The newspapers are full of colourful accounts of yesterday’s protests in which 13,000 farmers took to the streets of Whitehall. Jeremy Clarkson was the guest of honour, declaring “this is the end of farming” and ranting at the BBC.
Andrew Ward, one of the protest organisers, thanked everyone for the tonnes of produce brought down on coaches and trains by protesters to be delivered to City Harvest, one of the capital’s largest food banks, to show that farmers “just want to feed people” (The Times).
Despite the mainly good-spirited nature of the rally, there was gloom in the air as farmers discussed their deaths or those of their parents. Many feared that could be followed by the demise of their family farm (The Guardian).
Bestselling author and Lake District farmer James Rebanks put across a different opinion in an interview with The Times. “I’m not against there being a threshold [above which farms pay inheritance tax]. If people want to close some of the loopholes that have enabled [people] to accrue lots of land as a tax dodge, I’m not necessarily against that.”
Inheritance tax will not be the “death of farming”, he says, but “if we don’t have the new schemes that farmers can join, if we don’t allow some of the old protections of family farms that exist, if we have crap trade policies, if we allow supermarkets to rip farmers off, what does that all add up to? It does add up to a slow strangling to death of British farming.”
Spotting a political opportunity, the new Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, brought her shadow environment, food and rural affairs team on stage to say they were the people who would “fight” for farmers.
There is a £14bn growth opportunity for food and drink manufacturing which can be unlocked by investment in technology, particularly AI, according to a report by the Food and Drink Federation out today.
The report finds that while investment in food and drink manufacturing has more than doubled over the past 20 years, other industries have seen higher rates of growth (The Manufacturer).
Speaking yesterday, Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey said the bank will take a ‘gradual approach’ to cutting interests rates after the Budget.
Bailey also told MPs that retailers were right to warn of job cuts because of national insurance and minimum wage hikes (The Telegraph). Retail bosses wrote to the Chancellor yesterday to warn the budget will hit them with an additional £7bn in costs and will lead to inevitable job cuts.
Weight lost drug Wegovy has gone on sale in China for the first time, a key step in unlocking a big, fast-growing market for the blockbuster franchise (Bloomberg).
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