they still had a farm opposite the war memorial. By modern standards, a tiny affair. Half a dozen cows in a ramshackle byre.
To supplement what must have been a meagre income, the farmer doubled-up as a milkman. I thought of him when the Chancellor made her demented assault on family farms.
Because the village is close to a train station with links to London, it is increasingly popular with commuters.
To a property developer with a hungry eye, the farm which lingers at its centre might well be worth more than £1m, making it newly liable to Inheritance Tax. But the family which own it, like so many of our farming families, are cash-poor.
Many of them will not survive this change. They will be forced to sell. And soon. For the typical British farmer is no spring chicken, with an average age of 59. Who will replace them?
Big business and overseas investors who do not pay IHT, but do have deep pockets. They crave the sugar-rush of quick profits, not the slow-growing long-term continuity of a family business.
As the late great conservative philosopher Roger Scruton said: “worthwhile institutions are hard to build, easy to destroy”. His words equally apply to Labour’s decision to apply VAT on school fees, which suggests this government has a mindset geared to the politics of envy and ideological vandalism.
None of which puts the food on the table. And that’s what we’re ultimately talking about here.
The amount of food we grow in the UK is already vulnerable to external shocks, as empty shelves during lockdown testified.
Our vulnerability was made worse by the last government offering cash incentives to encourage farmers to re-wild fields which once groaned with stomach-filling cereals. Take-up was so strong, the scheme had to be capped.
That was bad enough, but the erasure of family farms really will change the look of our countryside forever.
Many of those snapping-up farms at a cut price will ‘greenwash’. Planting trees – not food – to offset their own corporate carbon footprint.
I am a fan of solar farms, just not on prime agricultural land. And, if you live there, you will see something else change too.
Currently, if a villager has a gripe about access to footpaths or mud on the roads, they can buttonhole the farmer in the pub or, for that matter, after the Remembrance Sunday service.
You can’t do that if the owner is in Dubai or Dusseldorf.
LATEST OPINION FROM MEMBERSHIP:
- McDonald’s, garbage trucks and no Hollywood stars. Trump is one of the people, not the elite – Kevin Foster
- ‘The three extremely important takeaways for Britain after Donald Trump’s victory’
- It was the silent Trump supporters who won it for Donald – the majority may be silent but they’re powerful – Roger Gewolb
The distinction will be lost on many of my former MSM colleagues, who being based in London, are happy to believe Labour’s story that farmers are mainly Range Rover-driving plutocrats who can easily afford an inflated tax bill.
I have to tell you, the stereotype wears thin in these parts. I’ve spent the last year as a (very) mature student at the Royal Agricultural University. Visiting farms, it was obvious how many farmers were working around the clock just to stand still.
Labour says it had no choice. But it still chooses to fund a foreign aid budget of £11bn a year. By comparison, this new tax will raise a paltry £500m.
It’s no surprise to me that just one farming family in Over Wallop should have made so many sacrifices for this nation during wartime.
In my experience, these custodians of the countryside are the best of us. The work they do is not just poorly rewarded, but frequently lonely and dangerous too. Last year, 34 farm workers died on the land in Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Tragically, the precarious finances of family farms are not without human consequence. Many farmers feel a deep atavistic obligation to hand on what was passed on to them. The crushing reality that they won’t be able to, drives some to take their own lives.
I have an awful feeling that, more than any protest by tractor drivers in Parliament Square, more than any petition by the NFU, more than any tweet by Jeremy Clarkson, it will be stories of farmers driven to self-destruction that will make our urban government rethink a measure that so cruelly punishes our oldest and best rural families.