There are several cats in our neighbourhood – Brian, Lionel, Constanzia and Guadeloupe – who do not answer to their names.
This may be just a cat thing but, in fairness, that is not what they’re called. They’re just the names we have given them because we do not know their real ones.
Most of them rub along nicely with our two cats, except for Brian who is a nasty piece of work. If ASBOs still existed, he ought to have one.
I hope the cats will forgive me for the observation that unlike farm animals, they perform no useful purpose other than to bring pleasure to the families they own.
Cats give neither milk nor wool, and they are unlikely to be turned into food for humans except in extreme and unlikely circumstances such as a nationwide famine.
Yet despite their pointlessness, cats, when they’re not either eating or sleeping, they pace around the place with a haughty sense of entitlement.
Which is rather how I feel about farmers and the protests which bunged up central London today.
I appreciate they provide us with food so we don’t have to consume our pets, but farms are like any other business.
Yet they already enjoy tax breaks not available elsewhere. Now they are up in arms because Chancellor Rachel Reeves wants some of them to pay 20 per cent inheritance tax, half that faced by everyone else.
Their argument is that they won’t be able to pass their farms onto future generations and, if you listen to Jeremy Clarkson, that will mark the end of civilisation as we know it.
“It’s the end,” he wailed outside Downing Street. “The end.” There is, admittedly, some discrepancy in the figures being used in this debate. The farmers say 70,000 will be affected which is true if you take every farm worth more than £1million till the very end of time.
The Treasury claims that of the 1,700 farms passed on each year, 1,200 of them will pay no inheritance tax leaving just 500 which will.
According to the Centre for Tax Analysis, Agriculture Relief, which gave an IHT exemption, was there to stop farms being broken up on the death of the owner.
Jeremy Clarkson pictured in London for the farmers’ protests PATheir report said: “Among estates that benefited from Agricultural Relief between 2018 and 2020, less than half (44 per cent) of individuals had received any trading income from agriculture at any point in the five years prior to death.”
That is because wealthy people were buying up land to use as tax havens. Just 25,000 landowners hold 80 per cent of England, and many of them don’t even live here.
It is this loophole Ms Reeves seeks to close.
Even Clarkson admits that not having to pay any IHT was a prime driver in buying a farm, though no one watching his hugely entertaining Clarkson’s Farm TV series could ever accuse him of not being a proper farmer.
If you think it was unnecessary for Ms Reeves to raise taxes by £40billion in her budget then you will be on the side of those hit by them.
But if you believe it was the right thing to do then that money has to come from somewhere. And not everyone can be a special case.
GP surgeries are private businesses now facing up to £40,000 in extra costs from the rise in employer National Insurance. Doctors save lives. Are they more deserving than farmers?
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Or pharmacies which dole out life-saving medicines, or hospices which give life-ending care. Are farmers more deserving than them?
Would you rather see Ms Reeves not give £11.8billion in compensation to victims of the infected blood scandal, or £1.8billion to sub postmasters wrongly accused of theft?
There are others appallingly treated unlikely to get anything. The LGBT armed services men and women jailed or dishonourably discharged before the gay ban in the military was lifted in 2000. They lost wages and pension rights as a result.
And the Waspi women who were denied pensions when the state retirement age was equalised without proper warning. They also have just cause for recompense but there is no sign they will ever get it.
Or perhaps Ms Reeves should just clobber elderly folk some more so she can give their pension money to the farmers.
Before the election, the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that whoever won it would have to raise taxes substantially.
Rishi Sunak must be grateful that he is no longer prime minister and dodged that bullet. He can now spend more time with his cats.
And if he hasn’t got any, I’m sure Brian, Lionel, Constanzia and Guadeloupe would appreciate some Californian sunshine.