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.
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.
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.
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.