It is hardly advanced political science to observe that governments are more popular when giving people stuff than when taking it away. Junior doctors, who are getting a pay rise, are probably better disposed towards Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves right now than farmers, who are losing a tax break.

Not all farmers. The government says its reforms to agricultural property relief (APR) and business property relief (BPR) will mean inheritance tax is levied on about 500 estates that were previously exempt. Agribusiness lobby groups say many more will be affected, potentially 70,000. Farmers have marched on Westminster to vent their fury.

Dispute over the numbers is largely a function of different ways of measuring the “impact” of a tax. One dead farmer could bequeath assets to many people, not just a spouse and children. All might be affected – financially and emotionally – by the prospect of a bill from the exchequer. None of them will be happy to sell land that they had expected to inherit tax-free.

It is also feasible that the Treasury has not fully modelled the way the two reliefs being adjusted – APR and BPR – work in combination with each other. It may have undercounted the number of farms whose value on paper has risen steeply as land prices have soared. But that latter point could be construed as a defence of the new policy. The extra millions of pounds added to the value of an asset by nothing more innovative or enterprising than the passage of time is exactly the sort of unearned windfall that a fair-minded taxman should be raiding.

Even if the true number of farms affected by the proposed changes is higher than official estimates, it will represent a tiny fraction of the total number of estates annually covered by inheritance tax. The rate will still be half of that paid by non-farmers, and there will be more time to........

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