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Pissing off farmers is more likely to gain support in rural communities than lose it.
This.
I'm so tired of people on social media dismissing me (who has lived in extremely rural parts of Northumberland my entire life) as a clueless citydweller whenever I speak about:
This farmland IHT debate
Foxhunting
Using pesticides that don't mass-kill bees and other critical insects
People having a right to roam/being against landowners illegally blocking off public footpaths
The amount of land multimillionaires purposely keep barren and ecologically dead just so they can go grouse-shooting
There's this myth pushed predominantly by right wingers that everybody who doesn't live in a highly urbanised area agrees with farmers on everything.
They like to pretend that all farmers are gentlemen who wander around in tweed jackets and essentially live in the 1930s. Except I don't think that was true even in the 1930s.
It's also a bit irrelevant anyway because there won't be another election until 2029 and by that point all the farmers will have seen that this whole thing was a nothing burger anyway. The ultra rich farmers ended up getting taxed, as they should always have, and everyone else ended up basically not been.
Interesting take. Government policy should only favour loyal voters? Minority interest groups be damned?
Hardly a new take.
It's why labour did not care about the left post Corbyn.
Why the Tories ignore the poor. And both are happy to lump blame on immigrants or shaft the disabled.
FPTP makes it worse, as community size is more powerful. But PR would only improve it a little.
Larger, more loyal voting blocks will always have more power than smaller or overtly anti the current leadership.
Merely ignoring the poor would only be so bad (we're used to doing without) but politicians around the world win votes by exploiting irrational hatred of the poor and actively making things worse.
Honestly, it's a slightly different cause and effect.
The wealthy keep taxes low by funding both media that concentrates on blaming the poor. And funding politicians that support the argument.
Same result, just different initial source. Think the old cartoon with the monopoly man sat at a table with a huge pile of cookies. Another guy with one cookie and a third with none.
"Hey that guy wants to steal your cookie".
I don't think you need propaganda. I think it's baked into people from birth to feel fear, disgust, etc. I think it's easy to misattribute those feelings as having an external source, blaming them on the poor, and allowing that to shape their opinions and values. It's surprising to me that we don't even have a word for "hatred of the poor" because I think it's pan-cultural, regardless of whether politicians or the wealthy exploit it or not. (Which of course they do, but they can only universally do so because the bias exists.)
Isn't that reality? If they are minority interest groups then they can be safely ignored.
It sucks but it's true.
Also I like the idea that multi millionaires are a minority group, I mean they are a minority group, sadly, but they're not really the kind of people you think about, when using the phrase minority group.
That would be a decline in political culture, we don't want that.
I might be wrong and would love to be corrected, but I'm under the impression that this tax change only affects the mega rich farmers
Are they pulling the wool over our eyes for their own gain?
As per usual most of this is Labour's fault for being utterly awful at communication.
They only end up paying tax once their property is worth over 1 million pounds, but estate agents always overestimate the value of land. So they're being told the land is worth over 1 million pounds even though it obviously isn't.
What is somewhat unclear is how exactly the government would determine that their assets are worth over 1 million pounds. In order to know how much the land was actually worth they would actually have to sell it which obviously poses some difficulties.