The story of the week has been about farmers and inheritance tax. But it is not the story many farmers and their supporters would have us believe.
We haven’t seen a battle of facts, because only one side has them. The other is left to fall back angrily on the ‘pity the poor farmers’ trope. They do have genuine grievances, but this isn’t one of them.
Reporting in the regional media has been disgraceful. BBC Look East, The Eastern Daily Press and the East Anglian Daily Times have all slavishly pretended support whilst carefully steering clear of any explanation of the cause. The media suck up to the farmers because they assume theirs is a protest that will win approval from rural readers and viewers.
The Liberal Democrats play the same role, but their interest of course is in the voters, and rural areas provide the party with rich harvests. But they understand the issues better, which means they are even more cynical. Their MPs in our region seem likeable, hard-working and dedicated. They want to get things done. So why does the party hitch itself to the selfish interests of Jeremy Clarkson, James Dyson and the rest of the millionaire tax avoiders?
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This issue has been exercising the Greens too, and in particular their joint leader Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley). He explained the party’s position on the farming inheritance tax quite clearly to the House of Commons’ own magazine, The House: “It’s right for Govt to close the loophole that allows very wealthy people to buy farmland to avoid tax. But it should distinguish between these tax avoiders & genuine family farms.”
Yet somehow (and to Mr Ramsay’s understandable exasperation), this position became reversed when it came to the hack writing the headline, which declared: “Greens join growing rebellion against Labour’s tax on farming”.
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It is axiomatic of today’s politics that Nigel Farage (Clacton), a man with nothing reputable to say, is invited onto every TV discussion programme and to every outraged demonstration in order not to say it. But the organisers of the farmer’s demonstration had second thoughts. Mr Farage has the habit of making off with every event to his own ends, so the invitation to address the multitude was withdrawn by whoever were the organisers.
They pulled the plug on his political machinations in order to protect their own. After all, Mr Farage might still be considered the high priest of Brexit, about which a gullible farming industry has decidedly had second thoughts. One or two among the crowd may even recall that, in order to sell Brexit to the public, Mr Farage was the champion of the idea that leaving the EU would allow in cheap imported food to undercut, er, the farmers.
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One who did address the farmers’ rally was Kemi Badenoch (NW Essex), whose opening approval ratings are worse than every recent Tory leader except Liz Truss. She spoke with all the sincerity of a singing telegram, but presumably with those ratings still in mind she was keen to be photographed with Jeremy Clarkson at the demonstration. It is a commentary on where she believes her support lies that she considered Bloaty McBloatface as somebody whose magic might rub off on her. Like Nigel Farage, Mr Clarkson has previous in making announcements he might have cause to regret. Readers may recall his declaration that demonstrators should be “taken out and executed in front of their families”.
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“It was a very threatening letter,” one Labour backbencher complained, at the missive from the party whips after some Labour MPs declined to back the government’s proposals for limiting the winter fuel payment to pensioners. “It was telling us there would be punishments,” another told PoliticsHome.
The size of Keir Starmer’s majority was the subject of much pondering during the election campaign in this diary, which also wrote about the whips’ attempts to discipline the party’s army of new MPs. Because large majorities become unwieldy. Many MPs find they have little to do in the Commons and so get up to mischief – thinking for themselves and that kind of dangerous how-d’you-do.
But that kind of tight discipline is asking for trouble. There are already angry complaints at how all but the privileged are often kept in the dark on government thinking, and also at a generally distant and arrogant attitude to those not in the inner circle. And all this is happening not towards the end of a lengthy and exhausting parliament, but after just five months.
Pecksniff foresees much greater trouble ahead, and the PM and his coterie will have brought it on themselves. Fortunately, the most pressing issue likely to bring about internecine warfare remains Brexit. Dear reader, let us raise our glasses to that day.
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Last week your diarist questioned why, during the debate on the hereditary peers bill, Labour voted down a Conservative amendment which would also have prevented bishops from voting in the Lords. Surely, one wondered, it wasn’t just because it was a Tory amendment?
The answer fortunately appears to be that this may not have been the reason. It is claimed there were constitutional complications about the measure not having been in the Labour manifesto and needing a certain level of scrutiny, and the prospect of the whole bill then being held up whilst the Commons and Lords played ping-pong over it for months.
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My dears, where do they find them. A man not even a household name around his own kitchen table makes a rare appearance in Pecksniff this week. Political twitchers are flooding the byways of Brentwood in the hope of catching a glimpse of the lesser (in fact almost never) spotted Alex Burghart.
“What is the government doing to bring down inflation?” he demanded of Sir Keir’s stand-in, Angela Rayner, at PMQs. There had been an announcement that inflation had increased to 2.3%. Ms Rayner, looking bewildered, gently reminded Mr Burghart that, when he was the minister for growth in the Truss government, inflation was at 11.1%…
Poor Mr Burghart seems one of those who life has never invited to its party, and here was his big chance. Dear reader, you may judge of Mr Burghart’s discomfort, and it would be unworthy of us to dwell on it.
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We mused last week on how uplifting it might be to be able to embrace the occasional MP for some triumph or other, and we might have just the ticket. Our first triumph out of the bran tub is Jack Abbott (Ipswich), who after only five months as the MP has got to grips with the cladding crisis which has made life so stressful for many hundreds of the town’s flat dwellers.
He says: “After my representations on behalf of residents, the minister responsible for building safety confirmed with me that the government would fund the remediation of the buildings’ external cladding.
“This week saw yet further, crucial, progress. I am pleased that further government funding has been secured to carry out additional works needed to make (the building) safe.”
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James McMurdock is the unexpected Reform MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock. He squeezed into the Commons by only 98 votes. He might not have quite made it had the good people of his constituency known a little more about him.
He had failed to disclose that he has a conviction for assaulting a former girlfriend, though Mr McMurdock claimed he had merely pushed her, and put it down to a “teenage indiscretion”. However, this week The Times revealed that it seems he has never quite become addicted to the truth. Official court papers disclose that he repeatedly kicked the young woman, and the term of imprisonment was given because of “the serious nature of the offence”. There are allegations that it took two security guards to pull him off.
Whatever the faults of the other political parties, at the faintest whiff of scandal, the culprit would have been thrown into a deep hole and covered with a tarpaulin. Lee Anderson is Reform’s chief whip, enforcing discipline. Only, two own the company party and can’t be bossed, which leaves him with Rupert Lowe (Gt Yarmouth) who is damned if he’ll be told what to do by anybody, and the boy McMurdock.
Not overstretched, then. No doubt we can expect swift action from Mr Anderson in the coming days.
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A report was published as we went to press last week into the purchase by the last government of a building at Bexhill which had been derelict for 12 years, as a new asylum centre. It cost £15.4 million and would need another £20 million spent on restoring it, since as well as other problems the land is contaminated, and the buildings are riddled with asbestos. It has been used formerly as an RAF station, a prison and a training centre for military personnel from United Arab Emirates – who made a profit on the deal of £9 million in only eight months. The report by the National Audit office bitterly criticises the deal, pointing out that the Home Office had warned the purchase broke Whitehall rules: the government ignored warnings from the Home office of “significant risks” in the deal.
The purchase was the brainchild of that great guardian of the public purse, beaten Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick, and his chum and Hertsmere’s finest, former deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden. Mr Dowden has a certain gothic resemblance to those creatures carved on the end of pews in medieval churches. He is an old trouper, however, and this latest embarrassment is unlikely to have any more effect on him than it would have on those gargoyles.
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After musing last week on the effects of absorbing all the world’s ills and how they magnify the already challenging trials of everyday life, the issue arose at the Muckrakers. One of the wise men, Aidan, introduced us to the useful concept in these matters of ‘resistentialism’, which he explained – admittedly drink had been taken – refers to the seemingly spiteful behaviour manifested by inanimate objects. To be a resistentialist, it appears, is largely a matter of sitting inside a wet sack, moaning.
Thanks to Celina Błędowska
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