Britain’s original “winter of discontent” was more than four decades ago, when public and private sector workers entered prolonged strikes over the austere approach to managing its finances taken by the then-Labour government of Jim Callaghan. The crisis finally began to ebb away on February 14th, 1979.
The day before, a young girl was born in south London to teacher parents. More than 45 years later, Rachel Reeves would go on to become Britain’s first female chancellor of the exchequer when Labour, under Keir Starmer, vanquished the Tories in July.
Now, having been born during the original, Reeves faces the prospect of a winter of discontent all of her own making. Anger from farmers over increased inheritance tax and from pensioners over cuts to winter fuel payments threatens to overshadow her attempt to reset Britain’s fiscal future.
Whitehall, the administrative heart of London, is usually dominated by people in pinstriped suits. On Tuesday, it was the turn of wellington boots, flatcaps and Barbour wax jackets to be de rigueur clothing, as a protest of 10,000 farmers descended on parliament to complain about Reeves’s recent tax raid.
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In her budget last month, Reeves tweaked tax rules to target – in Labour’s eyes – wealthy landowners by introducing from 2026 a 20 per cent levy on the inheritance of farm assets worth more than £1 million (€1.2 million). The government has estimated that with existing loopholes and reliefs, most farms worth below £3 million will escape the new tax.
Farmers, however, aren’t having it. Despite government estimates that barely 550 farms each year would be affected, the National Farmers Union (NFU) has argued up to 70,000 British farms could enter the dragnet. The union has promised to escalate protests until Reeves implements a U-turn.
“I think you’ll have all seen the media reports about what farmers across the United Kingdom think they should be doing next,” said NFU president Tom Bradshaw, hinting at predictions that farmers could go on food-producing strikes to bring Labour to the negotiating table.
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Meanwhile, elements of the right wing of British politics see the farming row as an opportunity to land a blow on Starmer’s Labour government. The issue has even been dragged into the UK’s relentless culture wars. “Labour would listen if we grew avocados,” said one Whitehall protest sign.
Some in Labour are relishing the fight. Sources from the left of the party were ebullient at the weekend as they insisted to The Irish Times that the protesting farmers would never vote for them anyway, and that this was a row the party needed to have.
Analysis of the numbers from July’s election, however, suggests that up to 60 per cent of Labour’s 100 most marginal seats are in rural or semi-rural areas, where the views of farmers would hold sway and are bound to influence the next election, expected to be in 2029.
“Labour thinks it can peel off the small farmers from the big boys. But it can’t,” said a source from Reform UK, the right-wing party whose leader, Nigel Farage, sported the obligatory Barbour get-up as he made a hero’s entrance to the farmers’ protest in Whitehall on Tuesday.
Farmers’ groups are threatening to step up the fight. Meanwhile, new economic figures this week show a surprise rise in inflation to 2.3 per cent, in the same week that temperatures across the UK are due to plunge below freezing. This will be bound to draw attention to another of Reeves’s fiscally austere decisions: to strip up to £300 (€360) worth of winter fuel payments from all but the poorest of British pensioners.
Labour’s promised “decade of renewal” has had a bumpy start. Winter is coming and British politics may soon feel the chill.
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