Best Of

Frankly if the Tories are looking to win back votes like mine (well probably not mine at this point but many people like me) they need to get off this protesting stuff and onto actual ideas for anyone under the age of 90.

They might be right on the farms thing - but this is an irrelevant issue to the voters in the centre ground.

I am getting strong Labour 2010-2019 vibes. Please don't go down that path.

Voters in the centre ground need to eat, no farms no food

This is silly hyperbole HYUFD.

I am in the cohort of voter that a Tory Party could win over if it would like to try. I am not yet picking up any idea that the Tories opposing this policy is a winner. That may change of course,

As I said, 57% of voters oppose the tractor tax, including 56% of voters who switched to Labour in July but voted Conservative in 2019

https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1858787981303185664

I wasn't trying to claim the policy was popular, just that abolishing it is not a vote winner.

Next up, after Jeremy “I bought my farm in order to avoid inheritance tax“ Clarkson; that well known farmer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who definitely hasn’t bought 5,000 acres in order to avoid inheritance tax: https://x.com/Otto_English/status/1858860636609876027

Really not sure leading with these guys is doing the farming lobby any favours with the wider public? But maybe that’s just my left-liberal bubble speaking.

Unfortunately THE theme of the times is privileged, prosperous amoral chancers persuading the folk at the bottom that somehow they’re on their side. Clarkson (Repton) and Lloyd Webber (Westminster) aren’t a bad fit for that model.
*tugs forelock and taps side of nose at the same time*
Look, they’re rich, smart guys, they must know what they’re talking abaht.

When I was doing aa triathlon at Oundle School earlier in the year, someone in the registration queue commented on the rather majestic aircraft hanger-like sports hall. "Better than my old school," I said.
"Where did you go?" he asked.
"I went to school in Repton.
"Oh", he said, "a posho."
"No," I replied. "I went to school in Repton, not at Repton. I was at primary school there."

What happened next?

He laughed. And then I got changed and swum 600 metres in their rather excellent 50-metre pool, cycled 25km, and ran 5km around their playing fields. Which annoyingly were not as flat as I hoped.

(Indoor 50-metre pools are quite unusual in the UK; most are 25 metre. I was quite looking forward to swimming in it, but the boom had broken down halfway across, so we ended up swimming in one half of the pool, climbing out, then getting into the other half to continue the swim.)

Until recently Bath Uni had a very rare 49.96 m pool. Long story, short version - they built a pool that was exactly 50 m long and forgot about the tiles...

Let me guess, someone set British record in the pool and the swimming authorities measured it afterwards?

Ask Eilish McColgan how that works…
https://www.runnersworld.com/uk/news/a41705232/great-scottish-run-course-was-short-eilish-mccolgan-records-invalidated/

A hundred years back at a friend's school, some boy knocked 20 seconds off the school mile record, which obviously meant the course was too short or the stopwatch holder missed the start. A decade later he broke the world record at the Olympics. Come on Eilish (pre-Britpop).

The left are coming over as extremely "nasty" in their anti-farm comments.

Well, I'm not of the left, but I'm generally sceptical of giving any industry special treatment. And I'm especially sceptical when the special treatment is abused by other groups of people to avoid taxes.

Am I coming over as nasty?

I have no objection to farmers. They are carrying out economic activity, just like shoemakers, bakers, shopkeepers and insurance entrepreneurs.

But I also struggle to see why they should get special treatment.

Which is why I'd suggest replacing inheritance tax with a small annual gross assets levy. You can pass whatever you like onto your children, free of tax, but for people with assets of more than £1m, you need to make an annual payment 0.1% or 0.2% on the excess.

And this would be payable by anyone owning assets in the UK, not just by UK taxpayers. (I.e. tax the asset, not just resident taxpayers.)

It would probably raise almost exactly the same as IHT. It would avoid massive one-off payments. It wouldn't treat different family run businesses differently depending on the industry they were in.

And it wouldn't distort the market by allowing investment managers to buy up farmland solely for the purpose of avoiding IHT.

"This is the recorded track of the Yi Peng 3.
Notice the variation in the track approximately in the centre of my screenshot.
It essentially crosses back and forth over the undersea cable."

https://bsky.app/profile/honestcanadian.bsky.social/post/3lbczc4vfq22r

Isn’t that lovely of them? Must have spotted the issue and raised the alarm.

Looks like the Yi Peng 3 stopped last in Russia

https://gcaptain.com/details-of-baltic-sea-cable-incident-remain-murky-as-danish-coast-guard-shadows-chinese-vessel/

It’s hard to take a read on geopolitics for the next few years (assuming we have them…) isn’t it? Putin in bed with China to this extent makes Trump a very unpredictable actor. And he has notably not criticised Biden’s recent move (unless I have missed it).

I can’t read it any more. But we do know Trump won’t stabilise anything. Doomsday clock must have advanced a tick.

I thought that one of Trump's administration appointments, I forget which one, criticised the Biden decision in quite strong terms.

It was Mike Waltz, the incoming National Security Advisor.

Now, Trump isn't consistent. He could easily reverse-ferret, and maybe the China connection would prompt that. Who can say?

Hope springs eternal.

"After their catastrophic election defeat in July, you might expect to find the Tories fearful about the future. But that’s not the picture revealed by the latest ConservativeHome survey of party members.

An astonishing 38% of those canvassed expect a Conservative majority at the next election — a huge surge of optimism since the immediate aftermath of the party’s landslide defeat, when only 17% expected to win a majority next time. What’s more, this month’s survey shows that a further 18% of members foresee a Conservative-led coalition government and 11% a Conservative minority government. So just a few months after the Labour landslide, most Conservatives expect to be back in power before the end of the decade — which is bold.

https://unherd.com/newsroom/excessive-tory-optimism-ramps-up-pressure-on-kemi-badenoch/

We need less romanticised view of farming as family run small businesses.

As a country the thing we are sorely lacking is productivity growth. We should welcome companies investing in farmland, merging of farms and aiming to improve output.

We should not welcome rich millionaires buying farmland as a tax loophole / hobby and probably reducing output vs. its potential.

The distortion in farmland prices that arises from that also makes it impossible for genuine farmers or farming companies to expand as the yield on the land cost is too low.

Finally, arguing that there are many tax loopholes so we shouldn't close this one isn't the best argument. We should strive to continue to close loopholes or - even better - change it to an annual wealth tax levy.

Unfortuntely improving output generally involves ripping out hedges, spraying poisons and generally fucking over the countryside. At least as we have tried it so far. The Chemical Brothers farmlands writtten about by John Lewis-Stempel really are as close to desert as we are likely to get in this country. The groundis, to all intents and purposes, dead. And it is unsustainable. Hence the work by Gove on soil depletion.