The left-wing media wasted no time in trying to discredit the farmers’ protest against Reeves’ tractor tax. Byline Times led the charge with a sanctimonious piece whining about so-called “two-tier reporting.” Their headline wailed: “When Climate Protesters Slow Ambulances They’re Vilified, So Why Are Wealthy Farmers Given a Free Pass?”. Author Josiah Mortimer went on to lament how he supposedly saw “ambulances struggle to make their way through” the tractors when farmers peacefully demonstrated in Whitehall on December 11th last year. Cue the predictable cries of hypocrisy—climate protesters are condemned for blocking emergency vehicles, yet farmers get a pass…
Turns out there’s a simple explanation for why no one took aim at the farmers for delaying ambulances: because they didn’t. An FOI request seen by Guido to London Ambulance Service confirms “there were no recorded incident of delays attributed to the Farmer’s Tractor protest action”. Welsh hill farmer Gareth Wyn Jones tells Guido: “It’s disappointing that there are people so desperate to tarnish farmers with the same brush as groups like Just Stop Oil, that they don’t establish facts before filing their story. Embarrassingly for them, the evidence doesn’t support their view.” Another fact-check fail for Byline Times…
Speaking to Sky News off the back of Rachel Reeves’ Air Passenger Duty hike, Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary said:
“Labour is dependent on those Red Wall seats, and yet every move she makes poisons economic growth and damages the UK’s recovery… it’s the Chancellor who stumbles from policy misstep to policy misstep… I think her policy decisions are incredibly stupid.”