SNEAK PEEK: The New Kulaks

There's something that's not being said about the farmer protests in Britain...

Here’s an exclusive first look at my latest opinion piece, on the British government’s disgusting persecution of the nation’s farmers. People have called it communism and Stalinism, but I haven’t seen anybody talk about how breaking up farms and selling them to corporations like BlackRock will serve the so-called “plant-based agenda”—which it will.

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Tens of thousands of British farmers, tractors and all, and their supporters have descended on London in protest against a harsh new law that could see family farms broken up and sold to pay death duties. The money raised will pay for Britain’s beloved NHS, the government has said.

The farmers have found powerful support in television superstar Jeremy Clarkson, whose show Clarkson’s Farm is by far the most popular thing on Amazon’s streaming platform, drawing in millions of viewers across the globe. Nigel Farage, leader of populist Reform UK, which won 15% of the vote in the recent general election, has also thrown his weight behind the protests.

Some are saying the protests could topple the government. Similar things were said about the farmer protests in France and the Gilets Jaunes movement, before the pandemic intervened to put a stop to them. At this stage, I’m not sure what will happen, but anger at the new law is very real and very widely felt, and the government would be foolish to underestimate it.

What is clear, though, is that we’re witnessing an important moment in the ongoing transformation of Britain—a deliberate transformation that is making Britons unhealthier, unhappier and, worst of all, less free.

Farmers, the people who produce Britain’s food and act as custodians of its famous landscapes, from the high-hedgerowed fields of the Westcountry to the windswept Yorkshire Moors, where the doomed love of Heathcliff and Cathy played out among the gorse and heather, are now being spoken of in blood-curdling language.

We’re told that farmers are “far right.” They’re lazy and privileged and spoilt. They’re oppressors. They’re going to get what they deserve.

This is what former Labour advisor John McTernan, bizarrely appropriating one of the Labour Party’s most hated enemies, Margaret Thatcher, had to say a few days ago.

“We can do to the farmers what Thatcher did to the miners,” McTernan told GB News. “It’s an industry we can do without.”

Others have tried to clothe the iron fist in at least a semblance of a velvet glove.

According to The Guardian’s Will Hutton, Britain’s farmers have “hoarded land for too long.” “Inheritance tax will bring new life to rural Britain,” he says. Hutton explains that one of the main reasons there is “so much fuss” about what’s being done to Britain’s farmers is that “rural Britain has never escaped the cultural trappings of feudalism.” The countryside is stuck in the deep past, you see, in an outdated mode of production that, like all outdated modes of production, should be stripped away, because it’s inefficient and, most of all, unfair. Far from destroying the countryside, redistributing the land will power growth and productivity and allow young farmers, pushed out of the market by “monopoly,” to buy their own land.

If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.

Britain is going “full Stalin,” Elon Musk wrote on Twitter. Musk is no fan of Keir Starmer and his government. There are reports of deep alarm in Westminster about Musk’s Tweets highlighting the ongoing clampdown on freedom of speech and the grooming gangs and general Orwellian atmosphere in this country. Threats against Musk and promises of fines led vice-president-elect JD Vance, during the election campaign, to suggest that a second Trump admin could withdraw support for NATO if European countries didn’t stop trying to censor and censure Musk.

The comparison with communism, with what happened in the Soviet Union, particularly the collectivisation of farming, which was responsible for the deaths of millions, if not tens of millions, is not an idle one. It’s easy to forget that Labour are and always have been a radical left-wing party in pursuit of economic and social revolution. Tony Blair did a good job of disguising this by apparently moving his rechristened New Labour towards the centre of the political scale, but he was responsible for changing Britain as radically as any out-and-out communist could have done. This was done mainly through the deliberate policy of mass immigration, which former advisor Andrew Neather said was done to “rub the right’s nose in diversity” and make it impossible for a truly conservative government ever to be elected again. On those terms, at least, it looks very much like Tony Blair succeeded.

Others have compared what is happening to Britain’s farmers with Zimbabwe, and the process of land expropriation that took place after Ian Smith’s transfer of white minority rule and the end of Rhodesia. Farms were taken from their white owners and given to Robert Mugabe’s black supporters, with dire consequences. Zimbabwe went from breadbasket to basket case in a matter of years.

It's worth remembering, though, that Britain has its own native tradition of expropriation to draw on. Throughout the twentieth century, taxation was used for the purposes of class warfare, to strike directly at the British left’s most hated enemy: the landed aristocracy. Death duties were used to break up the large estates after World War I had killed off an entire generation of male heirs, and change British society in the most fundamental way since the Normans did away with the native Anglo-Saxon earls and thegns.

In recent decades there’s also been a broader war with the countryside, as Britain’s smug metropolitan elite have sought, with enormous condescension, to destroy what is distinctive about rural as opposed to city life. One of the first targets of the New Labour government was fox hunting, the traditional pastime of the aristocracy, but rural pursuits have suffered more broadly. New drink-driving laws helped to squeeze the life out of country pubs that depend on passing trade to stay afloat.

These are good precedents, all of which can helps us, to some extent, to understand the motivations and the stakes involved.  But what’s actually happening here, beyond the expropriation, is different. Britain’s family farms will not be broken up and the land given to collective farms for workers or redistributed on racial lines. Britain will not become a new Russia or Zimbabwe. And Will Hutton’s absurd suggestion that young farmers will buy up the newly released land is just that—absurd.