We might finally have discovered a group that the Labour Party loathes more than the white working classes: the men and women who work night and day to produce our food.

This became clear in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s recent autumn budget. She announced that the Labour government intended from April 2026 onwards to impose a 20% inheritance tax on all agricultural assets worth more than £1 million. James Heale of The Spectator reports the Today programme as citing a government brief that describes the farmers descending on Westminster in protest at the move as a “well-organised, self-serving, noisy lobby” that needs to be “stood up to.”

At first glance, it seems very foolish to alienate farmers. Even if the motive is there, why make life harder for the people without whom the superabundance we encounter in butchers and supermarkets would vanish? The answer is that we have on our hands a new kind of class warfare. In this case, it is declared not in the name of the poor against the rich, but against hard-working, conservative-minded folk who toil with their hands and on behalf of a more indolent, pen-pushing managerial class. It helps, of course, that the members of this latter group vote overwhelmingly for Labour and make up much of Britain’s bloated public sector. Thus, while social workers, DEI consultants, and other such bureaucrats get treated like clients, everyone else is viewed as little more than an ATM machine.

In a rare moment of perspicacity, even the Sky News journalist Beth Rigby put the point to Starmer that there is a pattern to the sorts of people he targets for taxation: aspiring, productive individuals who operate away from the state in the freer, less bureaucratic pastures of civil society.