The Government risks repeating mistakes of the past by alienating farmers - Yorkshire Post Letters

The farmers are up in arms about the budget changes to the inheritance tax and I am not surprised. There are also reports in the press that this Government intends to do to the farmers what Mrs Thatcher did to the miners. I would seriously ask Sir Keir Starmer: Is this really wise?

In 1935, my parents were farming in Sussex. The bottom dropped out of farming: prices plummeted, and my mother’s poultry flock was hit by fowl pest. So they gave up farming, and took a pub in Berkshire.

Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin announced that “it didn’t matter if every farmer in England went bankrupt; we could get all the food we needed from abroad”.

Four years later we were at war, and it was “Farmers! Come on, farmers! Let’s be having you!”

Sir Keir would do well to remember this; the situation in Ukraine doesn’t look too good.

He might also remember that we didn’t elect him and his party into office this year. We didn’t vote them in at all. No, we voted t’other lot out! There’s quite a difference.

And we can do the same again next time.