Is Sir Keir Starmer really stupid or deeply disingenuous? It’s a valid question and it is very relevant to our rural economy in West Wales. Three weeks ago his Labour Government delivered their first budget .I penned my last column just after the Chancellor had sat down. The scale of the disaster she is going to inflict on Welsh farming is now sadly apparent, and as I predicted it is very ugly.

The situation isn’t helped by half-truths, downright lies, obfuscation and a failure to engage with the farming community. That’s a strong statement but every word is justified. I write it having just returned from the NFU’s mass lobbying and the accompanying demonstration in London. As always the rural community (from all corners of the UK) was well behaved, polite and courteous. There was no graffiti or spray painting, no incendiary language and no statues were torn down. But the sense of frustration and mounting anger were palpable. Tin Ear Keir needs to take note and sharpish too!

At Welsh Labour’s conference in Llandudno last weekend, Sir Keir delivered a smug and complacent speech full of hubris and the usual pathetic blame game. With farmers protesting outside, he then snuck out of the back door like a thief in the night. Contrast that with Rishi Sunak earlier in the year, with a similar farmer’s protest; he went out the front and talked to them. One man is a leader, the other just an excuse.

In the run up to the Election, Steve Reed (he of the £400 freebie wellies from Lord Ali) described a challenge that Labour was going to abolish Agricultural Property Relief, as “desperate nonsense”.Now he is trying to justify it. Either he lied, or he is clearly excluded from any real power and decision making. He is now encouraging farmers to look at complex loopholes for a tax change that is said to be about closing loopholes. beyond moronic!

We have heard this week that Rachel Reeves has had to alter her on line CV following a bit of “actuality economy”; is she really the expert she claims to be?

Just today, No Idea Keir repeated his claim that the vast majority of farms would not be affected by this, quoting BBC Verify. They claim that a farm needs to be bigger than 200 acres to become liable for IHT based on “average land prices”. It suggests that their methodology is badly out. Farmland in Ceredigion sells at £10k/acre. So anything over 100 acres is automatically caught up in this. The reality is that it’s hard to run a viable farm business on much less than 200 acres. The NFU’s intimate knowledge of UK farming suggests that farms as small as 35 acres will be specialised poultry or horticultural units, and will be worth over the million pound threshold. So smaller farms get caught up too.

No one has yet looked in detail at the tenanted sector, representing some 25-30 per cent of the Welsh (and UK) farming industry .Many of these farms will be part of agricultural estates, comprising a home farm and a number of let farms. One IHT “claim” will involve multiple family farm businesses. Some estates may be held in Trust, paying regular Trust Charges instead of IHT. They aren’t even flagging up on the quoted Treasury figures. Such estates will be worth well in excess of the threshold, meaning the tenanted farms will all be subject to 20 per cent IHT.

Crunch the numbers: for the Landlord an asset has just become a massive liability without imposing a wholly unaffordable rent rise on the tenant. This is a circle that can’t be squared .Labour are throwing the tenanted farming sector under a bus. Maybe tenant farmers don’t qualify as “working people” in Starmer’s eyes? (I am happy to share the figures if anyone wants them).

And if you think I’m making this up, ask yourself why 20,000 farmers travelled the length and breadth of the country to protest. Thank you to the Plaid Cymru MPs who met with Welsh NFU members. They take this issue very seriously. Kemi Badenoch has vowed to reverse this tax. All other political parties oppose it. Disgracefully some Labour MPs refused to make themselves available to meet their constituents. That’s truly shameful and cowardly too.

Stupid or disingenuous? Maybe both!