Alongside Homer, the greatest poet of pre-classical Greece was Hesiod, whose works were essential sources of wisdom for many centuries. Whilst Theogony dealt with the Gods in the Heavens, Works and Days was rooted down here, both on Earth and in the earth. 

This epic poem sees Hesiod inheriting a farm, alongside his brother Perses. His brother squanders his wealth, however, and then tries to take Hesiod’s land, bribing the judges to rule in his favour. Rather than again squandering this money, Hesiod argues that teaching his brother the values of hard work and how to run a farm would be more profitable in the long run.

I thought a little about this ancient tale as I shivered in the rain on Whitehall earlier. I was surrounded by much better men than me; farmers and their children who had taken a rare day off work, and travelled to the capital to protest Labour’s proposed changes to inheritance tax on farmland. 

The palpable sense of unfairness grew as moving speeches rang out

Rarely has a contrast been so stark between these ruddy-cheeked farmers in their various tweeds and wellies (alongside fake country boys like me in our suspiciously newer and cleaner Barbours and Schoffels) with the pale bureaucrats who are being commanded by their socialist political leaders to destroy the family farm forever. 

The palpable sense of unfairness grew as moving speeches rang out to the estimated 20,000 protesters, with tales of farmers who will be unable to pass their farms on to their children, ending upwards of six generations of farming on the same lands across the country. 

What is the public Labour argument? They say that these moves will only affect the very wealthiest and that the rural communities have just got their sums wrong. The Countryside Alliance, National Farmers Union, Conservative Rural Forum and all the others have just misunderstood, and it will all be fine. Jeremy Clarkson, Britain’s most popular farmer, asked those in attendance to raise their hands if they thought the changes would affect them. Almost every hand was raised.

The response to this from Labour outriders has been to laugh at Jeremy Clarkson and Sir James Dyson as unsuitable tribunes given their wealth and fame. If only Clarkson had taken the advice of Henry Hill, and made a hugely successful TV series about farming, the whole moral of which was about coming to appreciate what life was like for real farmers…

Besides, the quiet respectfulness with which Clarkson was listened to suggested that the farmers are very happy with having him as their spokesman. In fact, the general behaviour exhibited was remarkably unlike the anti-Israel marches we see these days. A minute’s silence for those who grew food during the world wars, and private moments of remembrance of the Glorious Dead at the Cenotaph were a world away from other protests. Charlie Gilmour swinging from a Cenotaph flag was pretty bad, though at least he did some time in prison; Black Lives Matter’s Astrophel Sang got off with a conditional discharge for trying to set fire to one of them.

Yes, there were a few slightly eccentric figures, one of whom started telling me, unprompted, that the Government used cloud-seeding to cause the rain and cold that afflicted the march, and that this was linked to the World Economic Forum. This I do not believe.

But then he said that it was about the Government’s attempts to exert greater control by controlling land and food resources. This, sadly, seems like a credible concern, insofar as the most logical reason why a Labour government is pushing a policy that will destroy family farms is that they want to destroy family farms. The purpose of a system is what it does, as The Critic’s own Sam Bidwell is fond of reminding me.

The time is coming when even the most sympathetic ears to Labour’s lines will have to admit that the purpose of this farmer tax — alongside the private school attack and the all the many moves to force the wealthy to leave the UK — is to create the poorer and weaker society that is copacetic to the socialist worldview. The numbers don’t need to add up in many cases, they just need to be “defensible” enough for the legislation to pass and the damaging effects to take hold. Once they have done so, the damage will be done and like so many things, will be much harder to recreate than to destroy.

Our rural communities are to be sacrificed on the altar

Fewer pesky rich people will make it easier to hurt business, and fewer children in private schools mean fewer avoiding the indoctrination that is being planned in the state education sector. As far as agriculture goes, once these farms are bust, they can be sold off to Chinese corporations and used for solar panels or else sequestered as carbon stores against which to write off the carbon emissions of large pension funds. And it will help make Britain more dependent on food from the continent, specifically those inside the European Union.

Our rural communities are to be sacrificed on the altar of undoing Brexit and appeasing Ed Miliband’s bizarre net zero targets. It’s no wonder so many feel so aggrieved. 

The farmer tax will raise about £560 million according to the budget. The Government’s foreign aid budget, meanwhile, is £13.7 billion this year. So, by reducing that by about 4.09 per cent, we could scrap the hike. Alternatively, we know that £560 million is about a day’s worth of spending on the NHS. By cancelling the next leap year, we would make the necessary savings. 

But in all seriousness, these comparisons show just how small a saving it would be for Labour even in the best-case scenario. Much like the winter fuel payment “saving”, private school VAT and other punitive measures, it makes more sense to see this as class warfare perpetrated on the British people by its own Government. 

Hesiod warned he who does harm to another harms himself, and the evil plan is most harmful to the planner. I hope for all our sakes this is a truth borne out against Labour for their wickedness.