Family farm tax protestors should be proud of standing up for their communities - Sarah Todd

For example, plenty joined together to show their support for British farming at a gathering in Thirsk Market Place. Many others were held at livestock markets and suchlike the length and breadth of the country.

The young farmers’ club movement helped to spread one teenager’s terrific idea of asking people to go to work, school or whatever they were doing yesterday in their wellington boots, to show support for farmers.

While Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves’s recent budget raid on family farms has been the final straw for so many it has been, in this correspondent’s mind, simply another example of rural people getting the mucky end of the stick. It sometimes feels like genuine country folk have been made to feel like outsiders in their native habitat. What they can farm, where they can live, who they can leave their land to…

Increasingly, family farmers are a rare species. So often there is a gaping chasm between genuine grass roots country people and the world around them. Does it matter? Probably not, but the needs and way of life of farming and other rural residents shouldn’t be ridden roughshod over. They are a minority; an ethnic group whose way of life is under threat.

There is no point chewing the cud over it all again, but there is an observation that this columnist will unapologetically make. There seems to be a number of Labour MPs who have a massive chip on their shoulder about anybody who owns anything - be it property, a business or land. Or pensioners who have worked hard and are comfortably off.

It's been too easy recently to get all hot under the collar, so while mentioning the older generation it’s timely to highlight an article about flamboyant television designer Laurance Llewelyn-Bowen that raised a smile.

He is collaborating with a retirement living provider and will be bringing his own special touch to some of their properties. Yes, it’s all good public relations for the development company, but he speaks a lot of truth in an interview in the current edition of Country Life magazine. In it, he points out that other cultures celebrate the elderly and questions the way we consign them to a life of beigeness. His quotes are a little ruder, but absolutely spot on.

There is a growing feeling, not least with the forthcoming bill to legalise assisted dying, that older people should be swept under the carpet. Maybe they could go on the same scrap/muck heap as farmers?

So interesting, the other day, to be out for something to eat and to notice the couples dining around us. Of course, half of them were busy cooing over dogs sweltering inside in doggy designer jackets and neckerchiefs, but the others were mostly just sitting in silence staring at their mobile phones. It made The Husband and this dining companion think we weren’t doing too badly on the marital front. Looking around, the only others passing the time of day were our age or older. Having a bit of a chat with the waitress, talking to the lad behind the bar or turning around and petting the odd pampered pooch while keeping conversation going around the table.

Returning home we finished watching the new television adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper’s novel Rivals. Yes, there were moments that it would have been cringeworthy to have been watching with an elderly relative (however brightly decorated their room). What was so refreshing, with it being set in the 1980s, was to remember a time when people said exactly what they thought. They weren’t namby-pambying around trying to make odd or stupid things seem normal.

Thinking aloud, the farmers will be so grateful they have their new hero Jeremy Clarkson, but the icing on the cake would surely have been Dame Jilly’s Rupert Campbell-Black turning out yesterday.

What hell he would have given the former Labour special adviser John McTernan who declared farming is an industry “we could do without.” Then, in this reporter’s imagination, all back to the fictional county of Rutshire to celebrate…

To all country people, congratulations for staying true to your roots. Future generations will thank you.