ROBERT HARDMAN: Decision to ban farmers’ anti-inheritance tax adverts on the tube exhibits how Labour’s petty tribalists censor dissent

A last-minute entry, surely, for the 2024 Two-Tier Keir Awards, celebrating the best of double standards in public life.

Having seen the assisted dying lobby, the animal rights lobby, the human rights lobby, the business lobby and others slap their messages across the most influential advertising billboards in Britain – those at Westminster’s Tube station – the farming lobby were all set to do the same. Until now.

As the Mail reveals today, the commissars at Transport for London, run by the capital’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, have decided that there shall be no complaints from rural Britain on the London Underground. 

The reason? TfL says that the proposed ads – saying ‘Stop the Family Farm Tax’- are ‘politically controversial’. You do not need to be a lawyer to see that this is a brazen case of vindictive hair-splitting.

Few things in recent memory have been as ‘politically controversial’ as the proposal to legalise assisted dying – yet, last month, campaigners for legal reform were allowed to cover Westminster Tube station with emotional arguments.

Other political advertisers have included Amnesty International and a different agricultural pressure group, Compassion in World Farming. 

They applied to put up adverts attacking government policy (or lack of it) in relation to the export of live animals. ‘Pass The Kept Animals Bill’, it declared. ‘Keep Your Promises’. 

No problem, said the mayor and TfL, as posters went up all over Westminster. In that instance, however, there was one key difference. Those ads were attacking a horrid Conservative government. These ads, on the very same hoardings, would be attacking a Labour one.

A coffin covered by the union flag on a flat bed truck has a sign saying ‘RIP Farming’ as a farmer lays out fresh vegetables during a rally

This is not some maverick stunt, not that Mr Khan has anything against stunts. He famously authorised the flying of a giant helium-filled, nappy-wearing Donald Trump during the US presidential visit in 2018 and also allowed the online giant, Amazon, to change all the Tube signs from ‘Westminster’ to ‘Webminster’. 

Two months ago, TfL also authorised ads for an Islamic money transfer service featuring the controversial cleric, Ismail ibn Musa Menk, burning a suitcase of US dollars.

But grumbling farmers? Now that’s going too far. No wonder the Tories and Reform are (like farmers) making hay.

Yet the £40,000 ad campaign was created by the National Farmers’ Union, an avowedly non-party political body, which worked with every government since Herbert Asquith was in power more than a century ago. 

Its members were astonished to be informed, on Budget Day, that Labour will slap a 20 per cent tax on all but the smallest farms at the point of transfer to the next generation. 

Before the General Election, Labour had pledged to do no such thing. Now, the NFU is trying to explain that the chasm between land values and farm incomes means that many families will have to sell the farm just to pay the tax.

Labour’s counter-attack is to paint them as rich, whining tax-dodgers. Just before Christmas, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Steve Reed, told MPs that farmers were ‘in it for the money’. 

This is the same Steve Reed who promised the NFU conference that Labour would not touch Agricultural Property Relief (APR) and who appeared in a farmyard photo opportunity wearing £420 designer wellies (gifted by Lord Alli). 

The commissars at Transport for London, run by the capital’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan (pictured), have decided that there shall be no complaints from rural Britain on the London Underground

He also sits on Mayor Khan’s patch as MP for inner-city Streatham where the only bull is the one on the pub sign in Streatham High Road. 

In other words, farmers are not convinced that the minister for farming is on their side, while his spin doctors peddle the line that only ‘wealthy’ farmers worth more than £1million are going to be hit.

Since the average family farm barely breaks even, spans 217 acres and land is worth £10,000 an acre, you do the sums. 

Wealthy? The average farm is worth less than the index-linked public sector pension pots of the ministers and civil servants driving this stuff.

This is why the NFU wanted to welcome MPs back to work at Westminster in January with an ad campaign. ‘We wanted to make the point that we have not gone away,’ a senior NFU source tells me.

Now, of course, a few posters are hardly going to make much difference. However, TfL’s decision does highlight the extent to which Labour’s petty tribalists will go to censor dissent.

Mayor Khan’s staff cite two breaches of their code, notably clause ‘N’ which states that an ad is unacceptable if ‘it promotes a party political cause or electioneering’ and clause ‘Q’, if ‘it is unacceptable for some other substantial reason’.

Clearly, there is no election going on and the ads do not ‘promote a party political cause’, any more than those assisted dying or animal rights ads did. 

The animal rights lobby, the human rights lobby, the business lobby have all had political adverts featured on the tube (Stock image) 

As for the ‘substantial reason’, the NFU’s ad agency has been told that the ads ‘would like to be displayed at Westminster’ [sic]. 

In other words, they might be seen by MPs. Perish the thought! TfL has added that the NFU is permitted to show ads creating ‘a positive message’. 

Come on, Clarkson & Co, show us some nice shots of fluffy baa-lambs and organic kale.

This all stinks. But perhaps not as much as what will soon be landing on ministers’ doorsteps. The NFU is the sensible face of farming. 

There are plenty of angry activists who want to go much further. They have plans for more extreme protests in the near future.

TfL’s decision will only have broughtthat day nearer.