Never one to let a bandwagon pass by without strapping himself to the front of it, booze-sodden, self-promoting europhobe Nigel Farage donned his finest faux-countryside garb yesterday and showed up at the farmers’ protest in Westminster.
Dressed in a Barbour jacket, flat cap and a striking pair of banana yellow corduroys tucked into his noticeably mud-free wellies, Farage strode down Whitehall with an umbrella draped fancifully over one arm to begin what he has termed a “rural revolt” against Labour’s decision to change the inheritance tax rules on farms.
Farage told GB News, the extremist conspiracy-theory TV channel: “What this proposal does is to hit families running farms, families whose incomes are incredibly modest, far more modest than I think most people believe they’ve got an asset, yes, that’s worth a lot of money.”
What Farage didn’t have time to mention, either during his appearance at the protest or during his TV spot, was that one of the most painful blows delivered to UK farming in living memory was caused by, er, Brexit.
Yes, the policy on which Nigel’s political career is based – Britain’s departure from the EU – meant an end to the £2.4 billion of agricultural subsidies paid directly to Britain’s farmers every year by Brussels. That’s all gone, replaced by a UK-based “Sustainable Farming Incentive”, a scheme that pays most farmers a fraction of what they once received from the EU.
When quizzed about this, Farage argued that Brexit was “barely relevant” to the problems that farmers currently face. The word “barely” was interesting to hear. Is Nigel finally coming round to the possibility that Brexit might just have had some teensy-weensy downsides after all?
And while Farage wrestles to keep down the dawning realisation that his life’s work has in fact been a total disaster, we can only marvel at his boundless chutzpah. To be responsible for depriving British agriculture of so much cash and then to pose as the farmers’ friend is a move so dazzlingly hypocritical that only Farage could possibly make it.
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