THERE’S been a lot written since the General Election about how quickly the star of Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour Party has waned.

The reasons for this are many, ranging from the merely revealing to the truly damning and defining. From a lengthening list of failure, I would offer the spectrum he has run from “Free Gear Keir” to his feebleness over Gaza, to the galvanising moment of the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment.

The unifying factor in all of this is one that was visible even when he was leader of the opposition. Namely, that he and other chosen key lieutenants like Rachel Reeves are just not very good at politics.

In elected office, as an expression of who you are, what you are about and whose side you are on, politics matter. As such, it’s something you’d think even a legalistic would-be technocrat like Starmer would have managed to nail down for himself by now.

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It does, though, even in these polarised times, take a special level of incompetence and lack of nous to turn a millionaire nonsense-monger like Jeremy Clarkson into some kind of folk hero. Yet that’s what Starmer and Reeves almost succeeded in doing with their decision to apply inheritance tax to family farms.

Preening and presenting himself as a voice for protesting farmers, it took the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire to skewer Clarkson, reminding him on camera of an earlier newspaper boast that avoidance of inheritance tax was “critical” in his decision to buy land.

He squirmed and spluttered and purpled with indignation as only the supremely entitled can, but the barb had penetrated and well he knew it. Caught bonny, as we’d say in Aberdeenshire.

Clarkson as a spokesperson for farmers is a bit like Count Dracula acting as a spokesperson for the blood transfusion service. But his grotesque cameo of self-interest aside, farmers certainly need to be spoken up for in the face of the absurd Budget decision to treat small family farmers in the same way as calculating chancers like Clarkson.

Let’s leave aside the lazy tropes about all farmers being rich, or that holding a concern about this policy is somehow “right wing”. The reality of most farms across Scotland is of small family-owned concerns which by any reasonable definition would fall into the category of being “asset rich, but cash poor”.

“Ah!”, say the unsympathetic. “Some farms are worth millions. And anyway, spousal allowances mean inheritance tax relief of up to £3 million will be available. That means only multi-millionaires will be affected!”

Sadly, no. While that £3m might sound like a lot, given that the value of the buildings and equipment needed for a modern farm can itself run into the hundreds of thousands if not millions, it’s not hard to see how even fairly modest farms yielding low incomes will end up getting caught up in this change.

While gifting a farm to children might be an option which fits with succession planning, that means that the farmer gifting it can no longer take an income from the farm. All of which means that the inevitable pressure will be to sell off land to those who can afford it, and to have bigger and bigger farms supporting fewer and fewer families.

That should worry us. Family farming is the backbone of much of rural Scotland and also our wider economy. Agriculture in Scotland generates a gross output of more than £3.3 billion annually and directly employs more than 67,000 people. It provides the literal seed corn for approximately £16bn of output from the Scottish food and drink sector – an industry which itself employs more than 130,000 people.

Those who have worked and improved family-owned land for generations can hardly be described as speculators or land bankers. The notional value of the land that they own is just that – notional. The value that their asset is supposed to have on paper can only be “realised” by selling up and getting out of farming altogether.

Unless you are some kind of free-market fundamentalist who thinks that the market can always satisfactorily meet demand for everything – food included – and that everyone should always pursue maximum personal economic advantage to the exclusion of all other considerations – including the vitality of communities all across rural Scotland – then the problem here should be immediately apparent.

Just in case it isn’t, then consider this: if UK Government policy means the next generation of farmers either can’t afford to meet the tax costs of taking on that land or think the cost of so doing is no longer worth the candle, then their only option will be to sell up, move away and do something else.

Those who then buy them out will be already wealthy large landowners or, more likely, their investment vehicles, or even large food companies. Which would be a strange thing for any self-respecting socialist or environmentalist, however unwitting or well-intentioned, to will as an outcome.

So what to do instead? Well, even the Treasury calculates that the measures will yield just £520m – a fairly paltry return for something which leaves the wealthiest landowners relatively unscathed while inflicting such a high cost elsewhere.

According to tax expert Dan Neidle, anywhere up to one-third of farm estates worth more than £1.5m are owned by wealthy people seeking to avoid inheritance tax by sinking money into farmland and who will even under these measures still get off far too lightly.

The sensible – and therefore genuinely radical thing to do here – would be to pursue the fake farmers and tax avoiders, and to leave the real farmers alone. It’s what any government with a care for the importance of a viable, sustainable rural Scotland would do, and why we’ll need an independent Scotland in order to get that outcome.