I’m rather annoyed with the National Farmers Union (NFU). A week or so ago, I emailed two people in the NFU media department with details of a story which I first featured in a Daily Sceptic article. I have also emailed the story to three or four NFU regional offices.
In the article, I showed how the inheritance tax on farmers wasn’t really intended to raise much money to cover the supposed £22 billion black hole in the public finances which Starmer and Reeves apparently discovered about five minutes after Labour had been elected, forcing Labour to raise the taxes which five minutes earlier Labour had promised not to raise.
In the article, I explained how investment company Aberdeen (also known as the capital-letter-free, vowel-free ‘abrdn’) had launched its FLAG (Forestry, Land and Agriculture) strategy to spend hundreds of millions of pounds buying up forests and farmland. But Aberdeen had been frustrated in its attempts to buy agricultural land due to much of the land being owned by family farmers. So Aberdeen paid for a report on Britain’s tax system by Left-wing think tank Demos. Surprise surprise, one of the key recommendations of the Aberdeen-sponsored Demos report was to impose inheritance tax on farmers. Given that many farmers are ‘asset rich but cash poor’, this would have forced many farms to sell off land to pay the inheritance tax, thus allowing what Aberdeen called “purely financial owners” like Aberdeen to buy up the land. To help push through this policy, Aberdeen managed to get its head honcho onto a taskforce of business leaders invited in October 2023 to advise Rachel Reeves on what she should be doing when Labour inevitably won the July 2024 General Election.
I had imagined that the media geniuses at the NFU could pick up the story, get a few great quotes from outraged farmers – in particular Jeremy Clarkson – and launch a blitzkrieg on Reeves leading to widespread public fury and to her having to cancel the tax and possibly even resign.
I don’t consider myself anyone special. But, as I have had more than 10 current affairs books published covering such topics as politics, economics, charities, the psychology of selling, universities and non-existent anthropogenic climate change, the least I expected from the NFU media heroes was an acknowledgement of my email to them and of the story. But there has been nothing, zilch, no answer apart from two automated email responses informing me that the person I had contacted was on annual leave. The NFU gets an (astonishing to me) £36 million a year, or thereabouts, mostly from farmers. About £26 million of this goes on NFU staff costs. So I started to wonder whose interests the NFU actually serves – those of farmers, who pay almost £36 million a year to the NFU, or those of NFU employees whose lifestyles are supported by the apparent generosity of Britain’s farmers.
There are many wonderful theories about organisational behaviour. One very simplistic one I have developed is that in any non-commercial organisation – healthcare, charities, government departments, regulators, local councils etc – there are two main types of person:
- the servers – those who see their role as providing whatever services that organisation is set up to provide
- the self-servers – those who see the organisation as a way to advance their own careers, increasing their own importance, power and financial well-being
Given that the first group, the servers, will spend much of their time and effort delivering the service which the organisation should be delivering, this often means that the second group, the self-servers, the group using the organisation to advance its own interests, inevitably accrues power and influence. And the more power and influence the self-servers manage to appropriate, the less likely it is that the organisation will actually do what it was originally set up to do.
Here’s a nice picture of the NFU HQ:
It looks like quite a relaxing place to work. Though there aren’t many cars outside. Perhaps many of the 817 hard-working NFU employees are hard-working from home?
Working from home can be, I realise, quite challenging. By the time you’ve got the kids to school, walked the dogs, read a few emails, browsed some of your favourite websites, had lunch, walked the dogs again, answered a few emails, browsed a few more of your favourite websites, picked up the kids from school and taken them to their various after-school activities – well, there’s not much time left to do the job you’re paid to do. Of course, I have no idea if many or even any NFU staff do actually work from home. But I do know that any serious, professional organisation which understood its original purpose would have acknowledged my email, read the article on the Daily Sceptic website and sent me some form of reply. So my question for Britain’s farmers is: do you really think you’re getting good value for the almost £36 million you fork out to the NFU each year? Or is it time to do a Trump-Musk – admit the NFU is not fit for purpose and that it’s just a self-serving bureaucracy like so many other organisations in Britain today – civil service departments, police, charities, border control, NHS, regulators and so on – scrap the NFU, fire all its employees and start again building a new organisation costing you considerably less money and staffed by people who are genuinely interested in service rather than self-service? Then perhaps we could extend the Trump-Musk treatment to so many other useless, costly, ineffective British bureaucracies?
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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I would observe that they are doing precious little to support the Farmers, perhaps they
just retain an old name but no longer really see that as their core business, they are keener I think to sell insurance and other financial packages to all and sundry. It might be worth looking at who they have big insurance contracts etc with, that might provide a clue as to who they really serve.
I think you’re barking up the wrong tree here. There’s no formal connection between NFU Mutual and the National Farmers Union, although (as helpfully explained by ChatGPT) “NFU Mutual and the NFU collaborate on farming-related issues, and many NFU members choose to insure with NFU Mutual”.
Given the lukewarm NFU support for the grass-roots farmers’ protests, what’s the betting that a UK equivalent of DOGE would discover interesting funding streams coming from Big Farmer?
I expect it’ll be same as organisations like the CBI that receive all kinds of overpriced government favours (consultancies, training contracts etc.) as long as they toe the party-line. After a while, the easy availability of such income streams lessens the significance of the subscription income from their actual members and, as the author described, encourages them to become self-serving.
In the CBI’s case, it got to the point where the senior management ended up going rogue and the whole organisation had to be rebuilt as a shadow of its former self. Perhaps the NFU is due to go the same way?
Let’s bloody hope so.
Thank you, David Craig. Shades of Ofgem, Ofcom and Ofwat – silly me, thinking once upon a time these lumbering, parasitic quangocracies must have been set up in the interest of consumer protection…
…Whereas nowadays morphed into self-serving organs of gov.uk, operated for gov.uk, by gov.uk, to keep gov.uk’s ripped-off citizens in line.
Better not get myself started (again) on that 25% increase in water bill that slithered through our letter flap the other day. Improvements in health… Environmental quality… Climate change… Blah, blah, blah, explains an accompanying letter from “Mike, Customer Services”, headed, “Creating a stronger, greener and healthier North West.”
Plans “independently assessed and aproved by our regulator,” Mike also reassures.
No mention of Oftwat remonstrating with United Utilities and gov.uk, on behalf of bill-paying consumers. Too busy walking the dog, picking up the kids and rattling off vacuous word salads from home.
Thanks Mike, thanks Oftwats. Off with their heads, their overblown billpayer-funded salaries and their word salads. Get rid.
I resigned a couple of years ago as I got fed up with them parroting the government line on global warming and doing FA to stop net zero impacting farmers
How many more of these useless self-serving organisations have we got?
RSPB – which has had absolutely nothing to say on the subject of the bird mincers.
RSPCC – which has had FA to say about the Pakistani Rape Gangs.
British Heart Foundation – wholly supportive of every bit of madness pushed by government throughout the Scamdemic and particularly masks for those suffering from heart disease and which I challenged them on. And they still push the C1984 “vaccines.”
There are of course scores of others. A massive Trump style decimation is required although decimation alone might be too sparing.
NFU – Next to Fucking Useless.
I wonder what James Rebanks thinks of the NFU.
I own a smallholding but no longer farm it, too much form filling and bureaucracy. Last year I asked NFU for a buildings and contents insurance quote.The NFU have an office in my local town and at least 2 staff. Their quote was over five times more that using a price comparison site and the office rarely has anyone in it other than the staff.that seem to have nothing to do.
Your analysis of the servers and self servers is brilliantly simple yet incredibly accurate. Thank you for the clarity of your arguments and your article.
Is the nfu a bit like our usaid? Unaccountable. Well you can see what is happening to the usaid. It is being extinguished, by the new sheriff in town. So, if those running the nfu would like to keep their jobs perhaps they may want to show some accountability, for starters. Our farmers and the country’s taxpayers deserve this at a minimum.