One of the few truly interesting TV shows of today is “Clarkson’s Farm”, of which I recently watched the third season.
A less obvious upside of the show is how it illustrates many political problems. Below, I will go into some of them.
For those not familiar with the show, it deals with the attempts of Jeremy Clarkson (formerly of “Top Gear” and other motor-/car-centric shows) to run a farm in the U.K., together with various helpers, most notably Kaleb (who actually knows something about farming).
I caution that about a month has gone by between my watching that season and the time of writing, so my memory might be off in detail. The situation with previous seasons is naturally even worse.
The name of this page also plays on “Animal Farm”, which, while very different in nature, is famed for its political parallels.
The most obvious is how Clarkson is a repeated victim of excessive and hindering regulation, arbitrariness from the “council” (a form of local U.K. government), and other types of governmental interference. At points, as depicted from Clarkson’s point of view, it seems as if he might be a victim of outright sabotage on irrelevant grounds, e.g. because he is seen as a nuisance. (While this is not implausible to me, based on what I have seen of politicians, civil servants, and humans in general, we must also consider Hanlon’s Razor and the risk that Clarkson has given a too partisan view of events. It might be telling, however, that Clarkson did score a considerable victory in season 3, which saw a great many council-imposed obstacles removed.)
A particular complication, well matching my own experiences with the German government, is that he has very limited recourse when in disagreement. For instance, he abstained from a planned appeal of some decision in season 2, because it would simply have been too expensive to be justifiable, likely hundreds of thousands of pounds, with an uncertain outcome and a considerable time delay, even were he ultimately successful. (Unfortunately, I am a little vague on the details by now.)
However, the word “excessive” above is important: Some amount of regulation might well be beneficial, or even necessary, e.g. to ensure food safety. The point is not that there is regulation but that the regulation is excessive. (And this is borne out by other sources and matches what is true in many other countries and fields.) Much of regulation brings less value than it does damage, and some regulation might be entirely without value or only serve to favor some special interest group at the cost of everyone else. Consider the attempts to limit Clarkson’s ability to run a shop, serve food, and provide parking opportunities on his own land. Maybe, e.g, there are some benefits of a non-obvious nature to preventing parking, but they have to be measured against the disadvantages that arise for the land-owner and the violation of his rights that ensue—and in the case at hand, any such benefits seems drowned by the disadvantages. (While the case might be different, if Clarkson had simply turned his entire farm into a commercial car park. Note that an indirect benefit for some locals might be argued, in that some disapprove of the amount of traffic caused by the farming celebrity, and that the lack of parking could block the traffic, but that applying such arguments would amount to an abuse of a regulation to achieve an unrelated outcome.)
A partial problem is that it is hard for an outsider to judge what regulations and whatnots carry what justification and when the word “excessive” applies. Corresponding care should be taken when judging individual regulations. (However, there can be little doubt that there is too much regulation overall in both U.K. farming and in a great many other fields and countries.)
A repeated issue is that this-and-that simply costs too much relative the value added and what it reasonably should cost (as opposed to just what the budget allows, which is a different issue).
This in particular with the cost of construction, which reflects a growing problem in the Western world and is, likely, largely government caused, e.g. through (again) excessive regulation, distortions of incentives, sabotage of market mechanisms, and similar.
I have repeatedly, strictly as a thought experiment, toyed with the idea of starting my own construction company, as there simply must be a better way to do things, e.g. by trying to deliver more value by more productive work than the typical German construction company does. (A pervasive other problem being a poor attitude, lack of professionalism, undue delays, and whatnot. For instance, near where I live, there is a regular apartment house that has been in renovation since before COVID—or, likely, several times the time it originally took to build the same house from the ground up.) However, I fear that any such attempt would ultimately fail exactly through the strong government and other interventionism that would hamper even those with a better attitude. Note e.g. the problems caused by various German quasi-guilds, their anti-competitive influence, and the additional barriers of entry that they bring.
Other deterrents against moving from thought experiment to practical experiment include that I would have great troubles finding enough capital for a serious attempt (note e.g. the high cost per year of even a single employee—to a considerable part because of the government) and the strong suspicion that I would run into similar problems of misestimation that Clarkson does, just in another field. Working around the capital issue by beginning as a small one-man business is certainly not an option for someone without the right background.
To this might be added other mechanisms of a pervasive nature, e.g. that government-controlled inflation, even before the COVID-countermeasure era, has driven prices up in an unnecessary manner or prevented them from sinking as production methods improved, that high taxes cut severely into disposable income, and similar. The inflation-driving mishandling of both the COVID-countermeasure era and the parallel energy-supply issues has done considerably further damage when we compare 2024 with 2019, but form more of a special case.
To some degree, Clarkson, himself, illustrates problems with politicians—except that he does what he does on a small farm owned by him and at his own cost and risk, while the politicians do so on all farms (literal and metaphorical), regardless of ownership, at the risk of others, etc. To boot, they usually do so without even bothering with a test run on a single farm before pushing something on all farms.
Most notably, Clarkson has a great many ideas that might appear brilliant but which simply do not pan out—and often fail to pan out because he is too naive about the complications involved, including costs, risks, and variations on the “spillage” theme. A great many politicians match this to a tee, except for often suggesting things that are much more obviously unlikely to work, e.g. because they have always failed in the past (and, of course, except for factors like taking risks with someone else’s money). Kamala Harris recent drive for price controls is a good example of something that might seem promising to the highly naive but which the non-naive know will do more harm than good. Ditto, if not to the same extreme degree, many of the suggestions pushed by the new Labour government in the U.K.
A recurring issue is how Clarkson (like many politicians) begins to implement something before he has done sufficient research. For instance, at one point in season 3, he finds himself stumped when trying to bring a large machine through a too narrow gate. Had he bothered with something as simple as checking the gates, roads, and whatnots in advance, he could have made better decisions, be it through abstaining from the use of that machine (likely, a rental) or through finding means of bringing it to its intended place of work with less hassle and fewer delays during the period of rental. In many other cases, the research might have been as simple as asking someone in the know whether this-or-that would be likely to work, bring a profit, whatnot before forging ahead.
However, in terms of a “test run” and the politicians’ failure to make one, Clarkson often has the excuse that a one-season attempt to do something on one farm could be viewed as exactly a test run. Going on an even smaller scale might sometimes have been a good idea, but, critically, not always. A smaller test of mushrooms, e.g., might not have made sense. In other cases, a smaller test might have been misleading through hiding complications or not showing sufficient effects. It might e.g. be that having a flock of sheep reveals something that having one or two sheep does not.
Moreover, a larger attempt might make for more entertaining or engaging television, which is a concern of a type that a politician cannot legitimately and ethically consider with public policy (notwithstanding that many do).
To boot, the maybe most promising ideas (were it not for that council...) only work because of a special circumstance, namely that Clarkson is a famous guy with a TV show. Consider his shop: He is by no means unique in having a farm with a shop, but few other farms can draw on the additional customers brought in by having that shop feature on a TV show and it would be foolish to recommend that other farmers also run a shop in a blanket manner—this the more so as every additional shop could spread custom thinner. A politician, however, might well argue that if a (real or metaphorical) shop works for Clarkson, then shops are the way to go, we should encourage the running of shops, and we should do so by either handing out government subsidies (at the cost of the tax-payers) or by making shops mandatory.
A dispute between Clarkson and Kaleb provides a particularly telling example of a politician’s mentality: For season 3, they have a bet on who will earn more money for the farm, Kaleb from the regular farming, over which he has been put in charge as newly appointed farm manager, or Clarkson from various other potential sources of income, e.g. the harvesting of wild berries and the aforementioned mushrooms. At some point, Clarkson had a portion of the farm under Kaleb’s control “wild farmed” in the hope of an extracurricular gain. Afterwards, when comparing costs and profits, he tried to stick Kaleb with the cost for this wild farming because the area at hand was Kaleb’s, never mind Kaleb’s protests, that the decision was Clarkson’s, and that Clarkson was the one who stood to gain—typical politician thinking. A saner system might e.g. have treated the event as a rental, where Clarkson “rents” the field from Kaleb, pays all other costs, and reaps all profits (should there be any), leaving Kaleb with a positive “ledger entry” for the rent. (Of course, many politicians would deliberately avoid such scenarios, e.g. because it seems too “Capitalist” or because they can simply force their will upon others—profits for me, costs for thee.)
In the defense of Clarkson, he might merely have attempted to spice up the show a little, as opposed to being an idiot. This, in particular, as (a) Kaleb still won the bet, (b) Clarkson ultimately owned the entire farm, even the parts managed by Kaleb, implying that the money at stake were only the small amount of the bet, not the much larger sums involved with the actual farming or the specific “ledger entry” under dispute.
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