Europe’s ablaze, but not on this side of the English Channel. Paris has been besieged. Dutch politics turned upside down. Yet in the country that gave history the Peasant’s Revolt, the only thing British farmers are flailing is hedgerows. As tractors blockade the chancelleries of Belgium and Germany, why is it that the only traffic gridlock caused by British agriculture is the queue of cars outside Jeremy Clarkson’s café?

Partly, it’s who we are. Battlefields of industrial strife like Peterloo and Orgreave aside, our culture of protest is different. As the comedienne Victoria Wood put it, the British do not have revolutions, preferring instead to write to ‘Points of View’. Roger Scruton, speaking as both philosopher and farmer, noted that – if forced to demonstrate – many of us would limply raise an arm and whisper ‘hesitate!’

With their increasingly gigantic tractors, British farmers could bring Whitehall and Westminster to a standstill with a speed that would make Just Stop Oil orange with envy. However, with the exception of the odd muck-spreader who redecorates his local council headquarters after falling-out over planning, disruptive protests are not the stuff of British farming.

British farmers could bring Westminster to a standstill with a speed that would make Just Stop Oil orange with envy

It is not that farmers lack a cause. British agriculture contends with many of the same cost pressures, environmental red-tape and supermarket rapacity endured by our continental counterparts. In the last year more than 30 farmers have died bringing food to a nation which talks the talk about a fair deal for farmers, without walking the walk. How else can we account for shoppers who pay more for water than milk?

Does British farming lack angry leaders? No. The fuel protests which almost brought the Blair government to its knees in 2000 were led by David Handley, a dairy farmer from Monmouthshire. But the default setting of British farmers is grumbling stoicism, not violent activism. It is impossible to imagine scenes like those in 1990, when French farmers set fire to lorries carrying British lamb, played out on UK motorways.

Is there something in our island story that has rendered our farmers relatively docile? Is there a British equivalent of La France Profonde which, instead of propelling agriculturalists towards the barricades, takes them no further than the Young Farmer’s ploughing match? Some quality of rural life that militates against militancy? This, after all, is the country where the German co-founder of Marxism, Friedrich Engels, described his happiest days as those spent on horseback with the Cheshire Hunt. It is no coincidence, surely, that one of the largest – and most peaceful – protest marches of recent decades was organised by the Countryside Alliance.

The means of production and ownership matter. I paid a visit last month to the Somerset farm of Neil Parish, the former chair of the agriculture select committee, whose days as an MEP gave him an insight into the farming politics of Europe. As we toured his land on the edge of the huge Hinkley Point nuclear power plant, he explained that the absence of primogeniture, the resulting small peasant farms and much higher incidence of collective ownership, gave French farmers their appetite for revolt. ‘They also hate the EU, even though their businesses rely on subsidies from Brussels,’ he told me.

A farmers’ demonstration on the French-German border in Ottmarsheim, eastern France (Credit: Getty images)

For British farmers, perhaps geography explains more than history. This month I will sit down for the annual dinner of my local Growmore Club, set up during World War Two, when U-boats stalked the Atlantic and Britons were enjoined to Dig For Victory. We have an island story, because we are an island. So you would think that the return of rationing in some shops during lockdown ought to have been enough to remind consumers how fragile supply chains imperil food security. The farmer, author and former soldier Jamie Blackett has written about how a drone swarm attack on a couple of our big ports could leave many of our cities three meals away from breakdown.

Sadly, farming writers have been ignored before. Did William Cobden and his damning critique of British agricultural practises 200 years ago, stop Enclosures? No, but then Cobden did not have Instagram. A new generation of angry British farmers, like the tireless Welsh hill farmer Gareth Wyn Jones, are increasingly influential on social media. Last month, James Melville, who hails from a Fife farming family, launched ‘No Farmers No Food’ on Twitter/X. Within a week it had more than 40,000 followers, with Jordan Peterson among those retweeting its posts.

Does this herald a change in the way British farmers make themselves heard? Perhaps in the future there will be less gentle persuasion of ministers by the National Farmer’s Union and more firing up the public to reach for their digital pitch-forks. But does what happens virtually translate into actual action on the streets? Maybe. Already this year there have been small protests by British farmers, notably one by crofters in Aberdeenshire demonstrating against, among other things, the reintroduction of beavers. Non-violent, of course, but a straw in the wind perhaps.