Labour peer: ‘We’re becoming the cruel party’ (2024)

Among the 10,000 protestors who descended on Parliament earlier this week to oppose the Government’s imposition of inheritance tax on farmers was 78-year-old Baroness Mallalieu. She keeps sheep and horses on her 50 acres on the southern edge of Exmoor National Park in Somerset and went along because she is “incredibly angry but also terribly worried” at what is being proposed.

Lady Mallalieu was, though, wearing several hats on the march. For the past 26 years she has been president of the Countryside Alliance, the voice of rural Britain, which this week warned that the fight over inheritance tax of farms is squaring up to be “every bit as toxic” as the battle Tony Blair’s government fought over fox hunting (trail hunting is still a favourite pastime of Lady Mallalieu’s).

And for 32 years – as a distinguished but now, she says, very much retired criminal barrister – she has sat as Lady Mallalieu on the Labour benches in the House of Lords. She was at the march to tell the party she joined at age 16 that it has got this one hopelessly wrong.

“It has taken the Labour Party 14 years to win back the trust of the countryside [efforts she has spearheaded] after that last attack on hunting. Since the last election we have more than 100 MPs in rural seats, but here we are making the same mistakes again. We are almost becoming the cruel party.”

There is an echo of Theresa May’s famous warning, when chair of the Conservative Party in 2002, that it risked becoming “the nasty party”. What exactly does she mean?

“These inheritance tax changes [previously farms were exempt] are not just threatening farmers in their pockets. They are threatening their family and their home. On the march, I heard there have been four suicides already among farmers and, for me, the most unpleasant side – and I don’t think the Government thought about this – is that they are saying to elderly farmers, make yourself die before March 2026 [when the changes come in] to save your family from losing their home.”

With two grown-up daughters, Cosima and Bathesheba, from her 27-year marriage (now ended) to fellow barrister Sir Timothy Cassel, her own farm, she says, is probably too small to fall within the new inheritance thresholds, and anyway, she is planning to spend what money she has before she dies. Bought 20 years ago – though she started farming aged 10 with the cows and pigs her parents kept in the fields around their Buckinghamshire home – she lives on Exmoor full-time and runs it more or less single-handedly, even though she makes regular sorties to join in Lords’ debates in London.

The snow and ice that descended in the south-west after the farmers’ protest is making it hard for visitors to reach her farmhouse, so I am speaking to her via Zoom as she sits in her cosy sitting room with beams and thick walls, hung with pictures of horses.

The daughter and niece of Labour MPs – William and Lance Mallalieu – she caused quite a stir when she went from her state grammar school to Newnham College, Cambridge, to read history and law in the mid-1960s and promptly got herself elected as the first-ever female president of the Cambridge Union.

Often celebrated as a “Brigitte Bardot lookalike” she, shockingly for 1966, wore corduroy trousers for debates. “I suppose I had blond hair,” she says, with a throaty laugh, “but I also had a lot of luck. There were 16 men to every woman at Cambridge back then so I thoroughly enjoyed myself”.

She may no longer have CND badges on her lapels but clearly she has lost none of her willingness to challenge convention. “There are certainly some Labour peers who share my views, and I’m pretty sure Labour MPs too, but they don’t dare to appear disloyal by talking to me.”

Some of her colleagues on the Labour benches in the Lords, she confides, are ostracising her for criticising the party leadership’s refusal to back down in the face of the farmers’ fury.

“After I’d been frozen to death the other day at the demo, I went back and had hot soup in the House of Lords. Some Labour peers sat down and talked to me. They don’t always do that but this time they did.

“One of them said he’d seen the marchers at the Tube station and added, with amazement, ‘they weren’t all posh’. He had no idea who these farmers are. They are the real workers.”

It wasn’t the only time her colleagues showed a misunderstanding of rural Britain. “I’m amazed when they tell me, ‘I live in a country area and I don’t have any of ‘that’ [disgruntled farmers] in my area. But it is their weekend cottage. They don’t go and sit in the local cattle market.”

Westminster can feel a million miles away from her farming community on Exmoor. “It is one of the very few really rural communities left. You can imagine what the mood is like here now. I’ve seen people in tears. They think – and I think they are right – that if they were to die, it is going to deprive their family not just of money but of their home because they won’t be able to pay the inheritance tax.”

A neighbouring farmer called by this week. He ran her through the impact of the proposed changes on farms in their neighbourhood.

“He knows them all. He excluded three that are really estates with a big house, and he excluded people like me who are really smallholders, but said there are 40 neighbours who will be hit. And that is just in this small area. Extend it over the country and the impact will be devastating.”

Numbers are a hot matter of dispute. Nick Thomas-Symonds, the paymaster general squirmed when asked four times on this week’s Question Time for exact figures. But the formidable Minette Batters, past president of the National Farmers Union of England and Wales (NFU), sitting next to him on the panel, said that around 57,000 of Britain’s 200,000 plus farmers are in the firing line for the next tax.

Some NFU estimates put it higher still, at as many as 70,000. Meanwhile, ministers have been quoting HMRC estimates that no more than 520 farmers each year would be hit by rules that set a threshold for starting to pay inheritance tax of 20 per cent at around £3 million in many cases.

“When they say 520,” reflects Lady Mallalieu, “what they don’t say is 520 each year. It’s a gloomy picture. I worry that if this goes through and isn’t corrected, we are going to have a complete absence of small family farms, large-scale enterprises, industrial-scale livestock farming and a lot of rewilding. No, no, no.”

She sounds a bit like recently-arrived farm champion Jeremy Clarkson. “I love Jeremy Clarkson,” she replies unfazed. “I didn’t see him at the march but I’ve met him at Countryside Alliance meetings. I hated his programmes on cars but he says what he thinks.”

That is something they have in common. How, I wonder, has her party got itself into this mess with farmers?

“Before the election, Steve Reed [now secretary of state for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] went round all the farming organisations telling them changes like these on inheritance weren’t even in contemplation. He said it was nonsense and gave us an assurance.”

Her tone suggests she hasn’t much time for him? “Daniel Zeichner [the farming minister at Defra] is a very nice man and is well-respected. Steve Reed is more remote. I think he went to one farm, but there we are.”

What about Labour’s much-heralded crop of new MPs representing rural constituencies hitherto regarded as true blue? “I suspect they have come through the party system, and were fighting seats they didn’t think they would win in the hope of getting a safer one next time. They don’t have a real rural connection”.

Lady Mallalieu herself stood twice for Labour in Hitchin, in the February and October general elections of 1974, and came within a few thousand votes of capturing it from the Conservatives. She tried for several more seats but wasn’t selected. “In some, I was asked how I could be a lawyer and a socialist,” she recalls, and in one I was asked, ‘Will you give anything you earn over the minimum wage to the party?’ I didn’t answer those questions well.”

There is no note of regret in her voice. “I’m so relieved now that I didn’t get it. I just couldn’t have had the life I have had, the countryside, my family, my times at the bar.” Among the cases she fought – usually defending – was that of the Maguire Seven, wrongly convicted and jailed for running an IRA bomb-making factory in the mid-1970s.

However, it is the present, not the past, that she wants to dwell on. “I gather what happened is that the Treasury in the past has tried to push various chancellors to impose inheritance tax on farmers, but they all refused because they could see the downside. Unfortunately, the present chancellor didn’t.”

The given reason for the changes is that they tackle abuses by what Lady Mallalieu describes as “tax-dodging farmers – those who have no intention of farming themselves but who buy agricultural land because it is exempt from inheritance tax and push up prices to a ridiculous level”.

So the right idea? “But what they didn’t do was properly consult anybody. Even, as far as we can gather, Defra. That is why the figures they have produced this week are so different from those of the NFU.”

Defra, she explains, has all the information on farms, including maps of every field, and could have done some “proper modelling” if they had been consulted in time. “All the people I know wouldn’t disagree for a moment with putting a tax on to affect those at the top level who pay these high sums for farming land but have no intention of farming it themselves. But the Chancellor pitched it far too low.”

It sounds like she has a ready-made plan to get Labour out of this mess if only they would listen. Is she talking to ministers? “I’ve spoken to a number of people and had conversations, but they are confidential.”

Is there any hope of a U-turn? “I think there will have to be one, but at the moment they are digging the hole deeper and deeper. It would improve things if they would just put up the threshold figure to a reasonable number where the small family farm is protected.”

She cautions, though, about thinking that the current protests are all about money. “We are talking about people who are already working unbelievably long hours to keep their farms going. They’ve done tourism to the nth degree. They go round in rusty old vehicles, not Range Rovers, and they do it because it is about lifestyle, about communities, about families who have always lived on their farm.”

If they are forced out because the very small profits they make each year will make the inheritance tax bill impossible to pay, she has her own doubts. The landscape will become the preserve, she says, “of solar panels or else rewilders, which means walkers won’t get very far through the bracken and gorse that quickly covers it.”

There is such a passion in her voice. How about going directly to her party’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer?

“He was a good and competent lawyer,” she ventures, “but he’s not a politician.” She contacted him, she remembers, when he was first elected as leader, and sent him a report the Countryside Alliance and the Fabians had done which showed why Labour wasn’t in tune with the countryside.

He passed her to Luke Pollard, the then shadow environment secretary who was then reshuffled out of the post. Labour pays lip service to the countryside, she says, but isn’t delivering.

“They talk about every Bill having to go the rounds of other government departments to see if there are things in it that affect them. So why weren’t these inheritance tax changes rural-proofed?”

Is it just the incompetence and chaos of a new administration short on ministerial experience? Lady Mallalieu isn’t convinced.

“I’ve always felt that we have a strong thread of class hatred within the party – and land is class. We saw it too in the way VAT was put on private schools.”

Her cut-glass accent and love of fox-hunting must have caused her problems with her fellow Labour peers and MPs. “I think they think I am posh but my credentials would match, if not defeat, some of theirs. My grandfather was a butcher’s boy in South Shields.”

Maybe that is why she feels so much more at home on her Exmoor farm, though she reports being alarmed even before the latest dispute by the number of her neighbours using the drop-in therapy centre at their local cattle market at Cutcombe to address the mental health strains of working as a farmer.

“I was having dinner the other day near here with some farming friends and there was a group of youngsters sitting there, all still at school. Whenever I mentioned a politician’s name to them, they’d say, ‘no, not heard of them’. ‘Who do you really admire?’ I asked. Every one of them said Nigel Farage.”

Such encounters reinforce her belief in speaking her mind to her own party, even if she is accused of disloyalty. “People ask me why I am still in the Labour Party, and I ask myself sometimes. But someone has to stand up in the party and say things that need to be said. And I don’t have anything to gain or lose.”

Labour peer: ‘We’re becoming the cruel party’ (2024)

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