Farmers aren’t miners

A parallel is being drawn between the Tories and the miners in the 1980s and Labour and the farmers today. On the left, there is an implied element of revenge: you screwed our people, so we’ll screw yours. It is true that the miners’ marches in London 40 years ago had much the same earthy atmosphere of ‘real people’ confronting authority as did the farmers’ rally this week. But in the end the comparison does not work. For the Conservatives, the miners themselves were not the enemy. The problem was the vast cost of uneconomic pits to the taxpayer and the declared determination of the NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, to bring down the government. Mrs Thatcher regarded the working miners, who refused to strike because Scargill would not allow them a strike ballot, as heroes. She even had secret contacts with them and entered into friendly correspondence with some of their wives who were being intimidated by the strikers. I doubt that Sir Keir Starmer is engaged in similar sympathetic correspondence with any farmers’ wives. Anyway, the analogy fails: there are no ‘scab’ farmers, because there are no striking ones. There never are. For farmers, the withdrawal of labour has never been an option, though cruel Sir Keir’s tax and regulatory assault on them might just change that. No doubt many individual Labour MPs have nothing against farmers, but there are two related strands in socialism which do. One is the old-fashioned class resentment which hates the private ownership of land. The other is modern eco-zealotry which seeks, in effect, to nationalise land to serve its purposes. Both should heed Kipling’s advice from the dying Norman baron to his heir: ‘When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own,/ And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing,” my son, leave the Saxon alone.’

One of the strongest driving forces for environmentalism is a love of nature and landscape. Yet net-zero zeal seems to work in the opposite direction. The future envisaged and enforced by Ed Miliband is of a country covered from end to end by wind turbines, new pylons and other species of carbon-free energy, and therefore a much uglier place. On Romney Marsh, 20 miles to the east of where we live, ‘South Kent Energy Park’ has recently been announced. Nearly 1,500 acres of the fertile farmland that was claimed from the sea in the Middle Ages is to be covered with solar panels. There will almost certainly be one or more coming soon to a place near you: 142 are under construction and nearly 2,000 are ‘awaiting construction’. These policies are ‘green’, but they obliterate actual greenness even more effectively than new towns. Field after field turns black. If you live near the solar panels, you hear all the time their self-righteous hum.

Supporters of the ‘assisted dying’ bill have assumed, without thinking, that the process should involve judges and the National Health Service, thus conferring upon suicide an air of official approval. But why, when you think about it, should notoriously hard-pressed doctors (or nurses) have to be present when the would-be suicide takes the cocktail of pills? It is not a medical procedure. And why, before the suicide can be committed, does a High Court judge of the Family Division have to decide who is or is not fit to die in this way? Harriet Harman describes the bill as one of those ‘great liberalising measures such as the abolition of capital punishment’. But the abolition of capital punishment removed the power of judges over life and death. Will Family Division High Court judges see the return of such power as an emancipation for the human race and a welcome new duty for them?

The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust recently issued an invitation from its chief executive to the annual ceremony on 27 January. It says: ‘Eighty years on from the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, our mission is more important than ever. We remain horrified by the barbaric attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023… and the devastating violence against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.’ It is deeply tasteless to elide the Hamas massacres with the Israeli response as equal moral wrongs. Only the first is racist and genocidal. To link the situation in Gaza with Auschwitz is even more revolting and, in the main organisation dedicated to commemorating the one and only Holocaust, surely intended, not careless, and therefore all the more reprehensible. The head of the HMDT has now apologised for the letter but not explained why such crazed moral equivalence was in the original wording. This extraordinary letter confirms the fears of many that the proposed Holocaust Memorial beside parliament will head the same way, providing a space in which anyone whose cause of suffering needs a political push will come for a photo-op and a claim that their plight is like that of the Jews under the Nazis.

Thirty years ago, I met a woman called Claire Mackintosh at a dinner party. She aired a problem she hoped to solve. Lots of people, she said, have small bundles of shares which they cannot sell because the price of the transaction exceeds the value realised. Claire had a solution: why not set up a charity which would undertake the share sales and distribute the entire proceeds to other charities? That is what Claire did next, calling her organisation ShareGift. I was pleased to help start it by joining the board and placing a coupon in the Daily Telegraph. Readers responded magnificently, and off it went. Many big companies joined in, pleased to save themselves the admin costs of very small shareholders. Since then, ShareGift has raised £50 million and divided the spoils between more than 3,000 charities. This week, we celebrate with a party at the Mall Galleries. It is deeply satisfying when a benevolent idea really works. The story of Claire and ShareGift is an inspiring, successful example of something which is simple, but not easy.