The Government hasn’t got a clue about agriculture in this country - Andrew Vine

Since last year’s show, as usual a spectacular success, the future of thousands of farms and the livelihoods dependent upon them have been thrown into doubt by the badly thought-out changes to inheritance tax that will drive families who have worked the land for generations out of business.

The farmers who gathered at the showground 12 months ago could hardly have imagined that a few weeks afterwards a Labour Party which before the election had solemnly promised to support them would, once in office, sound the death-knell for family farms.

How profoundly damaging this disastrously misguided policy to tax farmers into bankruptcy is likely to prove for Yorkshire was underlined last week when a study found that it could strip more than £1bn from our economy and destroy 16,500 jobs in the region among 200,000 nationwide.

The knock-on effects for the wider rural community can only be guessed at, yet in an act of obstinacy for its own sake, the government has insisted there will be no going back on the tax changes, even though its own figures show the yield from them will be negligible.

Let’s hope that awareness of the threat to farming spreads among visitors to the show next week, because the public ought to be angry at what the government is doing and the vacuum of knowledge behind it.

If a minister turns up, he or she deserves to have their ear bent, because no government of the past quarter-century has posed such a threat to agriculture.

It is jeopardising our countryside and undermining the security of our food supply, potentially leaving Britain reliant on imports and facing rising prices.

The government’s stubbornness about the farm tax feels like the position taken by an administration that knows it has got something very badly wrong, but doesn’t know how to back down without losing face.

But the pressure on it to reverse the changes will not diminish. Two days before the impact on jobs was revealed, a group of farmers served notice on the government that they are seeking a judicial review of the way the tax was introduced, without proper consultation of the agricultural sector.

This is yet another headache for ministers, and exposes still further their lack of understanding about farming.

It is simply irresponsible to announce a policy without first considering its impact and consulting those affected. This would be like the government making decisions on the future of the steel industry without knowing anything about the costs involved or the challenges of the international market.

Yet this is exactly what it has done with farming. Decisions have been taken by people who, to put it bluntly, haven’t a clue about the industry even as they influence its fate.

Further evidence of that came last week with the threatened closure of the UK’s biggest bioethanol plant, Vivergo, in Hull, with the potential loss of 150 staff and a further 4,000 jobs in its supply chain, among them farmers who grow the wheat used to make the fuel.

If that happens, all those people will be collateral damage of the government’s ignorance, the depth of which beggars belief.

It blithely lifted tariffs on ethanol from the United States as part of a wider trade agreement, apparently without realising this would doom Britain’s two producers, Vivergo and a plant on Teesside.

I can’t recall another government in my lifetime which effectively destroyed a business by accident because it had little or no knowledge of its workings and failed to appreciate the consequences of a decision. This speaks of an alarming lack of thought, research and inquisitiveness on the part of ministers.

Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues can traipse around as many factories as they like in high-vis jackets and hard hats to demonstrate their commitment to industry, but their actions on farming and ethanol – which is closely bound up with agriculture – demonstrate dangerous gaps in their knowledge and that of advisors.