Jeremy Clarkson, 65, has been a vocal critic of the current Labour government for months now, taking particular issue with chancellor Rachel Reeves’s October Budget.
In it, the Chancellor announced plans for a new tax hike on farmers, meaning the amount of agricultural assets a farmer can leave to their children tax-free had been capped at £1million – without the opportunity to share the tax relief with their spouses.
What followed was outrage from the agricultural community, with Clarkson joining thousands of farmers on the streets of Westminster to protest against the proposals.
“Rachel Reeves. I literally daren’t comment,” Clarkson said on X, formerly Twitter when the Budget was announced – and he didn’t stop there.
“We have a new government. It’s turning out to be hopeless,” he later added on the social media site before reaching out to fellow farmers directly, claiming they’d been “shafted” and to “look after yourselves for five short years and this shower will be gone”.
After months of insisting Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour Party U-turn on the plans, fans would be forgiven for thinking the topic would play a prominent part in the upcoming fourth season of Clarkson’s Farm.
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After all, the hit Amazon Prime Video series is no stranger to tackling legislative red tape and local authority clashes during its three-season run so far.
But season four won’t follow suit with the government’s controversial plans. Instead, much of the fourth run will focus on Clarkson’s decision to buy his own pub in the Cotswolds.
Speaking ahead of the show’s return though, Clarkson’s revealed there’s a very good reason why the farmers’ tax row won’t feature.
“That will be covered in season five!” Clarkson reassured fans. “When season four was filmed Labour were still doing pensioners, they hadn’t got round to farming.”
In the time between the Budget and the fourth season’s release, Clarkson hasn’t minced his words about Starmer, Reeves and co in Westminster.
Discussing the changes in one of his newspaper columns, he previously explained: “The truth is, there are no farmers who are happy with what Reeves and her politburo have done.
“And when you see what happens to the countryside and the cost of your food, you won’t be happy either. I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves have a sinister plan.
“They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms. But before they can do that, they have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers.
“That’s why they had a Budget which makes farming nigh on impossible. And that’s why I’ll be in London on the 19th.”
Clarkson’s also attacked Reeves over her changes to the minimum wage given he nows runs his own pub in Asthall, near Burford, Oxfordshire.
“The awful Rachel Reeves is hitting farmers and business people over the head with a hammer. But she’s using a machine gun on publicans,” he fumed in The Sun. He argued changes to the National Minimum Wage would mean “publicans are basically being fined for taking someone off the dole and giving them a job”.
What season four will document are the obstacles, and trials and tribulations facing pub owners in the UK after Clarkson decides to pursue the new business venture.
“Honestly, it was much, much harder,” Clarkson said when asked if running a pub was what he expected. “There are so many things that you discover about opening and running a pub that you wouldn’t even consider.
“When you and I go in a pub, you ask for a pint, you get a pint, you sit down, maybe have some pork scratchings or something, and it doesn’t look that difficult. But there’s an enormous amount of regulation on food hygiene and safety.
“And then you’ve got staffing. You’ve got to try and find chefs, you’ve got to find waitresses, and that’s all very complicated.
“And then it turned out that the pub I bought is in the 14th century. So it’s not on gas, there’s a dribble of electricity and it gets virtually no water at all. If you run a sink, you’re out of water. And if you’re dealing with more than three people a day, which we are, it completely does your head in.”
Rachel Reeves. I literally daren’t comment.
— Jeremy Clarkson (@JeremyClarkson) October 30, 2024
The challenges didn’t stop there. “Then we were trying to open it way too soon. I wanted to try and capture the August Bank Holiday Weekend, which meant that we were trying to open it at the exact same time as I was doing the harvest, so I’d spend all day trying desperately to get the pub open and dealing with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of problems.”
The former Top Gear star added: “Where do you store the lavatory paper? And how do you keep the food chilled? And how do cellars work? And the length of the pipe from the cellar to the bar, and if it’s more than 20 feet, you’re losing 40 pints a week.
“Then you get home absolutely knackered, and you have to get into your tractor and do grain carting through the night. So it’s not really a secret the stress was so bad.”
The first four episodes of season four arrive on Amazon Prime Video on May 23. Episodes five and six arrive the following week and episodes seven and eight the week after that.