‘This is home’

The victory of Clarkson’s Hawkstone Farmers’ Choir in the Britain’s Got Talent final reflects the spirit of contemporary populism. Substack @generationtalk, 1 June 2026.

With their rousing, emotional ode to farming, the Hawkstone Farmers’ Choir took the Britain’s Got Talent final by storm at the weekend. This larky group of farmers, initially brought together by Jeremy Clarkson to promote his Hawkstone brewing firm, sang about the connections between the past and present, the land and the seasons, ancestors and future generations. ‘This is home, where the roots run deep,’ they sang. One singer was poignantly, heavily pregnant.

It was a sweet performance, and a refreshing change from many of the other acts, with their cringe in-jokes about BGT and Simon Cowell. But it won because the song tapped into a more fundamental sentiment in Britain right now – that we are losing our sense of connection and continuity with the place we call home. This is what Frank Furedi describes as the ‘spirit of populism’ – and over the past couple of years, it is farmers who have most clearly articulated this.

In Britain and across Europe, farmers have organised imaginative and high-profile protests against the various ways in which the actions of political elites are making family farms increasingly unsustainable and precarious. In Britain, the Labour government’s plans to impose a hefty inheritance tax on family farms led to outcry, with the proposals eventually being watered down. In the EU, farmers have driven tractors to Brussels to protest against environmental regulations and trade deals that would cut them out of the market. There is something delicious about watching the wimpy wagers of technocracy being confronted by people toughened up by physical toil and commanding massive pieces of agricultural machinery.

The farmers’ concerns about their livelihoods are shared, in different way, by urban populations. From energy blackouts to water outages, all within a ‘cost of living’ crisis that seems set to become the new normal, Europe’s populations are increasingly finding themselves deprived of basic amenities and confronted with the reality of food, water, and energy insecurity. I live down the road from Whitstable in Kent, where some areas have been without running water for several days, in a grotesque re-run of events and excuses from previous years – with residents and tourists being blamed for drinking too much water in hot weather, and exhorted to stop running baths and filling paddling pools.

With the exception of some dogged constituency MPs, the elite response to all this is blasé – we are expected to suck it up, while the companies responsible focus on paying dividends to their shareholders and, when they get fined by the regulator, add the costs onto our water bills. The latest water crisis has intersected with widespread concerns about the vast swathes of new housing built on farmland and floodplains in East Kent, and plans for a thirsty new data centre to power the AI revolution. While policymakers wallow in magical thinking, it is left to locals to point out that a region incapable of coping with a few days of sun will struggle to meet these new demands.

While the practical implications of these changes are important, more significant is the way that they contribute to the sense that we are losing connection with and control over our communities. This, again, is something that the farmers articulated first, by pointing out that undermining family farms is fundamentally an attack on that community’s way of life: strongly grounded in a sense of time and place, and committed to the continuity of a tradition while innovating to meet the needs of today. Even those who have never come face to face with a cow and would struggle to tell a crop from a weed can empathise with this concern, as we find ourselves being shouldered aside by politicians who regard local communities as backward-looking irritants.

That’s why Jeremy Clarkson, for all his irritating arrogance, has become a hero to farmers and publicans, and gained the admiration and affection of many more of us concerned about the direction of travel. His Amazon show Clarkson’s Farm, beautifully filmed and engagingly narrated, brought attention to the harsh precarity of daily farming life. When he went on to promote the cause of local pubs, Hawkstone beer began cropping up everywhere – probably less because it’s tasty than because publicans felt that somebody finally had their back.

‘We are more than just a choir, and this is more than just a song,’ said a member of Hawkstone’s choir. ‘We are doing it for generations to come.’ That’s the spirit.