Look at the farmers’ protest, and then ask yourself: how will we ever make tax fairer amid such grumbling? | Polly Toynbee

Labour inherited a dire situation that needed desperate change – but powerful lobbies make any tax reform near-impossible

That was a state-of-the-nation image, those thousands of farmers in Whitehall protesting about inheritance tax (IHT). Their little inheritors on toy tractors could hardly have offered a better portrait of a Britain where even modest reforms of wildly irrational tax reliefs are near-impossible. The country loves Old MacDonald and detests IHT.

This is a symbol of the great malaise those same contrary voters feel about the profound unfairness in this most unequal of countries. Few think it’s OK for the top 1% to own almost a quarter of all wealth, or the top 0.1% to take about 60 times more income than their population share, while we are living through the greatest decline in living standards since records began.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist