The pundits' attacks on farmers would make Alan Partridge blush

In the weeks since Rachel Reeves’s Budget and its shock attack on agricultural property relief, we’ve seen various armchair pundits pontificate on farmers’ lives – a source of mounting exasperation for farmers themselves.

The peak of pundit-on-ploughman contempt came, unsurprisingly, from LBC’s James O’Brien

First, there have been the panicky announcements from the government – that the threshold for agricultural tax relief is £1 million, or that no, actually, it’s £3 million if you’re under 5’8” and are married to a woman called Susan or…“Ooh, look over there! A bird!”’

We’ve had Owen Jones on Jeremy Vine declare that farmers were overreacting due to ‘inflammatory’ rhetoric from the media, that ‘a very small proportion of farmers overall’ would have to pay the tax (the NFU disagrees) and shifting the terrain to extreme cases of landowning like the Duke of Marlborough and Sir James Dyson. LBC’s Matthew Wright suggested that, as a majority of farmers had voted for Brexit, it was only right they should take the financial hit themselves; while on Sky News Richard