We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land.
But then it’s confiscated by Rachel Reeves’s hand.

The farmers were furious. Well, farmers are always furious. It’s a life that combines working in freezing rain with handling impenetrable paperwork and following arbitrary rules set by distant bureaucrats. If you did it, you’d want to shoot something on the weekends, too.

The specific cause of Britian’s rural revolt on Monday was last week’s Budget, which will mean farms are subject to inheritance tax for the first time since 1992. This has been accompanied by a lot of commentary, some of it bonkers — this is not, in fact, what the Communists did — and some of it possibly complacent: social media is full of tax lawyers assuring farmers that their land isn’t worth what they think it is. It is not clear that these lawyers will be available to explain this point to the taxman when it matters. 

Kemi Badenoch was still assembling her crack team of people who can face being on the Conservative frontbench, so opposition to the move was led in Parliament by the Liberal Democrats, who know a wedge issue when they see one. Alistair Carmichael, chair of the Environment Committee, had an urgent question on the matter for the Secretary of State, Steve Reed.

But of Reed there was no sign. Perhaps he was stuck behind a tractor in his constituency, the rural idyll of Streatham and Croydon North. One hears that sheep are always getting out and blocking the access to the leisure centre. 

In his place he sent the Farming Minister, Daniel Zeichner, who represents the no-less-rural-than-Croydon city of Cambridge. Offering silent support were his fellow departmental ministers Mary Creagh (Coventry), Emma Hardy (Hull West) and Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead) — she at least has agricultural constituents, if you count the Kentish Town City Farm.

The four of them, so bravely led by the absent Reed — probably out making a final bid to get the winter wheat sown on Streatham Common before the weather turns — faced full opposition benches: the few Tory MPs left after the July wipeout almost all represent rural seats. Had their Brexit deal not been such a triumph for Britain’s farmers, there might be more of them.  

Zeichner’s defence was in three parts: the last government left an awful mess, fixing it had to be paid for somehow, and anyway, hardly anyone would be affected by this. Small farms would be fine, he said: “The vast majority of farmers will not be affected. They’ll be able to pass the family farm down to their children, just as previous generations have always done.” 

Carmichael was scathing in reply. “The government has seemingly failed to grasp that family farms are not just small farms,” he said. Although it’s possible that they soon will be. 

Zeichner tried his best to calm things down. He was a slightly sad figure

If the Labour frontbench is short of MPs who own wellie boots, the election swept a few onto its backbenches. Mostly they had been equipped with supportive questions: will the minister tell me why the Budget is actually great for my farmers? But Tonia Antoniazzi, representing Gower, was a little spikier. Ministers, she said, “need to see what it’s like on the ground”. In Wales, she went on, “there’s a completely different landscape”. More mountains, for a start. 

Zeichner tried his best to calm things down. He was a slightly sad figure. “The entire inheritance tax system is complicated,” he complained. “I’ve read a lot over the weekend.” 

The entire tone of the debate seemed to upset him: “I would just urge people to be temperate in their language on these issues, because people are very, very stressed and anxious and worried.” At this, the opposition benches erupted. There was a reason their constituents were anxious. “My task,” Zeichner pleaded to be heard, “my task, my task, my task…” — finally the noise abated — “is to be calm, sensible, reassuring to them.” He is the Valium of politics: a farmer’s little helper.

If only farmers would look at the details, he said, they would be reassured. The possibility that they might have a pretty good ideas of the numbers they live by didn’t seem to have occurred to him.

Not that they all need calming down. Indeed, Zeichner told a sceptical chamber, the last farmer he’d spoken to “congratulated me on what we were doing”. You wouldn’t know him, though. He farms in a different constituency. 

The former Treasury minister John Glen had a warning. “I spent most of the last six years looking at Treasury figures, and I have a great deal of sympathy,” he began. “I fear he is a victim of a hit and run exercise by the Treasury.” There is a great deal of doubt about the numbers the government has released in support of the tax change, and Zeichner didn’t seem to have interrogated them hard. It’ll probably be fine. No one has ever heard of Treasury officials getting one over on a new government with an assurance that everything will be fine that turns out not to be completely reliable.