Tens of thousands of British farmers, tractors and all, and their supporters have descended on London in protest against a harsh new law that could see family farms broken up and sold to pay death duties. The money raised will pay for Britain’s beloved NHS, the government has said.
The farmers have found powerful support in television superstar Jeremy Clarkson, whose show Clarkson’s Farm is by far the most popular thing on Amazon’s streaming platform, drawing in millions of viewers across the globe. Nigel Farage, leader of populist Reform UK, which won 15% of the vote in the recent general election, has also thrown his weight behind the protests.
Some are saying the protests could topple the government. Similar things were said about the farmer protests in France and the Gilets Jaunes movement, before the pandemic intervened to put a stop to them. At this stage, I’m not sure what will happen, but anger at the new law is very real and very widely felt, and the government would be foolish to underestimate it.
What is clear, though, is that we’re witnessing an important moment in the ongoing transformation of Britain—a deliberate transformation that is making Britons unhealthier, unhappier and, worst of all, less free.
Farmers, the people who produce Britain’s food and act as custodians of its famous landscapes, from the high-hedgerowed fields of the Westcountry to the windswept Yorkshire Moors, where the doomed love of Heathcliff and Cathy played out among the gorse and heather, are now being spoken of in blood-curdling language.
We’re told that farmers are “far right.” They’re lazy and privileged and spoilt. They’re oppressors. They’re going to get what they deserve.
This is what former Labour advisor John McTernan, bizarrely appropriating one of the Labour Party’s most hated enemies, Margaret Thatcher, had to say a few days ago.
“We can do to the farmers what Thatcher did to the miners,” McTernan told GB News. “It’s an industry we can do without.”
Others have tried to clothe the iron fist in at least a semblance of a velvet glove.
According to The Guardian’s Will Hutton, Britain’s farmers have “hoarded land for too long.” “Inheritance tax will bring new life to rural Britain,” he says. Hutton explains that one of the main reasons there is “so much fuss” about what’s being done to Britain’s farmers is that “rural Britain has never escaped the cultural trappings of feudalism.” The countryside is stuck in the deep past, you see, in an outdated mode of production that, like all outdated modes of production, should be stripped away, because it’s inefficient and, most of all, unfair. Far from destroying the countryside, redistributing the land will power growth and productivity and allow young farmers, pushed out of the market by “monopoly,” to buy their own land.
If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.
Britain is going “full Stalin,” Elon Musk wrote on Twitter. Musk is no fan of Keir Starmer and his government. There are reports of deep alarm in Westminster about Musk’s Tweets highlighting the ongoing clampdown on freedom of speech and the grooming gangs and general Orwellian atmosphere in this country. Threats against Musk and promises of fines led vice-president-elect JD Vance, during the election campaign, to suggest that a second Trump admin could withdraw support for NATO if European countries didn’t stop trying to censor and censure Musk.
The comparison with communism, with what happened in the Soviet Union, particularly the collectivisation of farming, which was responsible for the deaths of millions, if not tens of millions, is not an idle one. It’s easy to forget that Labour are and always have been a radical left-wing party in pursuit of economic and social revolution. Tony Blair did a good job of disguising this by apparently moving his rechristened New Labour towards the centre of the political scale, but he was responsible for changing Britain as radically as any out-and-out communist could have done. This was done mainly through the deliberate policy of mass immigration, which former advisor Andrew Neather said was done to “rub the right’s nose in diversity” and make it impossible for a truly conservative government ever to be elected again. On those terms, at least, it looks very much like Tony Blair succeeded.
Others have compared what is happening to Britain’s farmers with Zimbabwe, and the process of land expropriation that took place after Ian Smith’s transfer of white minority rule and the end of Rhodesia. Farms were taken from their white owners and given to Robert Mugabe’s black supporters, with dire consequences. Zimbabwe went from breadbasket to basket case in a matter of years.
It’s worth remembering, though, that Britain has its own native tradition of expropriation to draw on. Throughout the twentieth century, taxation was used for the purposes of class warfare, to strike directly at the British left’s most hated enemy: the landed aristocracy. Death duties were used to break up the large estates after World War I had killed off an entire generation of male heirs, and change British society in the most fundamental way since the Normans did away with the native Anglo-Saxon earls and thegns.
In recent decades there’s also been a broader war with the countryside, as Britain’s smug metropolitan elite have sought, with enormous condescension, to destroy what is distinctive about rural as opposed to city life. One of the first targets of the New Labour government was fox hunting, the traditional pastime of the aristocracy, but rural pursuits have suffered more broadly. New drink-driving laws helped to squeeze the life out of country pubs that depend on passing trade to stay afloat.
These are good precedents, all of which can helps us, to some extent, to understand the motivations and the stakes involved. But what’s actually happening here, beyond the expropriation, is different. Britain’s family farms will not be broken up and the land given to collective farms for workers or redistributed on racial lines. Britain will not become a new Russia or Zimbabwe. And Will Hutton’s absurd suggestion that young farmers will buy up the newly released land is just that—absurd.
Instead, the land will be gobbled up by asset funds and mega corporations. This is already happening across the Western world, from the US to Ukraine, even in the midst of its terrible, bloody war with Russia, where American companies like BlackRock and JP Morgan Chase look set to benefit from a massive “reconstruction fund” of billions of dollars.
Growing corporate control of the food supply has been one of the defining features of the last hundred years or more. It has been a disaster for human health since the very beginning, as the great pioneering dentist and anthropologist Weston A. Price showed way back in the 1930s, in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. The very first processed foods—refined wheat-goods, tinned fruit and so on—brought with them profound malnutrition and worrying physical changes as they displaced traditional whole-food diets. Whether Price was in America or Europe or South Sudan or the South Pacific, if the people cleaved to the diets of their ancestors, and in particular diets rich in nutrient-dense animal foods like organ meat, dairy products and shellfish, they remained healthy. But once they abandoned these foods and started eating foods made in factories using novel industrial processes, their health declined tremendously.
In the decades since, as corporate control over the food supply has grown, more and more of our diets have come to consist of processed and ultra-processed foods, the latter a type of product some food scientists believe shouldn’t even be considered food at all, but a “food-like substance.” The average toddler in the UK will now derive around two-thirds of its daily calories from this trash.
It’s not a wonder our health is worse than it’s ever been. Chronic disease is at an all-time high. Study after study has linked the consumption of corporate-produced processed food to obesity, diabetes, cancer and even neurological and behavioural diseases like Alzheimer’s and autism. This is why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made processed food one of the main targets of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.
Now, we’re told, we need further corporate control of the food supply to ensure the planet doesn’t end up boiling because of global warming. The plan for a “plant-based future,” in which agricultural emissions are drastically slashed by a transition to plant-based diets and the elimination of animal farming, is explicitly predicated on greater centralisation and control of agricultural land by corporations. The UN says it, the World Economic Forum says it—pretty much any organisation that is invested in “saving the planet” from climate change will say it too. A good starting point, if you want to know more, is the EAT-Lancet “Planetary Health Diet,” which I made the subject of my last book, The Eggs Benedict Option.
It’s not a surprise, then, that this new measure was announced at the same time as Keir Starmer pledged to reduce Britain’s emissions by 80% by 2035. The two policies go hand in hand.
If the plan to impose these new death duties goes ahead and corporations swoop in, don’t be surprised when the land is converted to use for lucrative solar farms or put over to GMO soy and grain monoculture and all of a sudden the price of meat and dairy is extortionate and people can’t afford to eat them as regularly as they used to or would like to.
I’ve long maintained that, in the push for a “plant-based future,” there will be no ban on red meat and dairy products. That would be too much. Instead, we’ll simply find it harder and harder to buy the products we like, because of inflation, artificial scarcity, and maybe carbon taxes imposed on the most “polluting” foods like red meat and milk. Commentators have already “said the quiet part out loud,” as in the summer of 2022, when a New York Times opinion piece called for the weaponisation of the pandemic’s economic turmoil to wean people off meat for good and “save the planet.”
As far as I’m concerned, this is about forcing behavioural change, about changing ownership of the food supply in order to change the relation of ordinary people to the food they eat. In that sense, it’s part and parcel with mass immigration and all the other social engineering the people of Britain have been subject to for the last 30 years. But don’t expect it to stop at Britain. If anything, Britain is just a test case.
You have been warned.