Don’t mess with farmers, Rachel Reeves. You will find yourself in the mud

Honestly, Rachel Reeves should know better. Politicians who take the farmers almost always end up in chaos – so it proves with this Chancellor, who may pay an unpleasant price for his smell of the Budget.

Reeves is assessing how much manure the farming community is willing to consume with 20 percent of the income on family farms. Now there are movements to show him exactly where they draw the line – using human waste.

He says that the farmers are not satisfied with the small demonstrations, they are preparing to show that they are not happy by refusing to accept any human waste in their fields. Just imagine the headlines if they go ahead with their threatened “sewer strike”, and the impending environmental disaster of the water companies (whose reporting does not inspire confidence). they hunt to find anywhere to dump the goods. Talk about an order to hit the fan.

We all know what Reeves had in mind when he came up with this tax collector: that he could collect a few million from the mysterious Marquess. Just as the latter workers applauded plans to punish the owners of private jets, he knew they would relish the idea of ​​punishing the owners of large national estates.

What he has failed to appreciate is that the majority of those affected by his new tax will not be Viscounts or Earls – but tough people in boiler suits who work from dawn to dusk to keep the country fed. Their small family farms are the backbone of the rural economy: they are very valuable on paper, but generate little profit.

Thanks to Reeves, hundreds, if not thousands, of these great traditional businesses may now be broken. Now the shocking news has become a way to convince the Chancellor to change – or at least teach him a lesson.

Reeves only needs to look at the Netherlands to see what can happen when governments take over farmers. Faced with a similar threat when their government threatened to close their farms, Dutch livestock producers created a delicious hell.

In their strongest protest, they drove about 2000 tractors to The Hague, which caused the biggest traffic jam in the history of their country. Closing the highways from Amsterdam to Eindhoven, created more than a thousand kilometers of queues.

In addition, the Indian government was rocked by protests when it tried to change the way farmers were paid. During the outbreak, thousands of angry small farmers set up permanent encampments outside Delhi and organized wave after wave of violent restrictions. It is said that about 700 people lost their lives in the demonstrations. In the end, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was forced to resign, scrapping three hated new laws.

It seems that Reeves, who has no experience of rural life, underestimated the extent of his ideas in his plan to remove the reins of death for agricultural land and buildings. When he informed the farmers more than a year before the new policy was implemented, there is no doubt that he thought he was doing them a service.

He failed to consider how eager some old and sick farmers were to spare their heirs the burden – with dire consequences. Now, there is a dark discussion among farmers about possible suicide until the deadline of April 2026. It is said that an elderly father took care of his son – not with joke – that if he killed himself before the new tax came in, it would save the family farm, making it one productive day. his working life.

What a horrible thought. By nature and by nurture, the noble souls who work our land, often for precious little pay, are not abstract species. They are ready to show that they don’t need to search. Whether the speech is about sanitation strikes or suicide, it should not be taken as an exaggeration.