The political economy of Clarkson’s Farm

Whingeing about the appalling state of things has become the national pastime. And for good reason. A lot has gone wrong in living memory. Nothing works well – if it works at all. You pull a lever and it falls off in your hands – or refers you to an app, which doesn’t work. We seem to be living in a culture in decline. It’s little surprise, then, that reviewers of Clarkson’s Farm – a highlight in the TV schedules from the past year, now streaming on Amazon – have seen in the show confirmation of whatever it is they have to complain about. Clarkson’s Farm is a reality TV show where, as host Jeremy Clarkson knowingly puts it, “everything goes wrong against the clock”. But there is a deeper and somewhat more optimistic message that emerges from Clarkson’s buffoonish attempts to become an amateur farmer, which is that it is a miracle that anything works at all, ever. That they work at all, as well as they do, is something to celebrate and be grateful for as we head into the New Year – something to be mindful of, lest we smash them up too in our modern rage for perfection.

Clarkson’s Farm is now in its fourth season (the fifth is expected in the spring), and is a chronicle, in documentary-style format, of the trials of the former motoring journalist and Top Gear presenter as he tries to run a farm and get it to make money. He acquired the land – largely for tax reasons, as he cheerfully admits – in 2008, and faced a quandary in 2019 when the farmer looking after the estate retired. What to do? Well, why not, he thought, run it himself? A brilliant idea! (For a TV show.) How hard can it be?! (Very and amusingly so, we hope!) That running a farm of course turns out to be a great deal harder than Clarkson’s (performative) ignorance is capable of grasping without taking prolonged instruction in the school of hard knocks is the basis of the joke that runs through the show.

The joke works, is charming, and keeps on giving throughout the four seasons. But there’s far more on offer than the blokeish laughs that lovers of Clarkson’s previous output will be expecting. Along the way Clarkson is seen to learn humility and compassion, the transcendent value of work and community, our absolute dependence on ecosystems that we are all too casually destroying, and is brought face to face with the fact that reality is somewhat broader and more complicated than can be captured in his famously no-nonsense opinions. One of the episodes is even, as its title warns, emotionally harrowing. The show has justly won approval and applause, even from those who may not previously have been exactly enamoured of Clarkson’s on-screen and on-page political persona.

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Clarkson’s Farm is a political parable

The show is also a surprisingly insightful parable that illustrates vividly the truths of political economy. It is, for example, widely believed on the left, and hence in the culture generally given the dominance of left-wing notions among our elites, that nothing could be easier than to make a shed load of money if you just have the good sense to be born into the right family, or through luck or guile or having the right connections have somehow managed to acquire the land and the capital to set up in business. All you would then need to do is hire some hands, exploit them ruthlessly, then sit back and wait for the loot to roll in until you’re as rich as… well, as Jeremy Clarkson.

Foolish left-wing notions are generally mirrored in some form on the right, and sure enough Clarkson is seen to hold a similar view (at least for the purposes of his admittedly contrived show), just without the moralising inflection. The farm he has acquired needs to make money to survive. He has the land and the money on hand to acquire the necessary capital and to hire the hands. So, how hard can it be? Bring it all together, do a bit of “tractoring”, then sit back as the profits roll in. At the end of the first year, after more hard work and stress and disasters than he had bargained for, or that would seem reasonable or fair to anyone who is not also a farmer, Clarkson finds that he has made just £144 – a tiny drop in the ocean of the investment needed for the next year’s cycle.

So there’s one miracle. Despite the weather, the ridiculous regulations, the meddling bureaucrats, the screw-ups, the cost inflation, the price deflation, the fearsomely complicated and pricey yet indispensable technology and machinery, the rocky markets, the risky and highly uncertain investment and production decisions, the appalling pay and non-existent returns, the blizzard of green levies and rules and taxes, the need to deal with the bureaucracy and demonstrate you are complying with the rules, however daft, not to mention a global pandemic and war playing havoc with global supply chains and prices – despite all this, somehow, farmers keep going and put food on our tables.

This is the work of the entrepreneur – to take big risks for highly uncertain future returns, and work day and night to see it through. The rewards if you get it all right and with a bit of luck can be considerable – and well deserved. Consumers benefit just as surely as they do. Those who get them right are those we hear about – and criticise mercilessly. We do not see the many more who – when the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew – fell by the wayside.

Signs and wonders

“Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe,” so let’s consider another miracle, as chronicled in the fourth season. We have all, no doubt, had disappointing experiences with country pubs. We tear ourselves away from the comfort of our couches in the hope of a warm welcome, a crackling fire, good food and drink, and convivial company. What we get instead is an eerily silent and dilapidated old building smelling vaguely of mould, an indifferent welcome, warm beer, and food you’d hesitate to give to the dog. At least there’s the favourite national pastime to fall back on, on the drive back home. But the next time you are unaccountably optimistic enough to give the experience another try, do it with the benefit of a viewing of Clarkson’s Farm and you might, instead of grumbling, consider the miracle that anything is there at all.

Clarkson’s grand idea for bringing in more money is to open a pub that serves food produced on the farm, and on other local farms in the area, and sell other farms’ produce in a shop on the same site. How hard can it be? First, find one of those dilapidated old country pubs and buy it. The news here at least seems good, to start with: there are plenty of them on the market, and more coming up for sale all the time. (Let’s pass over any consideration of why that might be so.) It should be possible to find yourself a nice old building, perhaps a historic inn, in need of some updating and some care, for a bargain price.

True, the bargain might not be quite all it seems when you get a quote from the construction workers and plumbers and decorators needed to get the place shipshape – costs in the industry have soared and remained sky-high since Covid. And this is assuming you can secure the necessary permissions from the planning bureaucrats, which might be tricky, especially if you’re doing something unusual (running a shop and a pub from the same premises), or if the planners hate you for making rude TV programmes about them, or just prefer things to stay as they are than to see anything that smacks of economic development. Then there’s all the equipment needed to run a kitchen, a bar, a restaurant, a shop. The connections to be made to markets, supply chains, the authorities, customers. The advertising, the managers, the chefs, the staff, the accountants. On and on.

There’s also the inevitable moment when your ideas run up against reality. Clarkson wanted to run a local pub that sold only local produce produced on local farms. But what about if your customers want a gin and tonic, or a Coke? What if they want to put some black pepper on their steak (which is available relatively locally, but only if you’re prepared to pay ten times the going rate)? You might have the nice idea of shunning food wholesalers as unnecessary middlemen, but what if your customers want roast beef when the cows are not yet ready for slaughter? What happens when the local slaughterhouse closes down, as they are doing up and down the country because they can’t compete with those run on an industrial scale? What to do when all your staff are fed up with all the crises and are threatening to walk out? How, when you think about it, does anything ever work, ever? Yet, as Clarkson says, the result is so often, as in this case, that “incredible” people “pull off a miracle”. Think on these things the next time you order a pint. Behind the scenes there is chaos. Bless those bringing some order into your life!

"I’ve done a thing!"

The insights you take from Clarkson’s trials are something like those you find in the economics classic I, Pencil by Leonard Read. Just as there’s not a single person in the world who knows how to make a pencil – who knows how to cultivate a forest, harvest the timber, prepare it for manufacture, produce the graphite, the food for the workers, the fuel for the machinery and to mine the raw materials, the craft and processes involved in the making of the finished product, and so on and on – there’s not a single person who knows how to open and run a pub; a mediocre one, let alone one that you’d want to go back to. At every stage of the process, there are processes to coordinate, costs to consider, hard-to-acquire and costly skills, technical and social and commercial, that are necessary, all to be brought together in a timely and organised way that will produce something affordable and pleasing to people skilled in the national pastime. The miracle is not that this is ever done well. The miracle is that it is done at all.

One of Clarkson’s catchphrases is “I’ve done a thing!”, proudly shouted when he achieves some trifling success in a trivial-seeming task that only seems trivial to those who haven’t tried it or spent a lifetime acquiring the kind of tacit knowledge we don’t even know we have when we have it. “I can’t tell you how to do it, you just have to know,” says Kaleb Cooper, Clarkson’s hired hand and later farm manager, helpfully, as he shows Clarkson the ropes in his own world. “Unfortunately, I don’t know,” replies Clarkson, quite reasonably. But what he does know is how to make an entertaining and popular and amusing television show. In his latest, Clarkson has “done a thing” worth celebrating indeed.

One final lesson to be taken from the show is that governments have to find a balance between facilitating and encouraging – or preferably just getting out of the way of – all those involved in doing a thing, and the laws and regulations tied around all of that so that one person’s thing does not too much interfere with or destroy everyone else’s thing. It seems pretty clear, made all the clearer by Clarkson’s ventures, that we are now getting that balance dangerously wrong. Clarkson’s farm is a noble venture that is, like Gulliver, tied down by a million tiny threads. As the show makes clear, each tiny thread in and of itself might seem pretty sensible and necessary. The danger is that as those threads multiply, the activity that produces all of our everyday miracles might yet find itself totally circumscribed. And that would be a true national disaster. Why not have a moan about it over a drink? Keir Starmer remains banned from Clarkson’s pub. Everyone else can book a table at thefarmersdogpub.com.

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