Letters: Labour’s attack on farmers

Losing the plot

Sir: Your leading article ‘Blight on the land’ (23 November) is right to call out the hypocrisy and vindictiveness of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Agricultural Property Relief cuts. Sadly, this is just one part of the Labour government’s multi-pronged attack on farmers, in sharp contrast to the promises they made before the general election. The 7 per cent rise in the minimum wage and the 9 per cent jump in employers’ national insurance contributions will hit all businesses, but given the 56 per cent slump in farm incomes over the past 12 months, farming is one of the sectors least able to cover such increases.

The government also makes much play of the fact it is putting £5 billion into the agricultural budget over the next two years. It fails to point out that, annually, this is pretty much the same as has been spent since 2013, during which time inflation has eroded 40 per cent off its spending value. Then, of course, there is the mean-spirited hike in taxes on double-cab pick-up trucks.

But it is the under-publicised yet savage cut in direct subsidies to English farmers contained in Reeves’s Budget that really hurts. These will be chopped by 76 per cent next year, yet the many millions of pounds that have already been recouped are still not finding their way back to farmers through environmental schemes.

Even more galling is the fact that no cuts have yet been applied in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, putting English farmers at a competitive disadvantage in their own market. No wonder they are angry.

Philip Clarke

News and opinion editor, Farmers Weekly