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...
There are quite a number of 50m pools now - I was surprised when I looked it up.
Wikipedia lists more than 50, and that does not include Oundle or extra-long lidos.
An account of the regnum * of Justin Welby, by the Church Mouse (whom some may recall as writing for the Indy, and publishing a well-received, idiosyncratic book called "Beard Theology: A holy history of hairy faces.").
Detailed, and probably includes some things that will not be familiar.
I note that the Government itself is sensible enough to realise it can’t win a popularity contest with Jeremy Clarkson. Its outriders, unfortunately…
I mean, very clearly none of them have ever watched Clarkson’s Farm or understand what it is about. “He bought the farm without intending to farm it” is not news to the millions who have: it’s the whole sodding point! The whole programme is him saying “I subsidise this with all my other stuff - look how shit life is for proper farmers, how little they can make, and how much we need them”.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
Clarkson gave a helpful interview saying exactly that.
Instead of the original tax dodge he will now have to invest time and money in a different tax dodge, and he is quote upset about it
Or rather his accountant will. The suffering. Will no one think of the accountants?
Or freezer repair people!!
As I think I heard Clarkson tell Victoria Darbyshire he would just now set up a trust and try and live seven years and that his daughter has already said 'you will seven years, although it might be in a deep freezer by end of it'.
Abolishing IHT altogether and introducing a very low rate assets tax would be a simpler and less objectionable way to deal with the distortion that the exemption of agricultural land from IHT created, compared to the policy that Labour introduced.
Imagine the screaming from the large landowners. IHT is bad enough: an asset tax! Mon dieu!
Cutting IHT to a level payed by the monarch and on public sector pensions eg 0% could be payed for by reducing the carbon capture and storage budget by 50%.
As an aside: this simply isn’t true.
I completely agree that carbon capture is a complete waste of money at the current time, with far better options available for carbon reduction if that’s the government’s goal, but the annoucement was for £22billion over 25 years, so less than a £1billion / annum.
IHT raises ~£7.5billion / annum.
I shall find other cuts! Foreign aid should only be paid after IHT is abolished.
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...
I sometimes go swimming in Jesus Green Lido in Cambridge. That is 91 metres long (or 100 metres...) but fairly narrow. I'm there in my wetsuit, and some hardy souls are swimming in just their swimsuit.
Peterborough Lido is much better. 50 metres long, and still outdoors, but heated to a relatively tolerable temperature. Goodness knows how much that costs to heat.
She’s utterly toast if we have a bad/freezing winter and the papers are full of stories of the granny who froze to death because Reeves took away her winter fuel allowance.
She's doomed anyway. That hair colour change was symbolic, a sign of early panic. We've had the endless lies on her CV, now the farming thing, following the WFA debacle, the pathetic fibs about the £22bn black hole, the economy is already tottering towards recession, her pro-growth policies are already failing
If she isn't booted I predict that in about 18 months, when it is obvious the growth is not coming and her insane tax proposals are actually costing money, not making it, Starmer will sacrifice her to save his own skin
But presumably Starmer knows and is on board with her agenda? He can't say "the well-known economist Rachel Reeves told me her tax rises would make us richer but it turned out to be a crock of shit, so I have sacked her" because it was obvious to the most casual observer that what was being proposed was not a pro-growth agenda and he would look like a blithering idiot to have ever thought otherwise.
EDIT: Also, I'm surprised few are as discomfited as me by the hair colour change. Of course, she's free to do it - just as she's free to, say, start wearing a beret. But it's the behaviour of a teenager or someone else self-obsessed. It's just... odd.
Farmers are economically rational. If the price of farmland shoots up, such that the yields they earn on farming are low compared to what they would get if they sell their farm... then they'll sell their farm.
The IHT loophole encourages farmers to sell their farms to wealthy investment fund managers.
Doesn't forestry also count as agriculture for that purpose?
Abolishing IHT altogether and introducing a very low rate assets tax would be a simpler and less objectionable way to deal with the distortion that the exemption of agricultural land from IHT created, compared to the policy that Labour introduced.
Imagine the screaming from the large landowners. IHT is bad enough: an asset tax! Mon dieu!
Cutting IHT to a level payed by the monarch and on public sector pensions eg 0% could be payed for by reducing the carbon capture and storage budget by 50%.
As an aside: this simply isn’t true.
I completely agree that carbon capture is a complete waste of money at the current time, with far better options available for carbon reduction if that’s the government’s goal, but the annoucement was for £22billion over 25 years, so less than a £1billion / annum.
IHT raises ~£7.5billion / annum.
I shall find other cuts! Foreign aid should only be paid after IHT is abolished.
About 1/3 of Foreign Aid (~5bn from 15bn) has aiui in recent years been carpetbagged to pay for housing immigrants whom the previous Government had not been processing.
There's a lot that can be done just by unwinding the Hail Mary passes.
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...
There are quite a number of 50m pools now - I was surprised when I looked it up.
Wikipedia lists more than 50, and that does not include Oundle or extra-long lidos.
Yeah, but the problem is that there's only 50. Leaving outdoors ones, the nearest to me that is accessible to mere plebs is probably Corby or Hitchin.
There's a 50=metre pool planned to be built in the new Cambridge Eddington development, but whether that happens is another matter. A 25-metre pool was 'planned' for our village as well. After 25 years it's pretty much been forgotten about. Though as Eddington's the university's baby, they'll probably find a way for the council to fund it from the money that could build a smaller pool here...
So I am told by a pollster that when the public are told the value of the IHT exemptions for farmers the support for the farmers craters.
I was right, the voters do not like people getting unjustifiable tax exemptions.
This government really is quite spectacularly bad at the PR side of things.
So was the last. Maybe it’s impossible these days for a government to be on top of things fully and all the time from a PR perspective as there are so many millions of “voices” on social media and new media not just old media who are pulling things apart and critiquing.
We might just get used to the absolute facts we never truly saw that governments are incompetent by nature under the skin.
True: when the media environment is dominated by people who are massively incentivised to maximise eyeballs at all costs then any hope of nuance goes out the window.
Which is why you need to get your single sentance clickbait lines workshopped /before/ you announce a policy!
Oh, and the other point the Government is missing is that they have now unapologetically extended IHT to some assets, so many people are thinking “will mine be next?”.
I was quite impressed with Badenoch's stirring speech about downtrodden workers and the nation's indebtedness for their labours
The miners strike might have turned out so differently if we'd had Kemi on board.
Kemi can also back the miners now too after Ed Miliband scrapped what would have been the last mine left in the UK in Cumbria
Thatcher closing hundreds of uneconomic mines in the dash for gas, was genius. Miliband closes an uneconomic mine and he's a traitor.
FWIW as the grandson of a miner they would both be right to have closed the lot of them.
Wilson closed more mines than Thatcher. Labour are now the enemies of former miners as much as farmers, they are the party of the public sector woke and welfare claimants, they abandoned being the party of the working class long ago
I was quite impressed with Badenoch's stirring speech about downtrodden workers and the nation's indebtedness for their labours
The miners strike might have turned out so differently if we'd had Kemi on board.
Kemi can also back the miners now too after Ed Miliband scrapped what would have been the last mine left in the UK in Cumbria
Thatcher closing hundreds of uneconomic mines in the dash for gas, was genius. Miliband closes an uneconomic mine and he's a traitor.
FWIW as the grandson of a miner they would both be right to have closed the lot of them.
I think the last four decades has shown that Thatcher was absolutely correct in the dash for gas. But that does not mean that one coal mine for very specific purposes would not be very useful and wise.
It's fun to hear people bemoaning the fate of the miners, and calling for this mine not to happen...
Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.
When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.
I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.
As we need family farms for our food.
Labour could have kept the exemption for 3 generations or more of family farmers but refused as it is a measure of socialist class war
I don't understand.
Is corn from a family owned farm different to corn from a farm owned by a company?
A family owned farm will produce more food than a field sold to build houses.
Oh, so farmers never sell land to developers.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up then.
It's about stewardship.
Would you prefer Farmer Tess or Monsanto in charge of the corporate.
Plus re your previous post, game is one of the most natural foods to eat. Nice, free range life then shot out of the sky. And delicious.
And of course your ex colleagues bought farms because as well as the tax there is the status. And I appreciate you can switch round the priority of those but many City boys want to be Country Gents. The tax is just the icing on the cake.
OK.
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
She’s utterly toast if we have a bad/freezing winter and the papers are full of stories of the granny who froze to death because Reeves took away her winter fuel allowance.
She's doomed anyway. That hair colour change was symbolic, a sign of early panic. We've had the endless lies on her CV, now the farming thing, following the WFA debacle, the pathetic fibs about the £22bn black hole, the economy is already tottering towards recession, her pro-growth policies are already failing
If she isn't booted I predict that in about 18 months, when it is obvious the growth is not coming and her insane tax proposals are actually costing money, not making it, Starmer will sacrifice her to save his own skin
But presumably Starmer knows and is on board with her agenda? He can't say "the well-known economist Rachel Reeves told me her tax rises would make us richer but it turned out to be a crock of shit, so I have sacked her" because it was obvious to the most casual observer that what was being proposed was not a pro-growth agenda and he would look like a blithering idiot to have ever thought otherwise.
EDIT: Also, I'm surprised few are as discomfited as me by the hair colour change. Of course, she's free to do it - just as she's free to, say, start wearing a beret. But it's the behaviour of a teenager or someone else self-obsessed. It's just... odd.
She’s utterly toast if we have a bad/freezing winter and the papers are full of stories of the granny who froze to death because Reeves took away her winter fuel allowance.
She's doomed anyway. That hair colour change was symbolic, a sign of early panic. We've had the endless lies on her CV, now the farming thing, following the WFA debacle, the pathetic fibs about the £22bn black hole, the economy is already tottering towards recession, her pro-growth policies are already failing
If she isn't booted I predict that in about 18 months, when it is obvious the growth is not coming and her insane tax proposals are actually costing money, not making it, Starmer will sacrifice her to save his own skin
But presumably Starmer knows and is on board with her agenda? He can't say "the well-known economist Rachel Reeves told me her tax rises would make us richer but it turned out to be a crock of shit, so I have sacked her" because it was obvious to the most casual observer that what was being proposed was not a pro-growth agenda and he would look like a blithering idiot to have ever thought otherwise.
EDIT: Also, I'm surprised few are as discomfited as me by the hair colour change. Of course, she's free to do it - just as she's free to, say, start wearing a beret. But it's the behaviour of a teenager or someone else self-obsessed. It's just... odd.
Maybe she was promised a new matching wardrobe by a certain obliging donor...
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...
There are quite a number of 50m pools now - I was surprised when I looked it up.
Wikipedia lists more than 50, and that does not include Oundle or extra-long lidos.
Makes all Labour's squaking about "callous Tory bastards!!" seem rather hollow...
Interesting. It doesn't take into account the increased uptake of Pension Credit, which will do a lot to mitigate that figure. It's also relative poverty, which PBers tend to dismiss in other circumstances, and rounded to the nearest 50,000.
For context, removing the two-child limit would bring 540,000 children out of absolute poverty.
Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.
When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.
I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.
As we need family farms for our food.
Labour could have kept the exemption for 3 generations or more of family farmers but refused as it is a measure of socialist class war
I don't understand.
Is corn from a family owned farm different to corn from a farm owned by a company?
A family owned farm will produce more food than a field sold to build houses.
Oh, so farmers never sell land to developers.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up then.
It's about stewardship.
Would you prefer Farmer Tess or Monsanto in charge of the corporate.
Plus re your previous post, game is one of the most natural foods to eat. Nice, free range life then shot out of the sky. And delicious.
And of course your ex colleagues bought farms because as well as the tax there is the status. And I appreciate you can switch round the priority of those but many City boys want to be Country Gents. The tax is just the icing on the cake.
OK.
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
I was thinking about this the other day in relation to how do we encourage firms not to just sell up at the first opportunity. One good scheme for small businesses (although I haven't check if it changed in the budget) is that it is much more tax efficient to sell your business to a employee buy-out than sell to outsiders.
I was quite impressed with Badenoch's stirring speech about downtrodden workers and the nation's indebtedness for their labours
The miners strike might have turned out so differently if we'd had Kemi on board.
Kemi can also back the miners now too after Ed Miliband scrapped what would have been the last mine left in the UK in Cumbria
Thatcher closing hundreds of uneconomic mines in the dash for gas, was genius. Miliband closes an uneconomic mine and he's a traitor.
FWIW as the grandson of a miner they would both be right to have closed the lot of them.
He didn't scrap a mine, he refused permission for a new one that clearly would have been profitable (otherwise someone wouldn't have been desperate to build it) and met all the current bollocks that these projects have to meet.
He is a repellent toad who doesn't want the UK to succeed.
Most Governments are made and/or broken by the relationship between the occupants of No.10 and No.11 Downing Street. Indeed, I'd argue the fragility of that relationship has been one of the biggest problems affecting British government and governance over the past 70 years - it's of course less the relationship between the individuals but between the Prime Minister's Office and HM Treasury.
Chancellors come in two flavours - the political and the technocratic but as history tells us both kinds can get into poor relationships with the Prime Minister. Too often political alliances forged either outside or at different points inside Govenrment can sour when it comes to the very top jobs and this has, I think, been accentuated by the decline in the influence and importance of the Foreign Secretary role.
I don't know if the Starmer/Reeves relationship can or will survive the reality of Government - it wouldn't be the first that didn't - look at Major/Lamont and Truss/Kwarteng to name but two and you can throw in Blair/Brown and Wilson/Callaghan if you want a bit of balance. The idea the Chancellor can be a human shield for the Prime Minister and pace the scapegoat be sent into the wilderness with the Government's sins on his or her back isn't an original one either.
Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.
When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.
I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.
As we need family farms for our food.
Labour could have kept the exemption for 3 generations or more of family farmers but refused as it is a measure of socialist class war
I don't understand.
Is corn from a family owned farm different to corn from a farm owned by a company?
A family owned farm will produce more food than a field sold to build houses.
Oh, so farmers never sell land to developers.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up then.
It's about stewardship.
Would you prefer Farmer Tess or Monsanto in charge of the corporate.
Plus re your previous post, game is one of the most natural foods to eat. Nice, free range life then shot out of the sky. And delicious.
And of course your ex colleagues bought farms because as well as the tax there is the status. And I appreciate you can switch round the priority of those but many City boys want to be Country Gents. The tax is just the icing on the cake.
OK.
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
Can we agree that farming is different from most other businesses in that the most you can ever get out of it depends on the max yield of your land, whereas if you are successful with a “normal” business you can expand well beyond whatever footprint you started with? At least, that’s true of family farms as opposed to industrialised ones.
They are effectively cottage industries that we decide to retain, as a policy decision, to not just make food but to preserve the countryside the way we like it as a public good. We can change that policy if you like, but you have to recognise that you’re changing something many of us like.
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.
I'm not remotely left-liberal, but I don't get the sentimental drivel people spout about farming, any more than I did about coal mines in the 90s. Like any other marginal industry, if farmers can't survive without their epic tax breaks and subsidies they should go under, to allow the labour, land and capital to be used more efficiently by others. And small farms that benefit from the IHT break are exactly the least efficient ones that should go under first. Property doesn't suddenly become a national treasure because you plant crops or whatever on it. The world isn't short of food.
Having lower IHT is a good idea, but we should lower the overall rate rather than give out undeserved bungs to special interest groups, many of whom just use it as a tax dodge anyway.
Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.
When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.
I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.
As we need family farms for our food.
Labour could have kept the exemption for 3 generations or more of family farmers but refused as it is a measure of socialist class war
I don't understand.
Is corn from a family owned farm different to corn from a farm owned by a company?
A family owned farm will produce more food than a field sold to build houses.
Oh, so farmers never sell land to developers.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up then.
It's about stewardship.
Would you prefer Farmer Tess or Monsanto in charge of the corporate.
Plus re your previous post, game is one of the most natural foods to eat. Nice, free range life then shot out of the sky. And delicious.
And of course your ex colleagues bought farms because as well as the tax there is the status. And I appreciate you can switch round the priority of those but many City boys want to be Country Gents. The tax is just the icing on the cake.
OK.
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
Can we agree that farming is different from most other businesses in that the most you can ever get out of it depends on the max yield of your land, whereas if you are successful with a “normal” business you can expand well beyond whatever footprint you started with? At least, that’s true of family farms as opposed to industrialised ones.
They are effectively cottage industries that we decide to retain, as a policy decision, to not just make food but to preserve the countryside the way we like it as a public good. We can change that policy if you like, but you have to recognise that you’re changing something many of us like.
And as I said earlier, farms are a massive part of our environment. The smaller farmers are much more likely to look after that environment sanely than large agribusinesses.
She’s utterly toast if we have a bad/freezing winter and the papers are full of stories of the granny who froze to death because Reeves took away her winter fuel allowance.
She's doomed anyway. That hair colour change was symbolic, a sign of early panic. We've had the endless lies on her CV, now the farming thing, following the WFA debacle, the pathetic fibs about the £22bn black hole, the economy is already tottering towards recession, her pro-growth policies are already failing
If she isn't booted I predict that in about 18 months, when it is obvious the growth is not coming and her insane tax proposals are actually costing money, not making it, Starmer will sacrifice her to save his own skin
But presumably Starmer knows and is on board with her agenda? He can't say "the well-known economist Rachel Reeves told me her tax rises would make us richer but it turned out to be a crock of shit, so I have sacked her" because it was obvious to the most casual observer that what was being proposed was not a pro-growth agenda and he would look like a blithering idiot to have ever thought otherwise.
EDIT: Also, I'm surprised few are as discomfited as me by the hair colour change. Of course, she's free to do it - just as she's free to, say, start wearing a beret. But it's the behaviour of a teenager or someone else self-obsessed. It's just... odd.
You've got a thing about this hair colour change, haven't you? My better half, a distinguished and beautiful lady of a certain age, and far from a self-obsessed teenager, has had blonde, white, red and brown hair in the time I've known her - each one splendid in its own way. It's freedom of expression.
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.
I'm not remotely left-liberal, but I don't get the sentimental drivel people spout about farming, any more than I did about coal mines in the 90s. Like any other marginal industry, if farmers can't survive without their epic tax breaks and subsidies they should go under, to allow the labour, land and capital to be used more efficiently by others. And small farms that benefit from the IHT break are exactly the least efficient ones that should go under first. Property doesn't suddenly become a national treasure because you plant crops or whatever on it. The world isn't short of food.
Having lower IHT is a good idea, but we should lower the overall rate rather than give out undeserved bungs to special interest groups, many of whom just use it as a tax dodge anyway.
If you want to know what life would be like in the country without the smaller farms, visit some bits of America. Retaining smaller family farms is a shrewd policy choice. Ask the French.
Abolishing IHT altogether and introducing a very low rate assets tax would be a simpler and less objectionable way to deal with the distortion that the exemption of agricultural land from IHT created, compared to the policy that Labour introduced.
Imagine the screaming from the large landowners. IHT is bad enough: an asset tax! Mon dieu!
Cutting IHT to a level payed by the monarch and on public sector pensions eg 0% could be payed for by reducing the carbon capture and storage budget by 50%.
As an aside: this simply isn’t true.
I completely agree that carbon capture is a complete waste of money at the current time, with far better options available for carbon reduction if that’s the government’s goal, but the annoucement was for £22billion over 25 years, so less than a £1billion / annum.
IHT raises ~£7.5billion / annum.
Something I can't prove but strongly suspect:
Most of us don't really internalise/grock the difference between capital and revenue spending. That big X as a one-off can be cheaper than smaller x every year forever.
And that misconception explains most of the pickle that humanity in general and Britain especially, is in.
Makes all Labour's squaking about "callous Tory bastards!!" seem rather hollow...
Interesting. It doesn't take into account the increased uptake of Pension Credit, which will do a lot to mitigate that figure. It's also relative poverty, which PBers tend to dismiss in other circumstances, and rounded to the nearest 50,000.
For context, removing the two-child limit would bring 540,000 children out of absolute poverty.
But Labour has kept that two-child limit in place. Choosing to keep 540,000 children in poverty.
Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.
When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.
I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.
As we need family farms for our food.
Labour could have kept the exemption for 3 generations or more of family farmers but refused as it is a measure of socialist class war
I don't understand.
Is corn from a family owned farm different to corn from a farm owned by a company?
A family owned farm will produce more food than a field sold to build houses.
Oh, so farmers never sell land to developers.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up then.
It's about stewardship.
Would you prefer Farmer Tess or Monsanto in charge of the corporate.
Plus re your previous post, game is one of the most natural foods to eat. Nice, free range life then shot out of the sky. And delicious.
And of course your ex colleagues bought farms because as well as the tax there is the status. And I appreciate you can switch round the priority of those but many City boys want to be Country Gents. The tax is just the icing on the cake.
OK.
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
I sort of disagree. It is valuable to the nation to have people invested in the long term of farms. There's a biodiversity benefit. Hedgerows, and that kind of stuff. Vague stuff about green and pleasant land. Actual efficiency about getting food out of the ground shouldn't really be the #1 concern. Actual economic efficiency here shouldn't necessarily be the #1 concern.
But I do agree (I think) that the current system which, I think, has been set up to encourage that outcome, isn't necessarily optimal at delivering that outcome.
You've posted that at this time for at least the last 3 days. You have obviously been out of the country so much that you have forgotten it lasts until approximately February
Makes all Labour's squaking about "callous Tory bastards!!" seem rather hollow...
Interesting. It doesn't take into account the increased uptake of Pension Credit, which will do a lot to mitigate that figure. It's also relative poverty, which PBers tend to dismiss in other circumstances, and rounded to the nearest 50,000.
For context, removing the two-child limit would bring 540,000 children out of absolute poverty.
But Labour has kept that two-child limit in place. Choosing to keep 540,000 children in poverty.
Well quite. I think they deserve much more opprobrium for that than WFP means-testing.
Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.
When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.
I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.
As we need family farms for our food.
Labour could have kept the exemption for 3 generations or more of family farmers but refused as it is a measure of socialist class war
I don't understand.
Is corn from a family owned farm different to corn from a farm owned by a company?
A family owned farm will produce more food than a field sold to build houses.
Oh, so farmers never sell land to developers.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up then.
It's about stewardship.
Would you prefer Farmer Tess or Monsanto in charge of the corporate.
Plus re your previous post, game is one of the most natural foods to eat. Nice, free range life then shot out of the sky. And delicious.
And of course your ex colleagues bought farms because as well as the tax there is the status. And I appreciate you can switch round the priority of those but many City boys want to be Country Gents. The tax is just the icing on the cake.
OK.
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
Can we agree that farming is different from most other businesses in that the most you can ever get out of it depends on the max yield of your land, whereas if you are successful with a “normal” business you can expand well beyond whatever footprint you started with? At least, that’s true of family farms as opposed to industrialised ones.
They are effectively cottage industries that we decide to retain, as a policy decision, to not just make food but to preserve the countryside the way we like it as a public good. We can change that policy if you like, but you have to recognise that you’re changing something many of us like.
And as I said earlier, farms are a massive part of our environment. The smaller farmers are much more likely to look after that environment sanely than large agribusinesses.
Ever been to or worked on a farm? I wouldn't say environmentally conscious is an apt description. Plenty of dodgy things go on that whilst probably not prosecutable are clearly not benefiting the environment. IME farmers are businessman first and the stewarding comes when the farm is financially secure.
I'm just reading a document online that says: "The ignition of a 1-kg plutonium button requires heating 50-60 seconds with a welding torch. Spread of the burning reaction to cover the button may take 10-15 minutes with the temperature reaching over 800 "C."
Just in case anyone has a handy 1-kg Plutonium button lying around on their desk.
It's a little crazy to think that people have done experiments to see how plutonium burns and self-ignites in various forms and conditions.
Abolishing IHT altogether and introducing a very low rate assets tax would be a simpler and less objectionable way to deal with the distortion that the exemption of agricultural land from IHT created, compared to the policy that Labour introduced.
Imagine the screaming from the large landowners. IHT is bad enough: an asset tax! Mon dieu!
Cutting IHT to a level payed by the monarch and on public sector pensions eg 0% could be payed for by reducing the carbon capture and storage budget by 50%.
As an aside: this simply isn’t true.
I completely agree that carbon capture is a complete waste of money at the current time, with far better options available for carbon reduction if that’s the government’s goal, but the annoucement was for £22billion over 25 years, so less than a £1billion / annum.
IHT raises ~£7.5billion / annum.
Something I can't prove but strongly suspect:
Most of us don't really internalise/grock the difference between capital and revenue spending. That big X as a one-off can be cheaper than smaller x every year forever.
And that misconception explains most of the pickle that humanity in general and Britain especially, is in.
There is an example of that with the Mayoral plans for not HS2 between Birmingham and Manchester - their plan is to use the old fashioned way to lay the track because it's cheaper.
Yep it's cheaper short term (the initial development costs are lower) but the extra maintenance costs means things even at after 10 years and subsequently the short term savings cost more money...
She’s utterly toast if we have a bad/freezing winter and the papers are full of stories of the granny who froze to death because Reeves took away her winter fuel allowance.
She's doomed anyway. That hair colour change was symbolic, a sign of early panic. We've had the endless lies on her CV, now the farming thing, following the WFA debacle, the pathetic fibs about the £22bn black hole, the economy is already tottering towards recession, her pro-growth policies are already failing
If she isn't booted I predict that in about 18 months, when it is obvious the growth is not coming and her insane tax proposals are actually costing money, not making it, Starmer will sacrifice her to save his own skin
But presumably Starmer knows and is on board with her agenda? He can't say "the well-known economist Rachel Reeves told me her tax rises would make us richer but it turned out to be a crock of shit, so I have sacked her" because it was obvious to the most casual observer that what was being proposed was not a pro-growth agenda and he would look like a blithering idiot to have ever thought otherwise.
EDIT: Also, I'm surprised few are as discomfited as me by the hair colour change. Of course, she's free to do it - just as she's free to, say, start wearing a beret. But it's the behaviour of a teenager or someone else self-obsessed. It's just... odd.
You've got a thing about this hair colour change, haven't you? My better half, a distinguished and beautiful lady of a certain age, and far from a self-obsessed teenager, has had blonde, white, red and brown hair in the time I've known her - each one splendid in its own way. It's freedom of expression.
Mind you, we are in Brighton, so anything goes.
I do, yes. Partly it's just me. I have a preference for a more utilitarian aesthetic, a suspicion of vanity and a distaste for flamboyance. (When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s this attitude was just standard* and I'm puzzled that modern Brits not only spend so much time, money and discomfort on their own appearance (nail bars! tanning salons! botox! lip filler!) but actually don't subject this sort of thing to the relentless mockery it deserves. I'm actually a bit odd about this: I don't even like cosmetics, and lipstick actually promotes a sort of physical disgust reflex in me. But also, she's CoE. It's not the sort of thing you expect a CoE to do.
*and yes, the counterexample of e.g. the New Romantics is always given, but they were on the fringes of society, and widely mocked (rightly so in my view!)
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?
She’s utterly toast if we have a bad/freezing winter and the papers are full of stories of the granny who froze to death because Reeves took away her winter fuel allowance.
She's doomed anyway. That hair colour change was symbolic, a sign of early panic. We've had the endless lies on her CV, now the farming thing, following the WFA debacle, the pathetic fibs about the £22bn black hole, the economy is already tottering towards recession, her pro-growth policies are already failing
If she isn't booted I predict that in about 18 months, when it is obvious the growth is not coming and her insane tax proposals are actually costing money, not making it, Starmer will sacrifice her to save his own skin
But presumably Starmer knows and is on board with her agenda? He can't say "the well-known economist Rachel Reeves told me her tax rises would make us richer but it turned out to be a crock of shit, so I have sacked her" because it was obvious to the most casual observer that what was being proposed was not a pro-growth agenda and he would look like a blithering idiot to have ever thought otherwise.
EDIT: Also, I'm surprised few are as discomfited as me by the hair colour change. Of course, she's free to do it - just as she's free to, say, start wearing a beret. But it's the behaviour of a teenager or someone else self-obsessed. It's just... odd.
You've got a thing about this hair colour change, haven't you? My better half, a distinguished and beautiful lady of a certain age, and far from a self-obsessed teenager, has had blonde, white, red and brown hair in the time I've known her - each one splendid in its own way. It's freedom of expression.
Mind you, we are in Brighton, so anything goes.
I do, yes. Partly it's just me. I have a preference for a more utilitarian aesthetic, a suspicion of vanity and a distaste for flamboyance. (When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s this attitude was just standard* and I'm puzzled that modern Brits not only spend so much time, money and discomfort on their own appearance (nail bars! tanning salons! botox! lip filler!) but actually don't subject this sort of thing to the relentless mockery it deserves. I'm actually a bit odd about this: I don't even like cosmetics, and lipstick actually promotes a sort of physical disgust reflex in me. But also, she's CoE. It's not the sort of thing you expect a CoE to do.
*and yes, the counterexample of e.g. the New Romantics is always given, but they were on the fringes of society, and widely mocked (rightly so in my view!)
On your logic, you were complaining back in the 1970s about old ladies with blue rinse? (which, er, rather obviates your age-related argument about it being a teenage or self-obsession thing.)
Order-Order thinks there's an Opinium/Senedd poll that puts Reform ahead. Anyone got a link to the tables?
*Reform 28% Labour 26% Conservative 13% Lib Dems 13%
Mind you here in North Wales conservatives have won 4 locals from Labour recently
On the wider issue it would be excellent for Wales to see Labour lose the Senedd in 2026
* I have no tables and do not know if these are subsamples or an actual Welsh poll
Since 1999, the Welsh Labour administration has been diabolically bad. Fortunately, it looks as if they’ll be booted out in 2026.
Prediction: In this Parliament Labour will lose power in Wales, Scotland and the London mayoralty...
And will then be voted out of government in 2029.
You may be right, but it's a marathon, not a sprint. We're only a few miles in to the race, and although Labour haven't started well, don't be surprised if they emerge from the back of the pack around 2027/8.
Prediction: In this Parliament Labour will lose power in Wales, Scotland and the London mayoralty...
And will then be voted out of government in 2029.
Well, they say it's the hope that kills you and obviously some of the Conservatives on here have forgotten the pummelling they got just four and a half months ago and may still be a bit punch drunk.
I can't speak for Wales or Scotland but that's a courageous prediction for the London Mayoralty in 2028.
Will Sadiq Khan stand again? As I've said on here before, he made a catastrophic political error when announcing his decision to stand again so early. He must have thought at the time (January 2022) Johnson would recover from the mid-term polling and beat Starmer at the GE - that didn't turn out as planned. Instead, he could have waited and found himself a London constituency and would now be a prominent backbencher if not actually in Government.
He'll have to make another judgement call in early 2026 which I imagine he'll get wrong again.
The truth is London is a tough road to hoe for the Conservatives - they polled 20.6% in July against 43% for Labour, 11% for the LDs, 10% for the Greens and 9% for Reform so where is this candidate who will maximise the anti-Labour vote? The answer, as it has probably always been, is it's probably NOT a Conservative, Lib Dem, Green or Reform but a super-Independent who can motivate the anti-Labour vote.
I don't know who that person is or might be and I can't see the Conservative Party not standing a candidate and endorsing such an Independent but there's plenty of time for that to change.
I'm just reading a document online that says: "The ignition of a 1-kg plutonium button requires heating 50-60 seconds with a welding torch. Spread of the burning reaction to cover the button may take 10-15 minutes with the temperature reaching over 800 "C."
Just in case anyone has a handy 1-kg Plutonium button lying around on their desk.
It's a little crazy to think that people have done experiments to see how plutonium burns and self-ignites in various forms and conditions.
I expect that - if your going to stick a load of it on an aircraft full of steel beam melting jet fuel - it's something you might want to think about.
She’s utterly toast if we have a bad/freezing winter and the papers are full of stories of the granny who froze to death because Reeves took away her winter fuel allowance.
She's doomed anyway. That hair colour change was symbolic, a sign of early panic. We've had the endless lies on her CV, now the farming thing, following the WFA debacle, the pathetic fibs about the £22bn black hole, the economy is already tottering towards recession, her pro-growth policies are already failing
If she isn't booted I predict that in about 18 months, when it is obvious the growth is not coming and her insane tax proposals are actually costing money, not making it, Starmer will sacrifice her to save his own skin
But presumably Starmer knows and is on board with her agenda? He can't say "the well-known economist Rachel Reeves told me her tax rises would make us richer but it turned out to be a crock of shit, so I have sacked her" because it was obvious to the most casual observer that what was being proposed was not a pro-growth agenda and he would look like a blithering idiot to have ever thought otherwise.
EDIT: Also, I'm surprised few are as discomfited as me by the hair colour change. Of course, she's free to do it - just as she's free to, say, start wearing a beret. But it's the behaviour of a teenager or someone else self-obsessed. It's just... odd.
You've got a thing about this hair colour change, haven't you? My better half, a distinguished and beautiful lady of a certain age, and far from a self-obsessed teenager, has had blonde, white, red and brown hair in the time I've known her - each one splendid in its own way. It's freedom of expression.
Mind you, we are in Brighton, so anything goes.
I do, yes. Partly it's just me. I have a preference for a more utilitarian aesthetic, a suspicion of vanity and a distaste for flamboyance. (When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s this attitude was just standard* and I'm puzzled that modern Brits not only spend so much time, money and discomfort on their own appearance (nail bars! tanning salons! botox! lip filler!) but actually don't subject this sort of thing to the relentless mockery it deserves. I'm actually a bit odd about this: I don't even like cosmetics, and lipstick actually promotes a sort of physical disgust reflex in me. But also, she's CoE. It's not the sort of thing you expect a CoE to do.
*and yes, the counterexample of e.g. the New Romantics is always given, but they were on the fringes of society, and widely mocked (rightly so in my view!)
You've clearly forgotten the period 1889-1894 when then Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Viscount Hexham, GCMG, OM, experimented with a ginger-and-peach Afro and had FUCK ALL COPS tattooed on his face, causing a temporary stir in the Atheneaum
Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.
When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.
I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.
As we need family farms for our food.
Labour could have kept the exemption for 3 generations or more of family farmers but refused as it is a measure of socialist class war
I don't understand.
Is corn from a family owned farm different to corn from a farm owned by a company?
A family owned farm will produce more food than a field sold to build houses.
Oh, so farmers never sell land to developers.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up then.
It's about stewardship.
Would you prefer Farmer Tess or Monsanto in charge of the corporate.
Plus re your previous post, game is one of the most natural foods to eat. Nice, free range life then shot out of the sky. And delicious.
And of course your ex colleagues bought farms because as well as the tax there is the status. And I appreciate you can switch round the priority of those but many City boys want to be Country Gents. The tax is just the icing on the cake.
OK.
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
Well surely if farmers take large retirement cheques, then their assets are significantly more likely to come under IHT than if they kept the farmland?
Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.
When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.
I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.
As we need family farms for our food.
Labour could have kept the exemption for 3 generations or more of family farmers but refused as it is a measure of socialist class war
I don't understand.
Is corn from a family owned farm different to corn from a farm owned by a company?
A family owned farm will produce more food than a field sold to build houses.
Oh, so farmers never sell land to developers.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up then.
It's about stewardship.
Would you prefer Farmer Tess or Monsanto in charge of the corporate.
Plus re your previous post, game is one of the most natural foods to eat. Nice, free range life then shot out of the sky. And delicious.
And of course your ex colleagues bought farms because as well as the tax there is the status. And I appreciate you can switch round the priority of those but many City boys want to be Country Gents. The tax is just the icing on the cake.
OK.
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
Can we agree that farming is different from most other businesses in that the most you can ever get out of it depends on the max yield of your land, whereas if you are successful with a “normal” business you can expand well beyond whatever footprint you started with? At least, that’s true of family farms as opposed to industrialised ones.
They are effectively cottage industries that we decide to retain, as a policy decision, to not just make food but to preserve the countryside the way we like it as a public good. We can change that policy if you like, but you have to recognise that you’re changing something many of us like.
And as I said earlier, farms are a massive part of our environment. The smaller farmers are much more likely to look after that environment sanely than large agribusinesses.
Ever been to or worked on a farm? I wouldn't say environmentally conscious is an apt description. Plenty of dodgy things go on that whilst probably not prosecutable are clearly not benefiting the environment. IME farmers are businessman first and the stewarding comes when the farm is financially secure.
I've lived on one (for six months...).
Smaller farmers tend to think medium- to long-term. There are things they could do that would maximise the land's output, but which would cause them problems many years on. Leaving fields fallow is an example for some farms (not all); one many larger farms do not do by means of adding chemicals. This is terrible for biodiversity. Or removing hedgerows, which larger farms have more capacity to do.
You've posted that at this time for at least the last 3 days. You have obviously been out of the country so much that you have forgotten it lasts until approximately February
It's my new joke, which gains amusement by being relentlessly predictable, unamusing and pointless, like OMG they killed Kenny
Abolishing IHT altogether and introducing a very low rate assets tax would be a simpler and less objectionable way to deal with the distortion that the exemption of agricultural land from IHT created, compared to the policy that Labour introduced.
Imagine the screaming from the large landowners. IHT is bad enough: an asset tax! Mon dieu!
Cutting IHT to a level payed by the monarch and on public sector pensions eg 0% could be payed for by reducing the carbon capture and storage budget by 50%.
As an aside: this simply isn’t true.
I completely agree that carbon capture is a complete waste of money at the current time, with far better options available for carbon reduction if that’s the government’s goal, but the annoucement was for £22billion over 25 years, so less than a £1billion / annum.
IHT raises ~£7.5billion / annum.
Something I can't prove but strongly suspect:
Most of us don't really internalise/grock the difference between capital and revenue spending. That big X as a one-off can be cheaper than smaller x every year forever.
And that misconception explains most of the pickle that humanity in general and Britain especially, is in.
The first big carbon capture project is to allow Net Zero Teeside (gas power station, blue hydrogen and other CO2 emitting industry), as such it is a massive bung to Houchen's two mates who invested a week's beer money in taking control of Teesworks. Hopefully it will also result in regeneration and a few thousand jobs.
She’s utterly toast if we have a bad/freezing winter and the papers are full of stories of the granny who froze to death because Reeves took away her winter fuel allowance.
She's doomed anyway. That hair colour change was symbolic, a sign of early panic. We've had the endless lies on her CV, now the farming thing, following the WFA debacle, the pathetic fibs about the £22bn black hole, the economy is already tottering towards recession, her pro-growth policies are already failing
If she isn't booted I predict that in about 18 months, when it is obvious the growth is not coming and her insane tax proposals are actually costing money, not making it, Starmer will sacrifice her to save his own skin
But presumably Starmer knows and is on board with her agenda? He can't say "the well-known economist Rachel Reeves told me her tax rises would make us richer but it turned out to be a crock of shit, so I have sacked her" because it was obvious to the most casual observer that what was being proposed was not a pro-growth agenda and he would look like a blithering idiot to have ever thought otherwise.
EDIT: Also, I'm surprised few are as discomfited as me by the hair colour change. Of course, she's free to do it - just as she's free to, say, start wearing a beret. But it's the behaviour of a teenager or someone else self-obsessed. It's just... odd.
You've got a thing about this hair colour change, haven't you? My better half, a distinguished and beautiful lady of a certain age, and far from a self-obsessed teenager, has had blonde, white, red and brown hair in the time I've known her - each one splendid in its own way. It's freedom of expression.
Mind you, we are in Brighton, so anything goes.
I do, yes. Partly it's just me. I have a preference for a more utilitarian aesthetic, a suspicion of vanity and a distaste for flamboyance. (When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s this attitude was just standard* and I'm puzzled that modern Brits not only spend so much time, money and discomfort on their own appearance (nail bars! tanning salons! botox! lip filler!) but actually don't subject this sort of thing to the relentless mockery it deserves. I'm actually a bit odd about this: I don't even like cosmetics, and lipstick actually promotes a sort of physical disgust reflex in me. But also, she's CoE. It's not the sort of thing you expect a CoE to do.
*and yes, the counterexample of e.g. the New Romantics is always given, but they were on the fringes of society, and widely mocked (rightly so in my view!)
On your logic, you were complaining back in the 1970s about old ladies with blue rinse? (which, er, rather obviates your age-related argument about it being a teenage or self-obsession thing.)
Well I was. And I would complain about a CoE if she'd decided to go down that route.
There's two things going on here: one is my personal view "I think RR is a bit daft to me dicking about with her hair colour." That's a minor facet of my aversion to flamboyance, but also I accept that nowadays I'm right up one end of the spectrum on this view. It's not that I want to prevent people doing it - it's just not something I particularly like. But there are lots of things I don't particularly like and don't have to. I don't like non-humourous poetry but I don't object to people spending their time in that way if they do. But the other aspect is "is this how we would expect a CoE to behave?" It comes across as a bit non-serious. I daresay if a headteacher, for example, went down a similar route, I wouldn't be alone in finding that similarly jarring.
"Tubthumping" by Chumbawumba is probably Peak British Culture
Born Slippy.
Essentially the soundtrack to any decent night out between the mid 1990s and mid 2000s.
That's because British music went through an unaccountable dead phase from 1996 to about 2002. Born Slippy was a rare beacon of 'pretty good, actually'.
I'm struggling to think of any other highlights from that period. Dawn of the Replicants is about as good as it got for me.
Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.
When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.
I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.
As we need family farms for our food.
Labour could have kept the exemption for 3 generations or more of family farmers but refused as it is a measure of socialist class war
I don't understand.
Is corn from a family owned farm different to corn from a farm owned by a company?
A family owned farm will produce more food than a field sold to build houses.
Oh, so farmers never sell land to developers.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up then.
It's about stewardship.
Would you prefer Farmer Tess or Monsanto in charge of the corporate.
Plus re your previous post, game is one of the most natural foods to eat. Nice, free range life then shot out of the sky. And delicious.
And of course your ex colleagues bought farms because as well as the tax there is the status. And I appreciate you can switch round the priority of those but many City boys want to be Country Gents. The tax is just the icing on the cake.
OK.
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
Plenty of farmers though choose to stay because they like the life and, if the farm has come down through the generations as many have, feel a duty both to the land and to the production of food, for example.
The big estates you are talking about being sold to City boys are not in this category and are a tiny number of farms in the UK. No city boy is going to buy a working farm with a few hundred acres. And if they do they also feel a responsibility to its environment and upkeep.
Unlike a vast agribusiness which only has, rightly, a responsibility to its shareholders.
You've posted that at this time for at least the last 3 days. You have obviously been out of the country so much that you have forgotten it lasts until approximately February
It's my new joke, which gains amusement by being relentlessly predictable, unamusing and pointless, like OMG they killed Kenny
Happy to report while a bit cloudy in Arnside on Sunday, it didn't actually rain at sunset. And a 4pm sunset even without sun can be a joyous thing.
But as I said, tomorrow's looking splendid. Get out in it. You can still complain if you want.
Prediction: In this Parliament Labour will lose power in Wales, Scotland and the London mayoralty...
And will then be voted out of government in 2029.
Well, they say it's the hope that kills you and obviously some of the Conservatives on here have forgotten the pummelling they got just four and a half months ago and may still be a bit punch drunk.
I can't speak for Wales or Scotland but that's a courageous prediction for the London Mayoralty in 2028.
Will Sadiq Khan stand again? As I've said on here before, he made a catastrophic political error when announcing his decision to stand again so early. He must have thought at the time (January 2022) Johnson would recover from the mid-term polling and beat Starmer at the GE - that didn't turn out as planned. Instead, he could have waited and found himself a London constituency and would now be a prominent backbencher if not actually in Government.
He'll have to make another judgement call in early 2026 which I imagine he'll get wrong again.
The truth is London is a tough road to hoe for the Conservatives - they polled 20.6% in July against 43% for Labour, 11% for the LDs, 10% for the Greens and 9% for Reform so where is this candidate who will maximise the anti-Labour vote? The answer, as it has probably always been, is it's probably NOT a Conservative, Lib Dem, Green or Reform but a super-Independent who can motivate the anti-Labour vote.
I don't know who that person is or might be and I can't see the Conservative Party not standing a candidate and endorsing such an Independent but there's plenty of time for that to change.
London Tories need to find another Andy Street. Someone that is well known for being successful, but from outside party politics. Charlie Mullins would have been a great example, but he’s retired now.
Makes all Labour's squaking about "callous Tory bastards!!" seem rather hollow...
Interesting. It doesn't take into account the increased uptake of Pension Credit, which will do a lot to mitigate that figure. It's also relative poverty, which PBers tend to dismiss in other circumstances, and rounded to the nearest 50,000.
For context, removing the two-child limit would bring 540,000 children out of absolute poverty.
Rounded to the nearest 50k is a bizarre choice. In reality, the loss of WFA is much smaller than the pension rises these people will get via triple lock.
Prediction: In this Parliament Labour will lose power in Wales, Scotland and the London mayoralty...
And will then be voted out of government in 2029.
Well, they say it's the hope that kills you and obviously some of the Conservatives on here have forgotten the pummelling they got just four and a half months ago and may still be a bit punch drunk.
I can't speak for Wales or Scotland but that's a courageous prediction for the London Mayoralty in 2028.
Will Sadiq Khan stand again? As I've said on here before, he made a catastrophic political error when announcing his decision to stand again so early. He must have thought at the time (January 2022) Johnson would recover from the mid-term polling and beat Starmer at the GE - that didn't turn out as planned. Instead, he could have waited and found himself a London constituency and would now be a prominent backbencher if not actually in Government.
He'll have to make another judgement call in early 2026 which I imagine he'll get wrong again.
The truth is London is a tough road to hoe for the Conservatives - they polled 20.6% in July against 43% for Labour, 11% for the LDs, 10% for the Greens and 9% for Reform so where is this candidate who will maximise the anti-Labour vote? The answer, as it has probably always been, is it's probably NOT a Conservative, Lib Dem, Green or Reform but a super-Independent who can motivate the anti-Labour vote.
I don't know who that person is or might be and I can't see the Conservative Party not standing a candidate and endorsing such an Independent but there's plenty of time for that to change.
London Tories need to find another Andy Street. Someone that is well known for being successful, but from outside party politics. Charlie Mullins would have been a great example, but he’s retired now.
A Mr J Clarkson isn't bad at this politics lark...
Prediction: In this Parliament Labour will lose power in Wales, Scotland and the London mayoralty...
And will then be voted out of government in 2029.
Well, they say it's the hope that kills you and obviously some of the Conservatives on here have forgotten the pummelling they got just four and a half months ago and may still be a bit punch drunk.
I can't speak for Wales or Scotland but that's a courageous prediction for the London Mayoralty in 2028.
Will Sadiq Khan stand again? As I've said on here before, he made a catastrophic political error when announcing his decision to stand again so early. He must have thought at the time (January 2022) Johnson would recover from the mid-term polling and beat Starmer at the GE - that didn't turn out as planned. Instead, he could have waited and found himself a London constituency and would now be a prominent backbencher if not actually in Government.
He'll have to make another judgement call in early 2026 which I imagine he'll get wrong again.
The truth is London is a tough road to hoe for the Conservatives - they polled 20.6% in July against 43% for Labour, 11% for the LDs, 10% for the Greens and 9% for Reform so where is this candidate who will maximise the anti-Labour vote? The answer, as it has probably always been, is it's probably NOT a Conservative, Lib Dem, Green or Reform but a super-Independent who can motivate the anti-Labour vote.
I don't know who that person is or might be and I can't see the Conservative Party not standing a candidate and endorsing such an Independent but there's plenty of time for that to change.
London Tories need to find another Andy Street. Someone that is well known for being successful, but from outside party politics. Charlie Mullins would have been a great example, but he’s retired now.
Rory Stewart would be ideal as an Independent and of course had his career as an adventurer and diplomat before politics. He could win over Tories, LDs, even Alistair Campbell and Gary Lineker style centrist dads of whom there are many in London and also would win Reform voters in the final head to head preference against Khan
Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.
When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.
I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.
As we need family farms for our food.
Labour could have kept the exemption for 3 generations or more of family farmers but refused as it is a measure of socialist class war
I don't understand.
Is corn from a family owned farm different to corn from a farm owned by a company?
A family owned farm will produce more food than a field sold to build houses.
Oh, so farmers never sell land to developers.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up then.
It's about stewardship.
Would you prefer Farmer Tess or Monsanto in charge of the corporate.
Plus re your previous post, game is one of the most natural foods to eat. Nice, free range life then shot out of the sky. And delicious.
And of course your ex colleagues bought farms because as well as the tax there is the status. And I appreciate you can switch round the priority of those but many City boys want to be Country Gents. The tax is just the icing on the cake.
OK.
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
Can we agree that farming is different from most other businesses in that the most you can ever get out of it depends on the max yield of your land, whereas if you are successful with a “normal” business you can expand well beyond whatever footprint you started with? At least, that’s true of family farms as opposed to industrialised ones.
They are effectively cottage industries that we decide to retain, as a policy decision, to not just make food but to preserve the countryside the way we like it as a public good. We can change that policy if you like, but you have to recognise that you’re changing something many of us like.
And as I said earlier, farms are a massive part of our environment. The smaller farmers are much more likely to look after that environment sanely than large agribusinesses.
A lot of small farmers are pretty shit when it comes to looking after the environment. Just look at the strength of the farming lobby in Ireland insisting on it's right to create the most polluted rivers in Europe by retaining a derogation from the nitrates directive.
The idyllic vision some people have of farming doesn't match the reality.
Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.
When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.
I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.
As we need family farms for our food.
Labour could have kept the exemption for 3 generations or more of family farmers but refused as it is a measure of socialist class war
I don't understand.
Is corn from a family owned farm different to corn from a farm owned by a company?
A family owned farm will produce more food than a field sold to build houses.
Oh, so farmers never sell land to developers.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up then.
It's about stewardship.
Would you prefer Farmer Tess or Monsanto in charge of the corporate.
Plus re your previous post, game is one of the most natural foods to eat. Nice, free range life then shot out of the sky. And delicious.
And of course your ex colleagues bought farms because as well as the tax there is the status. And I appreciate you can switch round the priority of those but many City boys want to be Country Gents. The tax is just the icing on the cake.
OK.
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
Can we agree that farming is different from most other businesses in that the most you can ever get out of it depends on the max yield of your land, whereas if you are successful with a “normal” business you can expand well beyond whatever footprint you started with? At least, that’s true of family farms as opposed to industrialised ones.
They are effectively cottage industries that we decide to retain, as a policy decision, to not just make food but to preserve the countryside the way we like it as a public good. We can change that policy if you like, but you have to recognise that you’re changing something many of us like.
And as I said earlier, farms are a massive part of our environment. The smaller farmers are much more likely to look after that environment sanely than large agribusinesses.
Ever been to or worked on a farm? I wouldn't say environmentally conscious is an apt description. Plenty of dodgy things go on that whilst probably not prosecutable are clearly not benefiting the environment. IME farmers are businessman first and the stewarding comes when the farm is financially secure.
I've lived on one (for six months...).
Smaller farmers tend to think medium- to long-term. There are things they could do that would maximise the land's output, but which would cause them problems many years on. Leaving fields fallow is an example for some farms (not all); one many larger farms do not do by means of adding chemicals. This is terrible for biodiversity. Or removing hedgerows, which larger farms have more capacity to do.
Yes but there is often a business case for fallow land and a bit of grant money to sweeten the deal.
Its not always wise to ask about were all that old engine oil went or what happened to the pile of used tyres just after bonfire night. Or the half acre dump of things that might be useful but are currently being reclaimed by the earth.
"Tubthumping" by Chumbawumba is probably Peak British Culture
Born Slippy.
Essentially the soundtrack to any decent night out between the mid 1990s and mid 2000s.
That's because British music went through an unaccountable dead phase from 1996 to about 2002. Born Slippy was a rare beacon of 'pretty good, actually'.
I'm struggling to think of any other highlights from that period. Dawn of the Replicants is about as good as it got for me.
Mainstream culture in general was pretty lame around that time. Although of course, that's exactly what teenage me would have said.
But in retrospect, it wasn't just the arse end of the britpop era there was nothing good coming out of the other side of the pond, either. Nu metal and a thousand Britney Spears clones.
I spent most of those years being a moody goth. I'm sure there are still photos to prove it, somewhere... glad I got my teenage years out of the way before camera phones!
Prediction: In this Parliament Labour will lose power in Wales, Scotland and the London mayoralty...
And will then be voted out of government in 2029.
Well, they say it's the hope that kills you and obviously some of the Conservatives on here have forgotten the pummelling they got just four and a half months ago and may still be a bit punch drunk.
I can't speak for Wales or Scotland but that's a courageous prediction for the London Mayoralty in 2028.
Will Sadiq Khan stand again? As I've said on here before, he made a catastrophic political error when announcing his decision to stand again so early. He must have thought at the time (January 2022) Johnson would recover from the mid-term polling and beat Starmer at the GE - that didn't turn out as planned. Instead, he could have waited and found himself a London constituency and would now be a prominent backbencher if not actually in Government.
He'll have to make another judgement call in early 2026 which I imagine he'll get wrong again.
The truth is London is a tough road to hoe for the Conservatives - they polled 20.6% in July against 43% for Labour, 11% for the LDs, 10% for the Greens and 9% for Reform so where is this candidate who will maximise the anti-Labour vote? The answer, as it has probably always been, is it's probably NOT a Conservative, Lib Dem, Green or Reform but a super-Independent who can motivate the anti-Labour vote.
I don't know who that person is or might be and I can't see the Conservative Party not standing a candidate and endorsing such an Independent but there's plenty of time for that to change.
London Tories need to find another Andy Street. Someone that is well known for being successful, but from outside party politics. Charlie Mullins would have been a great example, but he’s retired now.
Rory Stewart would be ideal as an Independent and of course had his career as an adventurer and diplomat before politics. He could win over Tories, LDs, even Alistair Campbell and Gary Lineker style centrist dads of whom there are many in London and also would win Reform voters in the final head to head preference against Khan
I think these days he would agree with Khan on basically everything.
Prediction: In this Parliament Labour will lose power in Wales, Scotland and the London mayoralty...
And will then be voted out of government in 2029.
Well, they say it's the hope that kills you and obviously some of the Conservatives on here have forgotten the pummelling they got just four and a half months ago and may still be a bit punch drunk.
I can't speak for Wales or Scotland but that's a courageous prediction for the London Mayoralty in 2028.
Will Sadiq Khan stand again? As I've said on here before, he made a catastrophic political error when announcing his decision to stand again so early. He must have thought at the time (January 2022) Johnson would recover from the mid-term polling and beat Starmer at the GE - that didn't turn out as planned. Instead, he could have waited and found himself a London constituency and would now be a prominent backbencher if not actually in Government.
He'll have to make another judgement call in early 2026 which I imagine he'll get wrong again.
The truth is London is a tough road to hoe for the Conservatives - they polled 20.6% in July against 43% for Labour, 11% for the LDs, 10% for the Greens and 9% for Reform so where is this candidate who will maximise the anti-Labour vote? The answer, as it has probably always been, is it's probably NOT a Conservative, Lib Dem, Green or Reform but a super-Independent who can motivate the anti-Labour vote.
I don't know who that person is or might be and I can't see the Conservative Party not standing a candidate and endorsing such an Independent but there's plenty of time for that to change.
London Tories need to find another Andy Street. Someone that is well known for being successful, but from outside party politics. Charlie Mullins would have been a great example, but he’s retired now.
Rory Stewart would be ideal as an Independent and of course had his career as an adventurer and diplomat before politics. He could win over Tories, LDs, even Alistair Campbell and Gary Lineker style centrist dads of whom there are many in London and also would win Reform voters in the final head to head preference against Khan
I'm sure it's crossed his mind. But it's gone to FPTP no? Which rather scuppers his chances since there will surely be a Tory candidate.
As an aside - is Alastair Campbell a Centrist Dad now?
Order-Order thinks there's an Opinium/Senedd poll that puts Reform ahead. Anyone got a link to the tables?
*Reform 28% Labour 26% Conservative 13% Lib Dems 13%
Mind you here in North Wales conservatives have won 4 locals from Labour recently
On the wider issue it would be excellent for Wales to see Labour lose the Senedd in 2026
* I have no tables and do not know if these are subsamples or an actual Welsh poll
Since 1999, the Welsh Labour administration has been diabolically bad. Fortunately, it looks as if they’ll be booted out in 2026.
Prediction: In this Parliament Labour will lose power in Wales, Scotland and the London mayoralty...
And will then be voted out of government in 2029.
Scotland?
Ah yes, SNP still in power in Scotland, right?
Scotland may ironically be the only place Labour end up in power of the devolved nations and capital by 2029, mainly due to time for a change in all of them
Abolishing IHT altogether and introducing a very low rate assets tax would be a simpler and less objectionable way to deal with the distortion that the exemption of agricultural land from IHT created, compared to the policy that Labour introduced.
Imagine the screaming from the large landowners. IHT is bad enough: an asset tax! Mon dieu!
Cutting IHT to a level payed by the monarch and on public sector pensions eg 0% could be payed for by reducing the carbon capture and storage budget by 50%.
As an aside: this simply isn’t true.
I completely agree that carbon capture is a complete waste of money at the current time, with far better options available for carbon reduction if that’s the government’s goal, but the annoucement was for £22billion over 25 years, so less than a £1billion / annum.
IHT raises ~£7.5billion / annum.
Something I can't prove but strongly suspect:
Most of us don't really internalise/grock the difference between capital and revenue spending. That big X as a one-off can be cheaper than smaller x every year forever.
And that misconception explains most of the pickle that humanity in general and Britain especially, is in.
Similarly why global warming is such a hard problem for us to get to grips with, because it's happening relatively gradually relative to human decision timeframes.
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.
I'm not remotely left-liberal, but I don't get the sentimental drivel people spout about farming, any more than I did about coal mines in the 90s. Like any other marginal industry, if farmers can't survive without their epic tax breaks and subsidies they should go under, to allow the labour, land and capital to be used more efficiently by others. And small farms that benefit from the IHT break are exactly the least efficient ones that should go under first. Property doesn't suddenly become a national treasure because you plant crops or whatever on it. The world isn't short of food.
Having lower IHT is a good idea, but we should lower the overall rate rather than give out undeserved bungs to special interest groups, many of whom just use it as a tax dodge anyway.
Ultra libertarian fanaticism with no concern for the national interest.
We should have kept some coal mines as we need to secure our own energy in the age of Putin and lockdowns and renewables and nuclear alone are nowhere near enough as yet to supply it all.
We need to grow more of our own food even more so and the best way to provide food for the nation is family farms rooted in the land
I was quite impressed with Badenoch's stirring speech about downtrodden workers and the nation's indebtedness for their labours
The miners strike might have turned out so differently if we'd had Kemi on board.
Kemi can also back the miners now too after Ed Miliband scrapped what would have been the last mine left in the UK in Cumbria
Thatcher closing hundreds of uneconomic mines in the dash for gas, was genius. Miliband closes an uneconomic mine and he's a traitor.
FWIW as the grandson of a miner they would both be right to have closed the lot of them.
He didn't scrap a mine, he refused permission for a new one that clearly would have been profitable (otherwise someone wouldn't have been desperate to build it) and met all the current bollocks that these projects have to meet.
He is a repellent toad who doesn't want the UK to succeed.
So I am told by a pollster that when the public are told the value of the IHT exemptions for farmers the support for the farmers craters.
I was right, the voters do not like people getting unjustifiable tax exemptions.
This government really is quite spectacularly bad at the PR side of things.
They were set up to fail. I remember when pensioners completely lost it over Sunak's NICs cut, because it didn't apply to them.
People talk about all the outrage and histrionics on the left, but the right are just as guilty on things like means-testing WFP, IHT, anything Ed Miliband looks at, RAF fighter jets not shooting down ballistic missiles etc etc.
Don't let those sneaky centrists get away with outrage and histrionics as well.
Prediction: In this Parliament Labour will lose power in Wales, Scotland and the London mayoralty...
And will then be voted out of government in 2029.
Well, they say it's the hope that kills you and obviously some of the Conservatives on here have forgotten the pummelling they got just four and a half months ago and may still be a bit punch drunk.
I can't speak for Wales or Scotland but that's a courageous prediction for the London Mayoralty in 2028.
Will Sadiq Khan stand again? As I've said on here before, he made a catastrophic political error when announcing his decision to stand again so early. He must have thought at the time (January 2022) Johnson would recover from the mid-term polling and beat Starmer at the GE - that didn't turn out as planned. Instead, he could have waited and found himself a London constituency and would now be a prominent backbencher if not actually in Government.
He'll have to make another judgement call in early 2026 which I imagine he'll get wrong again.
The truth is London is a tough road to hoe for the Conservatives - they polled 20.6% in July against 43% for Labour, 11% for the LDs, 10% for the Greens and 9% for Reform so where is this candidate who will maximise the anti-Labour vote? The answer, as it has probably always been, is it's probably NOT a Conservative, Lib Dem, Green or Reform but a super-Independent who can motivate the anti-Labour vote.
I don't know who that person is or might be and I can't see the Conservative Party not standing a candidate and endorsing such an Independent but there's plenty of time for that to change.
London Tories need to find another Andy Street. Someone that is well known for being successful, but from outside party politics. Charlie Mullins would have been a great example, but he’s retired now.
Rory Stewart would be ideal as an Independent and of course had his career as an adventurer and diplomat before politics. He could win over Tories, LDs, even Alistair Campbell and Gary Lineker style centrist dads of whom there are many in London and also would win Reform voters in the final head to head preference against Khan
I'm sure it's crossed his mind. But it's gone to FPTP no? Which rather scuppers his chances since there will surely be a Tory candidate.
As an aside - is Alastair Campbell a Centrist Dad now?
Labour will likely move it back to AV, Campbell and Lineker are the patron saints of centrist dads and Stewart honorary godfather
The snow fell in Tallinn last night. Not the crunchy flakes of true winter, but the half-hearted slush of the in-between time. We mark 1000 days of war. 1000 days since the Estonian independence day when we wondered whether war was already upon us and whether we would be fighting for survival ourselves very soon.
True war has not come. In-between war, on the other hand definitely has. Attacks on pipelines and cables, jamming of GPS and civilian aircraft systems, removal of border markers, corruption and threats. Blood curdling threats. Threats of torture, of the utter destruction of the very name of Estonia. Yet in these 1000 days we have quietly prepared. We have an advanced civil defence system, we have quadrupled defence expenditure, we have found any Putinist fifth columnists and removed them. We have linked with the new NATO allies of Finland and Sweden. Today the Baltic has a strategic depth it has never had before. We have NATO troops and supplies of the latest military equipment. We are as secure as we can be against the depravity of Putin and the massive nervous breakdown he has visited on Russia. Large numbers of Russian speaking Estonians are amongst the first to volunteer to defend Estonia, since they know that, as in Ukraine, it will be the Russian speakers who will be first to be attacked by the rabble that used to be the Russian army.
For rabble it undoubtedly is. Despite the attacks on infrastructure, including mass cyber attacks- it is assumed here that today´s British Airways IT glitch is Russian cyber terrorism- the performance of the Russian military has been appalling. The Estonian high command doesn´t often comment, but the assumption is that we can hold until the Poles, Swedes, Finns, the French and the Brits can reinforce and shove the Russian forces out. The question is now that time for Putin is running out. The Russian economy, especially its transport sector is showing unmistakable signs of serious meltdown. Inflation is rising sharply and interest rates at 20% are still insufficient to protect the Rouble. The horrific death toll inflicted on Ukraine is more than matched by the astonishing losses of Russian forces. China is open to discussions with the West, since they see the increasingly desperate nuclear threats from Putin as very bad for business. The announcement of the G-20 meeting of Sir Kier Starmer and President and General Secretary Xi Jinping was greeted with wise nods here, despite the general hostility to China following some rather inept actions by Beijing against Estonia, not least the damage to the Finnish/Estonian power connectors.
No one knows what Trump will do. Estonia is closing no doors. In the face of what looks like a gathering crisis, we watch and wait. We live in the in-between time and hope that the death agonies of Putinism will not unleash a nuclear response before the monster is gone. Nevertheless is will be a cold and grim winter before the spring comes once more.
Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.
When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.
I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.
As we need family farms for our food.
Labour could have kept the exemption for 3 generations or more of family farmers but refused as it is a measure of socialist class war
I don't understand.
Is corn from a family owned farm different to corn from a farm owned by a company?
A family owned farm will produce more food than a field sold to build houses.
Oh, so farmers never sell land to developers.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up then.
It's about stewardship.
Would you prefer Farmer Tess or Monsanto in charge of the corporate.
Plus re your previous post, game is one of the most natural foods to eat. Nice, free range life then shot out of the sky. And delicious.
And of course your ex colleagues bought farms because as well as the tax there is the status. And I appreciate you can switch round the priority of those but many City boys want to be Country Gents. The tax is just the icing on the cake.
OK.
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
Plenty of farmers though choose to stay because they like the life and, if the farm has come down through the generations as many have, feel a duty both to the land and to the production of food, for example.
The big estates you are talking about being sold to City boys are not in this category and are a tiny number of farms in the UK. No city boy is going to buy a working farm with a few hundred acres. And if they do they also feel a responsibility to its environment and upkeep.
Unlike a vast agribusiness which only has, rightly, a responsibility to its shareholders.
Farmer John Price exacts his duty of care on the River Lugg:
"Tubthumping" by Chumbawumba is probably Peak British Culture
Born Slippy.
Essentially the soundtrack to any decent night out between the mid 1990s and mid 2000s.
That's because British music went through an unaccountable dead phase from 1996 to about 2002. Born Slippy was a rare beacon of 'pretty good, actually'.
I'm struggling to think of any other highlights from that period. Dawn of the Replicants is about as good as it got for me.
So I am told by a pollster that when the public are told the value of the IHT exemptions for farmers the support for the farmers craters.
I was right, the voters do not like people getting unjustifiable tax exemptions.
From what I've seen, the most concrete objection from the landowners is that... they're actually much more wealthy than the treasury had thought, so more of them will be hit by the new 20% IHT rate.
That's, er, not going to endear them to the public when it filters through.
So I am told by a pollster that when the public are told the value of the IHT exemptions for farmers the support for the farmers craters.
I was right, the voters do not like people getting unjustifiable tax exemptions.
From what I've seen, the most concrete objection from the landowners is that... they're actually much more wealthy than the treasury had thought, so more of them will be hit by the new 20% IHT rate.
That's, er, not going to endear them to the public when it filters through.
Yup, bunch of greedy tax dodgers, the public will soon see them for the chancers they are.
The snow fell in Tallinn last night. Not the crunchy flakes of true winter, but the half-hearted slush of the in-between time. We mark 1000 days of war. 1000 days since the Estonian independence day when we wondered whether war was already upon us and whether we would be fighting for survival ourselves very soon.
True war has not come. In-between war, on the other hand definitely has. Attacks on pipelines and cables, jamming of GPS and civilian aircraft systems, removal of border markers, corruption and threats. Blood curdling threats. Threats of torture, of the utter destruction of the very name of Estonia. Yet in these 1000 days we have quietly prepared. We have an advanced civil defence system, we have quadrupled defence expenditure, we have found any Putinist fifth columnists and removed them. We have linked with the new NATO allies of Finland and Sweden. Today the Baltic has a strategic depth it has never had before. We have NATO troops and supplies of the latest military equipment. We are as secure as we can be against the depravity of Putin and the massive nervous breakdown he has visited on Russia. Large numbers of Russian speaking Estonians are amongst the first to volunteer to defend Estonia, since they know that, as in Ukraine, it will be the Russian speakers who will be first to be attacked by the rabble that used to be the Russian army.
For rabble it undoubtedly is. Despite the attacks on infrastructure, including mass cyber attacks- it is assumed here that today´s British Airways IT glitch is Russian cyber terrorism- the performance of the Russian military has been appalling. The Estonian high command doesn´t often comment, but the assumption is that we can hold until the Poles, Swedes, Finns, the French and the Brits can reinforce and shove the Russian forces out. The question is now that time for Putin is running out. The Russian economy, especially its transport sector is showing unmistakable signs of serious meltdown. Inflation is rising sharply and interest rates at 20% are still insufficient to protect the Rouble. The horrific death toll inflicted on Ukraine is more than matched by the astonishing losses of Russian forces. China is open to discussions with the West, since they see the increasingly desperate nuclear threats from Putin as very bad for business. The announcement of the G-20meeting of Sir Kier Starmer and President and General Secretary Xi Jinping was greeted with wise nods here, despite the general hostility to China following some rather inept actions by Beijing against Estonia, not least the damage to the Finnish/Estonian power connectors.
No one knows what Trump will do. Estonia is closing no doors. In the face of what looks like a gathering crisis, we watch and wait. We live in the in-between time and hope that the death agonies of Putinism will not unleash a nuclear response before the monster is gone. Nevertheless is will be a cold and grim winter before the spring comes once more.
Was just thinking the other day the whole world has a very 1938 vibe about it right now.
I only hope that the threat of nuclear war prevents further serious escalation. It's why I'm pro Ukraine getting nukes. Nukes have kept the peace, largely, since 1945. But then again, nobody is mad enough to do it... until they are.
Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.
When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.
I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.
On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.
I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.
As we need family farms for our food.
Labour could have kept the exemption for 3 generations or more of family farmers but refused as it is a measure of socialist class war
I don't understand.
Is corn from a family owned farm different to corn from a farm owned by a company?
A family owned farm will produce more food than a field sold to build houses.
Oh, so farmers never sell land to developers.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up then.
It's about stewardship.
Would you prefer Farmer Tess or Monsanto in charge of the corporate.
Plus re your previous post, game is one of the most natural foods to eat. Nice, free range life then shot out of the sky. And delicious.
And of course your ex colleagues bought farms because as well as the tax there is the status. And I appreciate you can switch round the priority of those but many City boys want to be Country Gents. The tax is just the icing on the cake.
OK.
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
Plenty of farmers though choose to stay because they like the life and, if the farm has come down through the generations as many have, feel a duty both to the land and to the production of food, for example.
The big estates you are talking about being sold to City boys are not in this category and are a tiny number of farms in the UK. No city boy is going to buy a working farm with a few hundred acres. And if they do they also feel a responsibility to its environment and upkeep.
Unlike a vast agribusiness which only has, rightly, a responsibility to its shareholders.
In my business, we have a saying:
Data > Opinion
What's the data? Has the introduction of IHT relief on farmland increased the retention of family farms? Or has it led to more people selling farms to cash in? And what has happens immediately after a farm is passed on? Is there a spike in sales following the sale of farms?
In other words, does the data support the supposition that this leads to more owner-farmers?
Or does its principally result in people who aren't farmers avoiding taxes?
Because arguing without data is wank. All we (and I include myself here) is doing is making a case totally devoid from reality.
So I am told by a pollster that when the public are told the value of the IHT exemptions for farmers the support for the farmers craters.
I was right, the voters do not like people getting unjustifiable tax exemptions.
From what I've seen, the most concrete objection from the landowners is that... they're actually much more wealthy than the treasury had thought, so more of them will be hit by the new 20% IHT rate.
That's, er, not going to endear them to the public when it filters through.
It will given it is just related to the land and a mere £1.1 million makes farmland liable for IHT now.
Exemptions for the farmhouse and spousal exemptions are irrelevant to the transfer of the farmland from father to son
I was quite impressed with Badenoch's stirring speech about downtrodden workers and the nation's indebtedness for their labours
The miners strike might have turned out so differently if we'd had Kemi on board.
Kemi can also back the miners now too after Ed Miliband scrapped what would have been the last mine left in the UK in Cumbria
Thatcher closing hundreds of uneconomic mines in the dash for gas, was genius. Miliband closes an uneconomic mine and he's a traitor.
FWIW as the grandson of a miner they would both be right to have closed the lot of them.
He didn't scrap a mine, he refused permission for a new one that clearly would have been profitable (otherwise someone wouldn't have been desperate to build it) and met all the current bollocks that these projects have to meet.
He is a repellent toad who doesn't want the UK to succeed.
Hm - I know little about this, but why is the state approving businesses or otherwise depending on the state's view of whether the business will be viable?
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.
I'm not remotely left-liberal, but I don't get the sentimental drivel people spout about farming, any more than I did about coal mines in the 90s. Like any other marginal industry, if farmers can't survive without their epic tax breaks and subsidies they should go under, to allow the labour, land and capital to be used more efficiently by others. And small farms that benefit from the IHT break are exactly the least efficient ones that should go under first. Property doesn't suddenly become a national treasure because you plant crops or whatever on it. The world isn't short of food.
Having lower IHT is a good idea, but we should lower the overall rate rather than give out undeserved bungs to special interest groups, many of whom just use it as a tax dodge anyway.
Ultra libertarian fanaticism with no concern for the national interest.
We should have kept some coal mines as we need to secure our own energy in the age of Putin and lockdowns and renewables and nuclear alone are nowhere near enough as yet to supply it all.
We need to grow more of our own food even more so and the best way to provide food for the nation is family farms rooted in the land
Congratulations.
That is literally the most evidence free post I have ever seen on PB. And I've read @Leon's posts about AI.
So I am told by a pollster that when the public are told the value of the IHT exemptions for farmers the support for the farmers craters.
I was right, the voters do not like people getting unjustifiable tax exemptions.
From what I've seen, the most concrete objection from the landowners is that... they're actually much more wealthy than the treasury had thought, so more of them will be hit by the new 20% IHT rate.
That's, er, not going to endear them to the public when it filters through.
Though look on the bright side. If agricultural land prices collapse then more of them can dodge IHT by falling under the threshold. If they want to keep the land in the family then the paper value matters little.
Comments
Wikipedia lists more than 50, and that does not include Oundle or extra-long lidos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long_course_swimming_pools_in_the_United_Kingdom
The Bishop of Chelmsford would be ideal. Justin W can retire to his home in France
I mean, very clearly none of them have ever watched Clarkson’s Farm or understand what it is about. “He bought the farm without intending to farm it” is not news to the millions who have: it’s the whole sodding point! The whole programme is him saying “I subsidise this with all my other stuff - look how shit life is for proper farmers, how little they can make, and how much we need them”.
As I think I heard Clarkson tell Victoria Darbyshire he would just now set up a trust and try and live seven years and that his daughter has already said 'you will seven years, although it might be in a deep freezer by end of it'.
Peterborough Lido is much better. 50 metres long, and still outdoors, but heated to a relatively tolerable temperature. Goodness knows how much that costs to heat.
EDIT: Also, I'm surprised few are as discomfited as me by the hair colour change. Of course, she's free to do it - just as she's free to, say, start wearing a beret. But it's the behaviour of a teenager or someone else self-obsessed. It's just... odd.
There's a lot that can be done just by unwinding the Hail Mary passes.
(Approximate numbers.)
There's a 50=metre pool planned to be built in the new Cambridge Eddington development, but whether that happens is another matter. A 25-metre pool was 'planned' for our village as well. After 25 years it's pretty much been forgotten about. Though as Eddington's the university's baby, they'll probably find a way for the council to fund it from the money that could build a smaller pool here...
Which is why you need to get your single sentance clickbait lines workshopped /before/ you announce a policy!
FWIW as the grandson of a miner they would both be right to have closed the lot of them.
It's fun to hear people bemoaning the fate of the miners, and calling for this mine not to happen...
By why should the stewardship of a farm be any different from the stewardship of any other business?
Look: I don't think IHT should force people out of family farms, and that's why propose something different. But we should - as much as possible - choose to make the tax system prioritize people making economically rational decisions.
And the IHT loophole on farmland encourages family farmers to sell their land! It doesn't encourage it them to steward it, it encourages them to take the big bucks from City Boys.
So, is it really achieving what it set out to do? Or is it resulting in farmers taking large retirement cheques?
For context, removing the two-child limit would bring 540,000 children out of absolute poverty.
He is a repellent toad who doesn't want the UK to succeed.
Most Governments are made and/or broken by the relationship between the occupants of No.10 and No.11 Downing Street. Indeed, I'd argue the fragility of that relationship has been one of the biggest problems affecting British government and governance over the past 70 years - it's of course less the relationship between the individuals but between the Prime Minister's Office and HM Treasury.
Chancellors come in two flavours - the political and the technocratic but as history tells us both kinds can get into poor relationships with the Prime Minister. Too often political alliances forged either outside or at different points inside Govenrment can sour when it comes to the very top jobs and this has, I think, been accentuated by the decline in the influence and importance of the Foreign Secretary role.
I don't know if the Starmer/Reeves relationship can or will survive the reality of Government - it wouldn't be the first that didn't - look at Major/Lamont and Truss/Kwarteng to name but two and you can throw in Blair/Brown and Wilson/Callaghan if you want a bit of balance. The idea the Chancellor can be a human shield for the Prime Minister and pace the scapegoat be sent into the wilderness with the Government's sins on his or her back isn't an original one either.
They are effectively cottage industries that we decide to retain, as a policy decision, to not just make food but to preserve the countryside the way we like it as a public good. We can change that policy if you like, but you have to recognise that you’re changing something many of us like.
Having lower IHT is a good idea, but we should lower the overall rate rather than give out undeserved bungs to special interest groups, many of whom just use it as a tax dodge anyway.
Mind you, we are in Brighton, so anything goes.
Most of us don't really internalise/grock the difference between capital and revenue spending. That big X as a one-off can be cheaper than smaller x every year forever.
And that misconception explains most of the pickle that humanity in general and Britain especially, is in.
But I do agree (I think) that the current system which, I think, has been set up to encourage that outcome, isn't necessarily optimal at delivering that outcome.
And will then be voted out of government in 2029.
Maybe Wes will come to the rescue, but I think he's more likely to flounce out before '29...
I'm just reading a document online that says: "The ignition of a 1-kg plutonium button requires heating 50-60
seconds with a welding torch. Spread of the burning reaction to cover the button may take 10-15 minutes with the temperature reaching over 800 "C."
Just in case anyone has a handy 1-kg Plutonium button lying around on their desk.
It's a little crazy to think that people have done experiments to see how plutonium burns and self-ignites in various forms and conditions.
Yep it's cheaper short term (the initial development costs are lower) but the extra maintenance costs means things even at after 10 years and subsequently the short term savings cost more money...
Partly it's just me. I have a preference for a more utilitarian aesthetic, a suspicion of vanity and a distaste for flamboyance. (When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s this attitude was just standard* and I'm puzzled that modern Brits not only spend so much time, money and discomfort on their own appearance (nail bars! tanning salons! botox! lip filler!) but actually don't subject this sort of thing to the relentless mockery it deserves. I'm actually a bit odd about this: I don't even like cosmetics, and lipstick actually promotes a sort of physical disgust reflex in me.
But also, she's CoE. It's not the sort of thing you expect a CoE to do.
*and yes, the counterexample of e.g. the New Romantics is always given, but they were on the fringes of society, and widely mocked (rightly so in my view!)
Ask Eilish McColgan how that works…
https://www.runnersworld.com/uk/news/a41705232/great-scottish-run-course-was-short-eilish-mccolgan-records-invalidated/
I can't speak for Wales or Scotland but that's a courageous prediction for the London Mayoralty in 2028.
Will Sadiq Khan stand again? As I've said on here before, he made a catastrophic political error when announcing his decision to stand again so early. He must have thought at the time (January 2022) Johnson would recover from the mid-term polling and beat Starmer at the GE - that didn't turn out as planned. Instead, he could have waited and found himself a London constituency and would now be a prominent backbencher if not actually in Government.
He'll have to make another judgement call in early 2026 which I imagine he'll get wrong again.
The truth is London is a tough road to hoe for the Conservatives - they polled 20.6% in July against 43% for Labour, 11% for the LDs, 10% for the Greens and 9% for Reform so where is this candidate who will maximise the anti-Labour vote? The answer, as it has probably always been, is it's probably NOT a Conservative, Lib Dem, Green or Reform but a super-Independent who can motivate the anti-Labour vote.
I don't know who that person is or might be and I can't see the Conservative Party not standing a candidate and endorsing such an Independent but there's plenty of time for that to change.
Essentially the soundtrack to any decent night out between the mid 1990s and mid 2000s.
Which also should be our national anthem.
Also, I don't understand why British sports teams haven't adopted it, it's magnificently stirring, defiant and all about getting fucking banjo'd
Smaller farmers tend to think medium- to long-term. There are things they could do that would maximise the land's output, but which would cause them problems many years on. Leaving fields fallow is an example for some farms (not all); one many larger farms do not do by means of adding chemicals. This is terrible for biodiversity. Or removing hedgerows, which larger farms have more capacity to do.
Hopefully it will also result in regeneration and a few thousand jobs.
Can't recall if I ever told it on yer
There's two things going on here: one is my personal view "I think RR is a bit daft to me dicking about with her hair colour." That's a minor facet of my aversion to flamboyance, but also I accept that nowadays I'm right up one end of the spectrum on this view. It's not that I want to prevent people doing it - it's just not something I particularly like. But there are lots of things I don't particularly like and don't have to. I don't like non-humourous poetry but I don't object to people spending their time in that way if they do.
But the other aspect is "is this how we would expect a CoE to behave?" It comes across as a bit non-serious. I daresay if a headteacher, for example, went down a similar route, I wouldn't be alone in finding that similarly jarring.
I'm struggling to think of any other highlights from that period. Dawn of the Replicants is about as good as it got for me.
The big estates you are talking about being sold to City boys are not in this category and are a tiny number of farms in the UK. No city boy is going to buy a working farm with a few hundred acres. And if they do they also feel a responsibility to its environment and upkeep.
Unlike a vast agribusiness which only has, rightly, a responsibility to its shareholders.
But as I said, tomorrow's looking splendid. Get out in it. You can still complain if you want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MybK54EVzeA
Impressive!!!!
The idyllic vision some people have of farming doesn't match the reality.
Its not always wise to ask about were all that old engine oil went or what happened to the pile of used tyres just after bonfire night. Or the half acre dump of things that might be useful but are currently being reclaimed by the earth.
But in retrospect, it wasn't just the arse end of the britpop era there was nothing good coming out of the other side of the pond, either. Nu metal and a thousand Britney Spears clones.
I spent most of those years being a moody goth. I'm sure there are still photos to prove it, somewhere... glad I got my teenage years out of the way before camera phones!
As an aside - is Alastair Campbell a Centrist Dad now?
Many congratulations to your Dad
Hope the members have gone home early - it can be very costly especially at today's drink prices !!!!
We should have kept some coal mines as we need to secure our own energy in the age of Putin and lockdowns and renewables and nuclear alone are nowhere near enough as yet to supply it all.
We need to grow more of our own food even more so and the best way to provide food for the nation is family farms rooted in the land
Coal Authority refused to grant them a mining license on the basis of financial viability and risk of subsidence,
Page 31 "Based on the information received from WCML and the reports provided by WA and BGS, the CA have concluded that WCML’s financial plans do not demonstrate that the Project is financially viable."
Page 33 for recommendations
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66fd2883e84ae1fd8592ec7f/Woodhouse_Colliery_recommendation_report_redacted.pdf
True war has not come. In-between war, on the other hand definitely has. Attacks on pipelines and cables, jamming of GPS and civilian aircraft systems, removal of border markers, corruption and threats. Blood curdling threats. Threats of torture, of the utter destruction of the very name of Estonia. Yet in these 1000 days we have quietly prepared. We have an advanced civil defence system, we have quadrupled defence expenditure, we have found any Putinist fifth columnists and removed them. We have linked with the new NATO allies of Finland and Sweden. Today the Baltic has a strategic depth it has never had before. We have NATO troops and supplies of the latest military equipment. We are as secure as we can be against the depravity of Putin and the massive nervous breakdown he has visited on Russia. Large numbers of Russian speaking Estonians are amongst the first to volunteer to defend Estonia, since they know that, as in Ukraine, it will be the Russian speakers who will be first to be attacked by the rabble that used to be the Russian army.
For rabble it undoubtedly is. Despite the attacks on infrastructure, including mass cyber attacks- it is assumed here that today´s British Airways IT glitch is Russian cyber terrorism- the performance of the Russian military has been appalling. The Estonian high command doesn´t often comment, but the assumption is that we can hold until the Poles, Swedes, Finns, the French and the Brits can reinforce and shove the Russian forces out. The question is now that time for Putin is running out. The Russian economy, especially its transport sector is showing unmistakable signs of serious meltdown. Inflation is rising sharply and interest rates at 20% are still insufficient to protect the Rouble. The horrific death toll inflicted on Ukraine is more than matched by the astonishing losses of Russian forces. China is open to discussions with the West, since they see the increasingly desperate nuclear threats from Putin as very bad for business. The announcement of the G-20 meeting of Sir Kier Starmer and President and General Secretary Xi Jinping was greeted with wise nods here, despite the general hostility to China following some rather inept actions by Beijing against Estonia, not least the damage to the Finnish/Estonian power connectors.
No one knows what Trump will do. Estonia is closing no doors. In the face of what looks like a gathering crisis, we watch and wait. We live in the in-between time and hope that the death agonies of Putinism will not unleash a nuclear response before the monster is gone. Nevertheless is will be a cold and grim winter before the spring comes once more.
David Gray White Ladder?
That's, er, not going to endear them to the public when it filters through.
I only hope that the threat of nuclear war prevents further serious escalation. It's why I'm pro Ukraine getting nukes. Nukes have kept the peace, largely, since 1945. But then again, nobody is mad enough to do it... until they are.
Data > Opinion
What's the data? Has the introduction of IHT relief on farmland increased the retention of family farms? Or has it led to more people selling farms to cash in? And what has happens immediately after a farm is passed on? Is there a spike in sales following the sale of farms?
In other words, does the data support the supposition that this leads to more owner-farmers?
Or does its principally result in people who aren't farmers avoiding taxes?
Because arguing without data is wank. All we (and I include myself here) is doing is making a case totally devoid from reality.
Exemptions for the farmhouse and spousal exemptions are irrelevant to the transfer of the farmland from father to son
That is literally the most evidence free post I have ever seen on PB. And I've read @Leon's posts about AI.