Horse racing can unite with farmers to combat Rachel Reeves

I joined the National Farmers’ Union to lobby members of Parliament last week in Westminster Hall. As a precursor to further, significant action, it felt like a constructive approach to the inheritance-tax debacle that will destroy growth in our agricultural sector.

I then dropped in on the rally in Whitehall, which was not organised by the NFU, attended by at least 20,000 farmers, according to my count. But I could not help but feel that it was a tactical error.

What really struck me about the marchers was how many of them were young, fit, sturdy and good-natured lads and lasses. In stark contrast to the pudgy urbanites they had come to protest to, skulking in their heated offices around Whitehall.

The rally, however, will have sent the wrong messages to Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer. Firstly, because it was organised in a rush by a handful of farmers, the turnout totally underplays the breadth and depth of anger among rural communities. At least 240,000 have signed the NFU petition. And that includes horse racing breeders and trainers.

Secondly, the Government will now be thinking complacently, “Well, if that’s the best the farming community can pull together, we haven’t got much to worry about.”

So, it is now essential, given that Reeves continues to tell the NFU that it is numerically illiterate, that the farmers are motivated and mobilised in a manner that will cause concern, rather than dismissiveness, among Labour MPs. But that task will not be made any easier by the half-hearted bolt that was shot last Tuesday.

One would have thought that it would be the right thing for the British Horseracing Authority to put its full weight and support behind the NFU, because a vast swath of its constituents are aligned and share common interests and concerns.

Activating such support, however, will be like walking through a minefield, as some members on the BHA board will veto such support, on the basis that it may annoy the Government and trigger retaliatory action.

But as the Ukraine war has reminded us, you are either an appeaser, or you stand firm with your allies. And horse racing and farming should be in this together.

Another reason for the BHA not playing a shot is that it is now going through a Biden/Trump handover period from one chairman, Joe Saumarez Smith, to his successor, Lord Allen.

As predicted, Allen is a Labour peer who is not known for his expertise on horse racing. He is, however, a highly regarded businessman who is described by a senior executive at Global Media and Entertainment as “the best chairman you could ever have”.

And, quite frankly, what does it matter if he does not currently know that much about horse racing and its associated political in-fighting? After all, he has been chief executive of ITV, chairman of the Manchester Commonwealth Games and a member of the organising committee of the London Olympic Games. Not to mention chairman of Balfour Beatty and executive chairman of EMI and Granada Media.

Coming into racing with a fresh perspective could be a bonus – and what is there that is so special about racing that he will not pick up in a nano-second? As long as he has a chief executive who knows their way around fetlocks and furlongs, he might just have the vision to rip up the old playbook and try something different.

Allen will have the enormous advantage of being untainted by association with anything to do with horse racing that has p—– off governments in the past 14 years. But how he can use that benefit to pull racing back from falling into a black hole of international commercial disadvantage is another matter.

Although not immediately obvious, driving home the distinction between addictive online casino games and betting on horse racing, particularly on the Tote where there is practically no incentive for the operator to create a repetitive habit, could be low hanging fruit.

But until he takes over in June, his instruction to Saumarez Smith may well be “don’t go firing any rockets at the government before I take over”.