It was the Soviet Union that, in 1939, Churchill first described as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Today, bemused constituents in Brighton, Bristol and especially rural Waveney and Herefordshire could be forgiven for thinking similarly about the Green Party.

The countryside is essential to the environment. That is why the government ring-fences environmental policy with food and rural affairs. Most likely it is also why, during the last election, the Greens chose to direct much of their campaigning — including for its co-leader, Adrian Ramsay — at rural constituencies.

Superficially, their manifesto talked a good game. Linking farming with conservation, it pledged almost to triple funding for farmers looking to do more for nature. Then, when thousands of our members and supporters across the country lobbied candidates asking them to support our Rural Charter, one replied, “Over recent years I personally think that there has been more and more synergy between the views of the Countryside Alliance and the Green Party.” It was news to us, but willingness is ever welcome.

The first test of the Green Party’s Damascene conversion to the cause of rurality came with the Budget. Rachel Reeves infamously decided to restrict agricultural and business property reliefs in a way that, as the rural sector argues but the Treasury refuses to accept, will leave the next generation of family farmers facing a hefty inheritance tax bill at the outset. The party’s response, which its Food, Agriculture & Rural Welfare spokesperson (who does not sit in Parliament) took 18 days to issue, was a fudge and a fumble.

“It is right to clamp down on those who buy farmland to avoid tax and the Green Party strongly supports wealth taxes,” it declared. “But we also need the government to take action to ensure that hard working farmers can earn a decent income.”

Two sentences: two problems. First, business assets are not personal wealth. Nobody thinks that if the chairman of Coca Cola were to die in office, his heirs should be liable to pay inheritance tax on the firm’s market capitalisation of over $270 billion. The fact that family farm ownership is structured differently does not affect the point of principle. Second, no viable measures for increasing farmers’ income could raise them high enough to compensate for inter-generational tax. If the suggestion is that farmers should be paid enough to offset future inheritance tax liability from public funds, one wonders why the government shouldn’t instead just leave the reliefs as they were and save itself the trouble.

The party decided to support what it wrongly sees as a “wealth tax” over standing up for family farmers

The statement did not, come to that, directly address inheritance tax at all. So studiously did it avoid giving a direct answer on what Green Party policy on business and agricultural property reliefs actually is, had it not specified that the statement was a reaction to farmers’ protests, readers would have been left mystified as to what it was about.

Its policy must instead be inferred from the actions of its elected representatives. When the Conservatives brought an Opposition Day debate in the House of Commons to force a vote on inheritance tax, two Green Party MPs abstained, two backed the government by voting against condemning the changes, and none saw fit to contribute otherwise. The following day a similar motion was brought to the London Assembly, calling on the Mayor to lobby the government against the tax. Had the opposition parties united, the motion would have passed, but instead the Greens joined Labour to vote it down.

The party evidently decided to prioritise its ideological commitment to what it wrongly sees as a “wealth tax” over standing up for family farmers. This matters because its ecological objectives cannot be achieved without active, enthusiastic participation from the countryside. Farmers will need to be the ones delivering the environmental outcomes from agriculture that the Green Party claims to want. 

More bizarrely still, the party’s policy of seeking to end factory farming could have offered it a perfect rationale for opposing the Budget measures, since family farms are not usually large enough to operate at that scale. If, as the sector has warned, inheritance tax bills lead to land sales, a likely consequence is the consolidation of landholdings under the ownership of the very corporations that practise the intensive animal farming methods that the Greens think should end.

Other Green animal policies are equally self-defeating. The party calls for an end to badger culling regardless of progress in eradicating bovine TB, potentially devastating the welfare of cows. It wants to ban what it emotively terms “blood sports”, but cites only trail hunting which does not, by definition, involve the intentional pursuit of any animal. Perhaps it intends to follow the Welsh Government’s example in backing deer culling for purposes of population control, unless those doing the work have the temerity to enjoy it. It demands a new “Commission on Animal Protection”, presumably to sit alongside the existing Animal Welfare Committee and Animal Sentience Committee and issue frowning admonitions against even thinking of looking askance at a squirrel.

The overall impression is of an urban party in rural clothing: a party whose view of the countryside is of its own imagining. Unless the Green Party faces the realities of rural life and starts standing up for the people who live and work in rural communities, its support there could vanish into air as thin as its judgment.