Farmers aren’t miners

A parallel is being drawn between the Tories and the miners in the 1980s and Labour and the farmers today. On the left, there is an implied element of revenge: you screwed our people, so we’ll screw yours. It is true that the miners’ marches in London 40 years ago had much the same earthy atmosphere of ‘real people’ confronting authority as did the farmers’ rally this week. But in the end the comparison does not work. For the Conservatives, the miners themselves were not the enemy. The problem was the vast cost of uneconomic pits to the taxpayer and the declared determination of the NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, to bring down the government. Mrs Thatcher regarded the working miners, who refused to strike because Scargill would not allow them a strike ballot, as heroes. She even had secret contacts with them and entered into friendly correspondence with some of their wives who were being intimidated by the strikers. I doubt that Sir Keir Starmer is engaged in similar sympathetic correspondence with any farmers’ wives. Anyway, the analogy fails: there are no ‘scab’ farmers, because there are no striking ones. There never are. For farmers, the withdrawal of labour has never been an option, though cruel Sir Keir’s tax and regulatory assault on them might just change that. No doubt many individual Labour MPs have nothing against farmers, but there are two related strands in socialism which do. One is the old-fashioned class resentment which hates the private ownership of land. The other is modern eco-zealotry which seeks, in effect, to nationalise land to serve its purposes. Both should heed Kipling’s advice from the dying Norman baron to his heir: ‘When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own,/ And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing,” my son, leave the Saxon alone.’