Farmers Weakly

Farmers Weakly
There’s an old joke about a group of procrastinators on a demonstration march. The cry goes up:
“Whaddawe want?”
“Procrastination…”
“When do we want it?”
“Er….later?”

I was reminded of this as several thousand angry farmers descended on London last week, ostensibly to protest at the government’s change of policy on inheritance tax. Where previously, agricultural land was exempt from IHT, it now means some will have to pay it, albeit at a reduced rate. 

However, the principal reason that prompted farmers to start furiously turning their ploughshares  into proverbial spears soon became lost as their argument became a bit muddled.

Nobody from the farming lobby could really articulate the scale of the issue, and the narrative rapidly descended into a they-just-don’t-understand-us rant. 

It’s a bad day for protesters when a government’s position begins to sound almost reasonable, made only worse as everyday country folk discover the cost of a pint in Central London. 

The nation’s farmers and country dwellers have some unfortunate form when it comes to muddied thinking and public protest. In 2002, the Countryside Alliance March brought the largest ever peacetime gathering of people to the streets of London, their primary concern being the recent ban on foxhunting. 

Realising that placards demanding the right to continue chasing foxes to death or imposing industrial scale slaughter of gamebirds wouldn’t really be conducive to generating positive public opinion, the message was again diluted. “Leave us alone…” they implored. To largely disinterested politicians, a hostile media and a lot of utterly perplexed Londoners. 

Jeremy Clarkson didn’t help the farmers’ cause much. With no prior liaison with the National Farmers Union, who were quite sensibly trying to lobby the government through traditional channels, he was propelled by the crowd (and, by his own admission, a cocktail of strong painkillers) to stir things up a bit. Which would have been fine had he been on message. But what message? Neither side seemed to have credible numbers with which to win the debate.
Clarkson’s toe-curling interview with Victoria Derbyshire, in which he was caught out by his own forgetfulness of the actualité, was a bad move and a wasted opportunity.

All of which made the massing of pitchfork- wielding farmers march on Whitehall look a bit premature.

So, the farmers have made their way back to soggy fields and leaky wellies having achieved very little. In fact, they have damaged the reputation of the sector considerably as a result of not having a coordinated comms plan or a coherent set of messages. Many more people who probably didn’t know about the farmers’ IHT loophole now do, and don’t feel particularly disposed to sympathy.

At least protesting Welsh farmers had come up with “no farmers, no food” as a slogan.
The problem is that while the supermarket shelves remain well stocked, even that message rings a bit hollow.

So, farmers everywhere, (and there are a few who read this), the challenge for you is to come up with a really credible answer to the question, ‘whaddawe want?”