No wonder the farmers who voted for Brexit are furious

If you want to make it onto the news, publicise your cause, right a wrong, protest against an injustice, support the hard done-by and protect your interests… you had better get a tractor.

You could organise a million people to peacefully walk through the streets of your capital city but you’ll be lucky to get it on the TV or mentioned in the papers. If Just Stop Oil drove slowly around central London the law would have been changed by now.

But drive your tractor slowly round Parliament Square with a few like-minded farming neighbours and your cause will be common knowledge by the end of the day.

Of course we shouldn’t begrudge the farming sector their natural advantage; they have been stitched up and they have learnt from their continental colleagues that tractors work.

British farmers were, you will doubtless remember, promised the earth if they voted for Brexit. Many did, although perhaps not as many as you might think – one study a few years back said the farming vote was 50% Leave, 45% Remain and 5% didn’t vote. Anecdotal evidence suggests the Leave vote may have been stronger, but it was certainly not the Leave landslide that you might imagine.

Perhaps this was because the NFU tried to warn them that cakeism was impossible and that the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy was not only generous but also guaranteed the highest standards and therefore seamless access to the whole of the European continent for their products.

But most farmers believed the Brexiteers when they told them they could have all that and more taxpayer-funded subsidies too, with less red tape as the icing on the cake. It was all lies and now the farmers are finding that out to their cost.

The government has replaced the CAP with a less generous system that concentrates on rewarding environmental improvements, but which many farmers think is forcing them to grow less and is paying them less too. Red tape is as bad if not worse than under the CAP and trade deals are rubbing salt in the wounds.

The Tory government, normally the farmer’s friend, has negotiated deals which allow a flood of cheaper food to enter the country. It is food that is not up to UK standards and which UK farmers cannot possibly compete against. Moreover, EU food has been pouring into the country unchecked, while British exports now have to pass EU tests to reach the market and are suffering as a result.

Now the UK is finally going to start testing EU imports, but that will also hit farmers importing seeds, plants and other products. And all the while the UK’s supermarkets have been squeezing every penny they can out of farmers, just as fuel and fertiliser costs have soared.

This is only going to get worse as food production is the largest part of the manufacturing sector and a huge British export success. But in future, as UK standards drift away from EU ones, they will find it increasingly difficult to prove that their products pass rigorous EU tests, rules and regulations.

If UK food producers use New Zealand or Australian products, let alone American chlorine-washed chicken or hormone-boosted beef, they will not be allowed to sell in the rest of Europe. In fact, they will have to actively prove that they don’t use any of those ingredients.

It all adds up to a tsunami of problems for the farming sector, and now the farmers have had enough.

But as for the government, what can it do? It promised cheaper food, better trade deals and more subsidies for the agricultural sector. We got the complete opposite.

It cannot back down now, it has to double down with the lies and the propaganda, claiming that it “has the farming industries’ back”.

The trouble is the victims of this con will not be so easily misled this time. Many farmers made themselves useful idiots and were used. Now they feel betrayed. They are suffering, and they are angry.

And remember, they have tractors.

You can read more from Jonty on Substack at Jonty’s Jottings