I read Andrew Michael Hurley’s new novel, Barrowbeck, in preparation for co-hosting Tales of the Weird, a timely event on the folk horror genre at the British Library earlier this month. I’m not the most informed commentator on this literary subset by any means, but I am, after Mark Gatiss, one of the most famous, and so I am often asked to pontificate about it. That’s the way the world works, I’m afraid. That’s why Hugh Dennis and David Baddiel are presenting a new show for Channel 4 about cycling across France, instead of the cyclist who cycled across France earlier this year and won the Tour de France cycling race, whoever he was.
Barrowbeck follows the fortunes of a Yorkshire hamlet, from an itinerant tribe making a pact with their gods 2,000 years ago, in which they promise to honour the land, to the near future of 2041. There, climate change has seen that same land flooded, some inhabitants holding on in hope as a cycle of life that stretched back millennia indisputably ends, as it will for all of us, sooner, it seems, rather than later. And these are the doomed lands our wealthiest farmers are taking to the streets to inherit (at half the inheritance tax anyone else would pay).
The farmers’ figurehead, the obsolete car-oaf Jeremy Clarkson, told the Times in 2021 that avoiding inheritance tax was a “critical” part of his decision to buy farmland. But now he maintains he in fact bought the 1,000 acres of land in Oxfordshire that he calls Diddly Squat Farm so he could shoot pheasants, and used the tax avoidance story as a smokescreen to avoid the ire of the animal rights lobby. I suppose it’s a bit like the time, when I was a small child, I admitted to stealing money from my nan’s purse in the hope she wouldn’t notice that I had battered her budgie to death with a claw hammer.
Clarkson thinks if he puts on a flat cap and fires up his farming fanbase they can act as a human shield to protect him from his obligation to contribute his fair share to society, lions led by a dickhead. Maybe, in a tribute to Lady Godiva’s protest against her husband Leofric’s unfair taxation of the Mercians, Clarkson should parade naked through the streets of every town in the land while crowds throw lumps of excrement at him, which he could probably catch in the folds of one of his chins anyway, sparing his fat face from filth.
As usual, there’s a disinformation campaign in progress from typically bent outlets. The Labour government maintain that farms worth under £3m can still be passed on for nothing; that all farmers will still pay 50% less inheritance tax than anyone else; and that only a quarter of farms will be affected by the most stringent of the new measures. I don’t claim to understand the complexities of the situation faced by farmers, but I would urge them to beware their newfound fellow travellers. Just as wealthy backers encouraged disgruntled Brits to vote for Brexit against their own interests, there may be self-serving motives in play among the farmers’ fair-weather friends, protecting their vast wealth by piggybacking on to the farmers’ understandable anxieties.
Andrew Lloyd Webber, who reportedly flew home first class from New York in 2015 to vote in favour of George Osborne’s tax credit cuts for the most vulnerable in society, owns a 5,000-acre farm, where he fertilises fields full of saccharine melodies with buckets of his own homemade slurry; Viscount Rothermere, controlling shareholder of the Daily Mail, owns a 4,700-acre farm that produces mainly bullshit; and the vacuum twat James Dyson, who backed Brexit and then moved his business to Singapore, apparently has 36,000 acres of farmland, British super-farms being an even better place to stash your vacuum cleaner cash than a lightly regulated, low tax, island city-state. With bellends like these, who needs frenemies?
In a tangentially related story, the kind of climate crisis floods that have caused devastation in Valencia will eventually hit us here, a few hundred miles north. I looked up a map predicting how London would flood under similar circumstances. Here in the tofu-smeared republic of Stoke Newington it looks like everywhere west of Bayston Road, where the 300,000-year-old mammoth hunting weapons of extinct Palaeolithic hunters were discovered in the late 19th century, will stay above water. I’ll be living on a wokeipelago surrounded by the waters of the drowned Hackney Marshes and the burst banks of ancient rivers that have been driven underground, once forded by Roman legionaries marching north on Ermine Street, in between the Stamford Hill Pizza Hut and Ozzy’s Dry Cleaners. How long does the land have left anyway? What is any of it worth? Our children will inherit only death. And a set of placemats depicting Henry VIII’s wives.
It’s worth remembering that while Clarkson’s barrier-bulldozing tractors are backed by the Tories and their newspaper allies, there are climate protesters who used similar tactics who are doing time. And 10,000 tax-fearing farmers are getting a lot more media coverage than the 50,000 people who attended the Restore Nature Now march in June. Is this the real two-tier Britain?
Not far from Clarkson’s suddenly more financially transparent investment is the foreboding Neolithic standing stone the Hawk Stone. Depressingly, Clarkson has named a lager he ferments after it. The Hawk Stone has surveyed the area of Clarkson’s farm for 10,000 years, since our ancestors first raised it. And the Hawk Stone will still stand, in silent judgment, long after Clarkson’s sneer of cold command has curdled and his farm has turned to dust, as boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.
Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf next year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July. He is also a guest of all-female Fall karaoke act the Fallen Women, at the Lexington, London on 28 December
