The Labour Government continues to take the countryside for a ride - Sarah Todd

In fact, it would have been a massive shop as it was in one of those bread-and-butter stores with German ancestry where a trolley load can cost less than a basket elsewhere.

The cupboards are always bare after the annual pilgrimage to the Harrogate showground and although there would be warning signs somewhere your correspondent never noticed them.

There is always somebody chatted to, along with waiting to go through the checkout. Don’t others spend time feeling the freshness of the fruit and vegetables, rooting about for the best sell by dates? Or reading the label on the back of a couple of bottles of wine, to compare?

While this supermarket’s value for money probably can’t be bettered, certainly not in our local market town, this shopper will never cross the threshold again.

Perhaps moaning about private parking charges is a little parochial for such an esteemed publication (maybe it’s time to become one of those angry people who writes to the local newspaper?) but sat stewing these sneaky fines - made while people are spending money and supporting jobs - seem somehow symbolic of rip-off Britain.

Busy working and living in a rural area, the luxury of popping to the shops for a few groceries every day isn’t possible. After all, we can’t all be part of our Prime Minister’s metropolitan elite set with a Waitrose or scrummy independent delicatessen on every street corner. It would be interesting to complete a survey, but something makes me imagine those who are regularly picking up such fines will be up from the countryside doing a shop to last a couple of weeks. Not just at supermarkets, but in town centres themselves, where so many traditional parking places have now been blighted by these dishonourable discharges.

Yes, life in 2025 feels like being on a supermarket-style conveyor belt of putting up and shutting up.

Perhaps, thinking aloud, this bad mood started the week before when photographs were splashed all over the news about new mattresses being hauled into a four-star hotel in London to be used by asylum seekers. Talking earlier about the Great Yorkshire Show, our mattress was bought there - after a few drinks and a lot of giggles trying it - from a West Riding firm that had taken a stand over 20 years ago. Replacing it keeps falling to the bottom of the priority list. As the snorer alongside says, it still does the job.

The thought of our ever-increasing taxes being used for such luxuries is enough to make even the soundest sleeper toss and turn. Might as well roll out the red carpet while they’re on.

Turning to the farming press, where this reporter writes most regularly, there is even less cheery news.

For example, the number of new tractors registered in the first half of 2025 is down 17 per cent on the year; the lowest level since 1998. Some of the sharpest declines are in the North, showing falls of 30 per cent or more. Other rural headlines highlight more than 6,000 agricultural, fishing and forestry businesses have shut their doors over the last 12 months. Office for National Statistics (ONS) data confirms over half of these closures took place during the first six months of this year; so impossible not to imply a correlation between Chancellor Rachel Reeves' announcement of her planned inheritance tax raid at the October budget.

All these figures mean that British farms are disappearing at a record pace and so, back via where we sort of started at the Great Yorkshire Show, those agricultural machinery and related rural businesses that still supported with displays and hospitality are amazing.

Deadline is looming but, guess what, another headline illustrating Labour’s politics of envy has popped up. News is the horse racing industry is in Ms Reeves’s sights next, with a rise in tax on horserace bets already estimated to put over 2,750 people out of a job.

Just like the knock-on with farming, for every horse in training there is a groom, farrier, feed merchant, saddler, transporter, dress shop, caterer, racecourse staff and so much more. Talk about taking the countryside for a ride.