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Good morning

Yesterday across rural England churchgoers celebrated Plough Sunday asking God’s blessing on farmers and their land. After four years living in Hull and then fifteen in Liverpool we now live surrounded by a family farm of a thousand acres with 300 cows in North Yorkshire.

I used to think that one of the divisions in our country was between the urban and the rural, but I’ve come to see that they share some of the same deprivations.

However, a divide seems to have opened up by the decision to apply inheritance tax to family farms. Even acknowledging the perception that they’re well off because of land prices, the farmers I’ve listened to feel that if only those who make the decisions could walk in their shoes they might see things differently.

For Christians such an idea flows from the belief that in order to help humanity God became one of us and actually dwelt among us ‘from the womb to the tomb’. Through Jesus it was a total identification with those he came to save. Or as the proverb goes, ‘only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches’.
As we heard on this programme last week the NFU is asking the Government to consult with those most affected.

Last week the Secretary of State for DEFRA spoke at the Oxford Farming Conference about helping farmers become more profitable. They’re crucial to providing 60% of our food and to protecting the natural world. But one hundred tractors blasted their horns outside and even the Archers is introducing the thorny issue of inheritance tax on farmers as a storyline.

Whatever the arguments for or against the one million pound threshold the hope I’m hearing in rural communities is for society at large to understand the symbiotic relationship between generations of families and their land which is a feature of life in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Clearly the Government has to deal with everyone fairly as they try to fund better public services. But a key moral and theological considerstion for all decision-makers of whatever public policy is to understand those most affected as they seek to build a just society.

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