Fleurpepper
On the hypocrisy of Clarkson. Borrowed from the 'I see you' site
I see you, Jeremy Clarkson.
This is nice, isn’t it? I always knew you’d come around to the power of a peaceful protest eventually. People always do, once the oppressive government machine finally turns its covetous eye on them. First they spent fourteen years coming for the working poor, the nurses, the teachers, the chronically ill, and the disabled benefits claimants. And you said very little, beyond the occasional sarcastic comment about the welfare state, because you were too busy earning obscene amounts of money for filming the Grand Tour.
Then they came for a comparatively small portion of your multi-million pound estate, and all of a sudden you were animated enough to jump straight onto a tractor and trundle down to Whitehall. Still, it’s great to see you finally embracing the true spirit of our democracy. The man who so vocally despises Just Stop Oil for being so melodramatic over a trivial little issue like the entire planet burning, now a Damascene convert to the power of taking to the streets.
And all it took was a Labour government making some vague moves towards taxing the very wealthiest. Quite the coincidence, isn’t it? Still, the very suggestion that there’s anything self-serving about your appearance at these protests is deeply offensive. How dare Victoria Derbyshire, with her typical woke BBC attitude and leftwing agenda, twist the truth by confronting you with your own words?
You’re a professional s*it-talker, Jeremy Clarkson. You can’t be held accountable for the amount of chaff you’ve thrown out in years gone by, even if said chaff included a direct confession that your entire purchase of all that farmland was one giant tax dodge. It’s sixth form politics, expecting public figures to be held accountable for the things they’ve literally said out loud and then had recorded in various newspaper columns. Accurate fact checks have a liberal bias and it’s most unreasonable.
The irony - that the grand old contrarian who has spent so many years railing against emotive and virtue signalling protest movements that strip all complexity and nuance out of a debate - should be reduced to this. Pulling figures out of thin air as he tries to publicly discredit his old employer for having the nerve to quote his own words back to him. Mugging to a crowd and claiming ’96% of them’ are going to be affected by these changes. They’re just not, and it’s patently absurd to claim otherwise.
There may well be a disconnect between the government’s estimates and the true reality on the ground for the number of farmers who will be affected by these changes. That’s worth debating and looking at more closely to ensure the changes have been properly thought through. But how, exactly, is your deliberately hyperbolic overestimate any more helpful to the debate than any potential miscalculation on Labour’s part? It’s inflammatory and performative nonsense, obfuscating the facts behind a cloud of angry Daily Express headlines.
True, a good few farmers on the cusp of this new IHT threshold are going to have do some tedious financial planning to ensure they’re using as many of the numerous loopholes and exemptions as possible. It’s a layer of extra bureaucracy they could probably do without, but let’s be realistic here. Most of them won’t be paying anything on estates worth closer to 1.5 million, and the ones sensible enough to fork over a few quid to a competent accountant closer to three.
Those are not insignificant sums of money, and nobody else looking to pass on that much gets anywhere near their level of discounts and exemptions. Do farmers deserve more support, in the face of their EU subsidies melting away and the increasingly predatory practices of the supermarket monopolies? Absolutely. But they are absolutely not supported by continuing with a broken inheritance tax system that incentivises super-rich landowners to hoard and bank vast swathes of agricultural land.
Removing those incentives has to happen, ironically enough to drive down the overly inflated value of workable land and make farming more affordable for people genuinely putting the hours in. If it doesn’t, every field will end up getting hoovered up by some Dyson or viscount or Nigel Farage, who as far as I can see farms nothing but online outrage. That outcome is no more desirable than the mass corporatisation of British farming that these protests are warning about.
Unless, of course, incredibly wealthy landowners like you don’t actually want to see the land value of their estates come down.
*That couldn’t be it, could it?*
Oh, how |I agree with this post. I get truly irritated when anti-Labour posters lump the 'poor farmers' and pensioners losing their WFA together.
In recent years, I have spoken too two local farmers who own the bulk of the land around here. The first, a staunch Brexit supporter, was boasting that his biggest earner was the car boot sales. The second, I initially felt a little sorry for as he was telling me about his wife having to take second job to make ends meet. The 'ends' were school fees for the local independent school.
I know these are not typical of all farmers, but my experience of the two people who own all farming land around here.
