Iris says: A cold front of slurry could be heading your way, Rachel Reeves

If you’re out and about in London on November 19, Daily Express weather girl Iris advises: Don’t forget your brolly.

I haven’t looked at the long-range forecast, so I don’t know if there is rain on the horizon.

But the farmers are going to be in town and I predict a s**t storm.

These sons of the soil are upset with Rachel Reeves (who isn’t?). What’s more, they have access to slurry and they’re not afraid to use it.

You wouldn’t want to be collateral damage when they dump it in Parliament Square, would you? So carry an umbrella and keep your eyes peeled for tractors towing a tank that stinks to high heaven.

Reeves’s Budget has revoked the exemption from inheritance tax that has applied to farm land. From April, 2026, it will be levied at an effective rate of 20 per cent on business and agricultural assets of more than £1 million.

Farmers claimed it would prevent them passing on their businesses to their children. They also fear for food security and environmental protection.

Reeves claimed: “Seventy-three per cent of farmers won’t be paying a single penny more in inheritance tax.”

Jeremy Clarkson, TV petrolhead, columnist, pub landlord and Cotswolds farmer, told followers on X: “Farmers, I know that you have been shafted today. But please don’t despair. Just look after yourselves for five short years and this shower will be gone.”

The thing about Budgets is that something always comes back to bite the Chancellor on the arse. This year more than most.

It’s just the law of unintended consequences. The more radical the Budget, the more complex the repercussions.

Tory Chancellors usually don’t like to frighten the horses, though Norman Lamont in 1993 and Kwasi Kwarteng in 2022 sent them galloping over the hill whinnying in panic.

Now Reeves, who looked inordinately pleased with herself as she presented her Budget to the House, has done the same.

Not only has she upset the farmers, but care homes have warned that the extra £600 million funding Reeves has given local authorities for adults’ and children’s social care won’t be enough to stop some homes closing.

The reason? What she gave with one hand, she took back with the other. Extra National Insurance costs and a rise in the minimum wage have piled more pressure on to the whole care sector.

As soon as they took power, Keir Starmer and Reeves bought off striking junior doctors with a whopping pay rise. But now the Budget has angered family doctors, who have also fallen into Reeves’s National Insurance trap.

Their practices are privately owned partnerships, which means that unlike the rest of the National Health Service, they have to cough up the extra tax.

The Budget also contained an item about the single biggest problem facing Britain and the rest of Europe – illegal immigration. Last year, Britain spent £4.3 billion on supporting refugees and asylum seekers.

The Budget suggested that we could save £2.2 billion by processing asylum claims more quickly and so saving on hotel bills. Sounds good, but what will the Government do with those to whom they don’t grant asylum and cannot send home?

So expect many of those illegals who make the perilous journey across the English Channel to go through on the nod.

Some, perhaps most, of Labour’s Budget measures were necessary; we have lived on tick for too long. But the deceit involved in Reeves’s master plan is unforgiveable. They lied, they dissembled, they cheated the voters of this country.

They behaved like wide boys playing the three-card trick on Westminster Bridge.

And if they fail to pull off their Budget gamble, then as one of Reeves’s worried colleagues said: “The reality remains that if we don’t get growth we go bust.”

In which case, Clarkson might be wrong: The farmers won’t have to wait even five years.

*****

It has been years since I last watched a film at the cinema. When Marvel Comics hijacked Hollywood I retreated to my armchair and switched the telly on.

I had forgotten how loud the cinema is. When they play the main feature, it hits you like a wall of sound.

Last week was half-term for our grandson and we took him to see The Wild Robot. I urge you to go. It’s a gentle morality tale about a shipwrecked robot, Roz, which has to learn to make friends with the animals on the island where it is washed up.

If forms a bond with an orphaned gosling, Brightbill, who thinks it is his mother. Cute, eh? But when they roll the movie it’s as if Phil Spector himself is in the projection room shouting, “Louder, louder!”

The grandson took it all in his stride. He wasn’t allowed popcorn because it makes him choke but he munched away on potato sticks and wore a constant frown of concentration.

I would have said the story was a little too advanced for his age (just turned five) but he had been briefed beforehand by his mother and chose to pass on some of her wisdom.

“Now, Grandpa, it’s going to be quite sad. But it’s okay to feel sad and the little goose is happy at the end. So is the robot.”

Well, that’s all right, then. I won’t need counselling. But I’ve already made an appointment with the audiologist.

*****

Being a journalist gives you privileged access to people you probably would not have met otherwise.

As young reporters, we were all packed off by the news editor to interview a showbiz celebrity passing through town. Perhaps a famous actor touring with a new play; or a pop star who has got a gig with the Radio One Roadshow.

Donald Zec, of the Daily Mirror, got to meet Muhammad Ali, probably the finest boxer who ever entered the ring, after Ali had embraced Islam and ceased to be Cassius Clay.

“I always wanted to meet him,” writes Zec in his memoir Put the Knife in Gently. “Boxing was out of my territory. But great is great.”

Zec was the doyen of showbiz writers and nowadays boxing is very much showbiz. It was arguably Ali who made it so.

The Greatest, as he was known – self-styled but none the less true – turned up at Zec’s Beverly Hills hotel but declined to come in.

“He sat yawning in the noon sunlight,” writes Zec, “a matchstick in his lower teeth. The biceps bulged through the sleeves of his grey flannel suit… he was clearly a very handsome animal indeed.”

Female fans swarmed the Cadillac. One told Ali: “Oh, you’re just a living doll. I just gotta have your autograph. You can write it on my thigh if you like.”

“Oh Lord o’ mercy,” grinned Ali, who was then, Zec recalls, “a womaniser of some renown.”

At the time, Ali was accused of being a draft dodger for refusing to fight in the Vietnam war because of his Islamic faith. Zec didn’t buy that. He believed Ali was genuine.

Zec walked with him through black neighbourhoods of Los Angeles, where Ali “kissed the kids, shook scores of hands and exchanged the occasional salaam aleichum”.

“I sensed this was no act,” writes Zec.

Ali, he reports, was no amateur at the spoken word either: “I’m happy, Allah’s happy, Elijah Muhammad’s happy because I’m standing up for what I believe.

“I got empty pockets now, but I’m a man. Better than having a million dollars and be ‘boy’.”

They broke the mould after Ali. Zec, too.

*****

A friend showed me an apartment she had found on an estate agent’s website. It’s in a nice part of town and has five bedrooms, so you’d expect it to be a little pricey.

But I wasn’t prepared for this: They want £108,333 a MONTH. Or £25,000 if you’re the sort of cheapskate who pays by the week.

I don’t know who owns it and I suspect I would have enormous trouble finding out. But I know this… whoever it is, they are far less burdened than you and me by the contents of Rachel Reeves’s red box.

We’re low-hanging fruit, always will be.

*****

“She has a black belt in cookery – she can kill you with one chop.” – Benny Hill

RICHARD DISMORE

5 November 2024