France’s farmers’ revolt isn’t all it seems

The toll station on the A9 motorway near the French-Spanish border is closed with cones and guarded by the local gendarmes. A few dozen trucks are parked on the grass verges, waiting for the farmers’ barricades to open. The farmers themselves have gone, heading north to barricade Montpellier. The autoroute is utterly, weirdly silent. A thundering corridor of commerce completely closed.

The truckers I talk to like that I’m British, congratulating me on Brexit as if I was personally responsible. They uniformly support the farmers although it is their livelihood that is being disrupted. Why? It is long past the time that credulous French people should support petulant farmer ‘unions’ demanding ever more enormous handouts.

The peasants’ revolt now laying siege to Paris isn’t all it seems. Those guys with the big John Deere engines are not peasants. They are industrial-scale farmers of subsidies who masquerade as horny-handed sons of toil. Their