I am sorry but farmers have been mollycoddled for long enough.
100% tax relief which is effectively dodges inheritance tax, no wonder Clarkson became a farmer.
What are the changes?
Agricultural property relief (APR) allows eligible farmland to be inherited with 100pc tax relief, and business property relief can be claimed on qualifying assets (such as farmland or equipment) not covered by APR.
From 6 April 2026, the full 100pc relief will be restricted to the first £1m of combined agricultural and business property. After that, the relief drops to 50pc. Assets above the threshold will be subject to an effective 20pc inheritance tax charge, meaning thousands of farmers will have to start paying death duties.
However, the Government says that the actual threshold before paying inheritance tax could be up to £3m, taking into account exemptions for each partner in a couple and for the farm property.
'Good luck to everyone protesting today against Labour’s demented family farm tax. Farmers work all hours and all year round to feed this country. We should be doing more to champion British food and keep our farmers on the land. Instead Reeves is clobbering British agriculture with a tax that is spiteful and punitive and economically disastrous. End it now.'https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/1858783436833493303
Don't most of us work "all year round"? Is there some job category where you get 6 months off?
If you have livestock you can't just leave it for 2 weeks whilst you go to Malaga.
You might be able to get a neighbour to keep an eye out but then they might be too busy themselves.
There's also an issue that farmers have always faced: farms are not infinitely divisible. If a farmer has a large family (and they often do...) then splitting up the farm doesn't work, as one marginal farm becomes two unproductive ones. This means that some kids often get left with very little. This can cause their kids some (ahem) rivalry if the parents are not very careful. The wise ones ensure that only one or two of their kids like farming. The one who doesn't get the farm can just move onto another farm or marry a lass who has a farm... In theory...
Having to sell some parcels of land to pay IHT might cause a marginal farm to become unproductive, so the whole has to be sold. And as has been pointed out many times, the purchaser will be either a large agribusiness who does not pay IHT, or to people who will not farm the land.
Though it isn't always a problem. Many moons ago, I was walking in the unfashionable western side of the Peak District. I came across an elderly couple in a farmyard, and we chatted. They were working the land alone, with a bit of help from neighbouring farmers, as none of their kids wanted to go into farming. They seemed quite sad about that.
Isn't this a problem for most parents? My Mum owned a house. She had two kids. I now own a maisonette.
Imagine if, instead of raising employers' NI, Reeves had done as many are suggesting and broken their manifesto promise by raising income tax and/or employees' NI. What would businesses and other government critics now be saying?
At a guess: reducing people's disposable income will be hugely damaging to the economy - even lower growth due to less spending, and this will lead to redundancies and businesses having to close. The Chancellor must go!
To govern is to chose.
Starmer and Reeves chose to raise taxes on workers and business.
And then exempted the public sector.
They would have been better off spreading the tax increase and saying "we're all in this together".
The fuel duty increase should have been implemented as well.
“We’re all in this together” would have at least led to general groans but an accepting of the need to raise funds in the short term. With some skillful economic management, they could een have reversed an income tax increase before the next election, to say “thank you” to everyone.
Instead, they’ve picked on a few specific groups of people, who can organise against the government. Today it’s the turn of the farmers, and the news tonight is going to be of Jeremy Clarkson and hundreds of tractors on TV with opposition politicians.
Jeremy Clarkson wrote:
I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves have a sinister plan.
They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms.
But before they can do that, they have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers.
That’s why they had a Budget which makes farming nigh on impossible.
That feels a teensy little bit over-the-top and possibly rather insulting to people who are being carpet bombed and ethnically cleansed. It's also kinda moving towards Great Replacement Theory nonsense when there is zero evidence that the new Labour government are going to increase immigration compared to the last administration.
Is Jeremy Clarkson going full MAGA going to be attractive to British voters?
Is it possible to be anti-racist and not support policies that result in ethnic replacement? Why should the global majority be a minority in the British countryside?
You confuse me William. Who are you saying are the global majority and who the countryside minority? And where exactly is this evidence for ethnic replacement in the countryside?
Whites are a minority globally but they dominate the British countryside. I'm questioning whether @bondegezou ought not to support a policy designed to get farms out of the hands of their hereditary owners in order to bring us closer to a racially just world.
To all those people who make farming families out to be rich: I'd like to see them get up at dawn and work until dusk, in all sorts of weathers. To have a year where the weather means all your profits are wiped out, or where government legislation floods the market with cheap meat. Where tourists routinely stray off the paths, interfere with livestock and knock down walls and fences. Where you have to go out in the snow to find ewes that are lambing. If they want us to be rich, then they should fucking well pay more for British food. Until then, I'll go work in an office and they can ****ing well starve.
Said to me, in rather stronger terms, by a farming relative.
Ex-farming relative, presumably, and now working in an office? Or was that all piss and wind?
Why do you assume that? I'm from South Derbyshire originally, and have near and distant relatives involved with farming in South Derbyshire, East Staffs and touristy areas a little further north. One uncle in particular is quite elderly and infirm at the moment. A couple more relatives if you include farming-related activities.
A lot of my family were in farming and building, and quite a few remain. Thankfully we haven't descended so low as to become lawyers yet.
It seemed strongly implied from, "Until then, I'll go work in an office and they can ****ing well starve."
That kind of thing pisses me off when people are whining (not farmers specifically, academics like myself, too - although in our case it's the 'I could earn a lot more in industry' line). Well, do it then!
As you and others note, there's a draw to farming (for some) despite all the downsides. Much as there is with academia, or teaching or other 'vocations'. Government policy should deal with shortages - if this will actually displace farmers then it's a bad thing (and it may do, I'd assess it differently, make it not actually payable until sale for example and not index-linked, so generational farming families never pay and the real charge decreases the longer that land is held, assuming land values increase in notional terms).
Apols. I meant that if they want to screw farmers over, then he might as well go and work in an office and let them starve.
Nobody is forcing him to be a farmer, and there is no shortage of folk who'd be happy to buy his land.
There is no shortage of *businesses* who'd be happy to buy his land.
As an aside, I'm firmly of the view that agribusinesses manage the land in a far worse manner than small farmers.
See how US now works, where outside of very niche farmers, you don't own the land, you don't own the livestock e.g 3-4 companies own the whole supply chain for chicken. They deliver chicks to your farm, they set the density of chickens needs to be in each barn, the conditions, the feed, etc, they pick them up when ready for slaughter. Them they need to be chlorinated because of the rate of disease because of piss poor conditions they are farmed in.
'Farmers must pay up for the NHS', says Rachel Reeves...
Given the small amount of forecast revenue from this measure, that's idiotic rhetoric.
The actual quote from Reeves is buried in the article: "The reforms to agricultural property relief ensure that wealthier estates and the most valuable farms pay their fair share to invest in our schools and health services that farmers and families in rural communities rely on" Which is far less idiotic (if somewhat meaningless) rhetoric. To be fair to the Telegraph, it seems to be HYUFD who put quotes around words she didn't say, rather than them.
Mr. HYUFD, Starmer should give the green light for missiles to be used in Russia. Failure to do so would be pathetic.
He won't, he is too wary of Putin's response.
Macron has more balls and probably will follow Biden's lead and allow Ukraine to send French as well as US missiles to Russian territory. Though even then I suspect Trump will cancel that permission after his inaugration in January (albeit if the Russians do anything against US bases in Europe Trump would be aggressive in his response)
Reportedly Starmer has been pushing for US approval to allow Storm Shadow strikes into Russia, and it is also being suggested that supplies of the missiles were being held back so that they would be available when that approval was granted.
I don't think the preemptive criticism of Starmer on this point is warranted. I hope to see Storm Shadow strikes in Kursk within the week.
We should not fear Russia. It has proved itself weak, rather than strong.
Putin would not be seeking aid from North Korea, if he had sufficient manpower.
Putin still has the largest nuclear missile arsenal in the world, that is far more of a concern than his manpower. I certainly wouldn't approve of missile strikes into Russian occupied territory beyond Kursk where the North Koreans are
You do realise that makes MAD an offensive, not defensive, weapon?
Previously, MAD has generally been: "If you attack me, then I'll attack you back." (*) At various times, that has included chemical and biological weapons as well as nukes: if the USA was attacked with those weapons, the response would be nuclear (as the USA had got rid of its chemical and biological weapons). Hence nukes are a defensive weapon.
Russia (and your...) view turns MAD into: "If you try to stop me attacking this smaller neighbour, I will use nukes." It becomes an offensive weapon.
If Russia is using long-range weapons into Ukraine, especially when they are obtained from NK and Iran, then Ukraine should be perfectly free to use similar weapons against Russia.
(*) With some outliers such as France, with their 'warning shot' doctrine.
Perhaps, though at least the French have their own independent nuclear deterrent and the US control theirs so Russia knows if they hit them they will hit Russia back.
Are we sure Trident is fully under our control or US control? Once Trump gets in we certainly can't do anything without his agreement in terms of missile attacks on Russian territory
Of course it isn't under our control. When he was having his Putin love-in period, Obama gave Vlad the serial numbers (or whatever they are) of Britain's nukes as part of US inventory, against our protests. We pay them handsomely for a fig leaf, they control the weapons.
Hence I think we should start thinking about getting and secretly preparing our own independent nuclear missile deterrent like the French have once Trump gets in as well as or even ultimately instead of Trident
Imagine if, instead of raising employers' NI, Reeves had done as many are suggesting and broken their manifesto promise by raising income tax and/or employees' NI. What would businesses and other government critics now be saying?
At a guess: reducing people's disposable income will be hugely damaging to the economy - even lower growth due to less spending, and this will lead to redundancies and businesses having to close. The Chancellor must go!
To govern is to chose.
Starmer and Reeves chose to raise taxes on workers and business.
And then exempted the public sector.
They would have been better off spreading the tax increase and saying "we're all in this together".
The fuel duty increase should have been implemented as well.
Of course accepting all those freebies makes it harder for Starmer to claim "we're all in this together".
Its amazing how willing our political leaders are to damage themselves for a few thousand quid.
Has Starmer reversed his pension deal yet or is that another fatcat promise ?
Sure, but there is now widespread realisation and explicit regret within most strata of the Tory Party (and of course within the entirety of the Reform Party) that the Cameron era and post-Cameron Governments failed to reverse Blair's constitutional 'reforms' and the fast track to national decline that they have brought about. What comes next is likely to be a Reform/Tory combination, and there is no way we can apply the precedent of avowedly right wing Governments tolerating the left wing ratchet effect (or enthusiatically adding to it) the way Cameron, May, Sunak, and frankly Boris did.
There's also an issue that farmers have always faced: farms are not infinitely divisible. If a farmer has a large family (and they often do...) then splitting up the farm doesn't work, as one marginal farm becomes two unproductive ones. This means that some kids often get left with very little. This can cause their kids some (ahem) rivalry if the parents are not very careful. The wise ones ensure that only one or two of their kids like farming. The one who doesn't get the farm can just move onto another farm or marry a lass who has a farm... In theory...
Having to sell some parcels of land to pay IHT might cause a marginal farm to become unproductive, so the whole has to be sold. And as has been pointed out many times, the purchaser will be either a large agribusiness who does not pay IHT, or to people who will not farm the land.
Though it isn't always a problem. Many moons ago, I was walking in the unfashionable western side of the Peak District. I came across an elderly couple in a farmyard, and we chatted. They were working the land alone, with a bit of help from neighbouring farmers, as none of their kids wanted to go into farming. They seemed quite sad about that.
Isn't this a problem for most parents? My Mum owned a house. She had two kids. I now own a maisonette.
Yes but with farmers the asset is the livelihood, parental housing is not their children's career.
Mr. HYUFD, Starmer should give the green light for missiles to be used in Russia. Failure to do so would be pathetic.
He won't, he is too wary of Putin's response.
Macron has more balls and probably will follow Biden's lead and allow Ukraine to send French as well as US missiles to Russian territory. Though even then I suspect Trump will cancel that permission after his inaugration in January (albeit if the Russians do anything against US bases in Europe Trump would be aggressive in his response)
Reportedly Starmer has been pushing for US approval to allow Storm Shadow strikes into Russia, and it is also being suggested that supplies of the missiles were being held back so that they would be available when that approval was granted.
I don't think the preemptive criticism of Starmer on this point is warranted. I hope to see Storm Shadow strikes in Kursk within the week.
We should not fear Russia. It has proved itself weak, rather than strong.
Putin would not be seeking aid from North Korea, if he had sufficient manpower.
Putin still has the largest nuclear missile arsenal in the world, that is far more of a concern than his manpower. I certainly wouldn't approve of missile strikes into Russian occupied territory beyond Kursk where the North Koreans are
You do realise that makes MAD an offensive, not defensive, weapon?
Previously, MAD has generally been: "If you attack me, then I'll attack you back." (*) At various times, that has included chemical and biological weapons as well as nukes: if the USA was attacked with those weapons, the response would be nuclear (as the USA had got rid of its chemical and biological weapons). Hence nukes are a defensive weapon.
Russia (and your...) view turns MAD into: "If you try to stop me attacking this smaller neighbour, I will use nukes." It becomes an offensive weapon.
If Russia is using long-range weapons into Ukraine, especially when they are obtained from NK and Iran, then Ukraine should be perfectly free to use similar weapons against Russia.
(*) With some outliers such as France, with their 'warning shot' doctrine.
Perhaps, though at least the French have their own independent nuclear deterrent and the US control theirs so Russia knows if they hit them they will hit Russia back.
Are we sure Trident is fully under our control or US control? Once Trump gets in we certainly can't do anything without his agreement in terms of missile attacks on Russian territory
We make our own warheads & the missiles themselves are pulled at random from the same pool that the US subs use. The US could sabotage the entire pool I guess & then put them back to working order after we’ve pulled the ones that go into our subs but that seems a risky thing to do.
We ought to be doing more launch testing to make sure this definitely doesn’t happen though.
Sure, but there is now widespread realisation and explicit regret within most strata of the Tory Party (and of course within the entirety of the Reform Party) that the Cameron era and post-Cameron Governments failed to reverse Blair's constitutional 'reforms' and the fast track to national decline that they have brought about. What comes next is likely to be a Reform/Tory combination, and there is no way we can apply the precedent of avowedly right wing Governments tolerating the left wing ratchet effect (or enthusiatically adding to it) the way Cameron, May, Sunak, and frankly Boris did.
On the latest polling the choice at the next GE will likely be between a Tory and Reform government or a Labour minority government supported by the LDs
Imagine if, instead of raising employers' NI, Reeves had done as many are suggesting and broken their manifesto promise by raising income tax and/or employees' NI. What would businesses and other government critics now be saying?
At a guess: reducing people's disposable income will be hugely damaging to the economy - even lower growth due to less spending, and this will lead to redundancies and businesses having to close. The Chancellor must go!
To govern is to chose.
Starmer and Reeves chose to raise taxes on workers and business.
And then exempted the public sector.
They would have been better off spreading the tax increase and saying "we're all in this together".
The fuel duty increase should have been implemented as well.
“We’re all in this together” would have at least led to general groans but an accepting of the need to raise funds in the short term. With some skillful economic management, they could een have reversed an income tax increase before the next election, to say “thank you” to everyone.
Instead, they’ve picked on a few specific groups of people, who can organise against the government. Today it’s the turn of the farmers, and the news tonight is going to be of Jeremy Clarkson and hundreds of tractors on TV with opposition politicians.
Jeremy Clarkson wrote:
I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves have a sinister plan.
They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms.
But before they can do that, they have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers.
That’s why they had a Budget which makes farming nigh on impossible.
That feels a teensy little bit over-the-top and possibly rather insulting to people who are being carpet bombed and ethnically cleansed. It's also kinda moving towards Great Replacement Theory nonsense when there is zero evidence that the new Labour government are going to increase immigration compared to the last administration.
Is Jeremy Clarkson going full MAGA going to be attractive to British voters?
Is it possible to be anti-racist and not support policies that result in ethnic replacement? Why should the global majority be a minority in the British countryside?
You confuse me William. Who are you saying are the global majority and who the countryside minority? And where exactly is this evidence for ethnic replacement in the countryside?
Whites are a minority globally but they dominate the British countryside. I'm questioning whether @bondegezou ought not to support a policy designed to get farms out of the hands of their hereditary owners in order to bring us closer to a racially just world.
Behave, William
If you follow that logic, then the slave trade was a benevolent practice enabling black Africans to share in the foundation of the richest and most powerful nation on earth, rather than keeping it for white Europeans (we'll ignore the indigenous north-American peoples, as is tradition).
To all those people who make farming families out to be rich: I'd like to see them get up at dawn and work until dusk, in all sorts of weathers. To have a year where the weather means all your profits are wiped out, or where government legislation floods the market with cheap meat. Where tourists routinely stray off the paths, interfere with livestock and knock down walls and fences. Where you have to go out in the snow to find ewes that are lambing. If they want us to be rich, then they should fucking well pay more for British food. Until then, I'll go work in an office and they can ****ing well starve.
Said to me, in rather stronger terms, by a farming relative.
What a nasty person.
They should have the same tax treatment as the rest of us.
Fuck off. Seriously, fuck off. He's a relative. Some farmers out there are in despair over this. Calling them 'nasty' is beneath you.
Let's stick an extra 10% nasty bastards income tax on lawyers.
Its that, or we kill them all...
On my deathbed I am becoming a farmer so my family will not have to pay inheritance tax.
Don't worry, you don't have to actually do any farming. You just buy the land and get someone else to pay you to farm it.
That accounts for a whole 14% of farmed land in the UK.
Mixed tenant is another ~30%. Regardless should we wait until we are losing more ££ before we close loopholes or close them now?
This is not about closing loopholes. If it was they would have sorted out making sure it hit the investors not the generational farmers. And as I said, the investors will just moving on leaving the farmers the ones being screwed.
There's also an issue that farmers have always faced: farms are not infinitely divisible. If a farmer has a large family (and they often do...) then splitting up the farm doesn't work, as one marginal farm becomes two unproductive ones. This means that some kids often get left with very little. This can cause their kids some (ahem) rivalry if the parents are not very careful. The wise ones ensure that only one or two of their kids like farming. The one who doesn't get the farm can just move onto another farm or marry a lass who has a farm... In theory...
Having to sell some parcels of land to pay IHT might cause a marginal farm to become unproductive, so the whole has to be sold. And as has been pointed out many times, the purchaser will be either a large agribusiness who does not pay IHT, or to people who will not farm the land.
Though it isn't always a problem. Many moons ago, I was walking in the unfashionable western side of the Peak District. I came across an elderly couple in a farmyard, and we chatted. They were working the land alone, with a bit of help from neighbouring farmers, as none of their kids wanted to go into farming. They seemed quite sad about that.
Isn't this a problem for most parents? My Mum owned a house. She had two kids. I now own a maisonette.
Yes but with farmers the asset is the livelihood, parental housing is not their children's career.
Presumably, if one's dad owns a big factory (toolmaker, say ) then one pays inheritance tax (if above standard thresholds) on the machinery, buildings and the land?
The difference is, that for family-owned concerns, it's probably not normally millions in land value (although maybe it is, some old city-centre factory ripe for conversion into flats).
Imagine if, instead of raising employers' NI, Reeves had done as many are suggesting and broken their manifesto promise by raising income tax and/or employees' NI. What would businesses and other government critics now be saying?
At a guess: reducing people's disposable income will be hugely damaging to the economy - even lower growth due to less spending, and this will lead to redundancies and businesses having to close. The Chancellor must go!
To govern is to chose.
Starmer and Reeves chose to raise taxes on workers and business.
And then exempted the public sector.
They would have been better off spreading the tax increase and saying "we're all in this together".
The fuel duty increase should have been implemented as well.
“We’re all in this together” would have at least led to general groans but an accepting of the need to raise funds in the short term. With some skillful economic management, they could een have reversed an income tax increase before the next election, to say “thank you” to everyone.
Instead, they’ve picked on a few specific groups of people, who can organise against the government. Today it’s the turn of the farmers, and the news tonight is going to be of Jeremy Clarkson and hundreds of tractors on TV with opposition politicians.
Jeremy Clarkson wrote:
I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves have a sinister plan.
They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms.
But before they can do that, they have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers.
That’s why they had a Budget which makes farming nigh on impossible.
That feels a teensy little bit over-the-top and possibly rather insulting to people who are being carpet bombed and ethnically cleansed. It's also kinda moving towards Great Replacement Theory nonsense when there is zero evidence that the new Labour government are going to increase immigration compared to the last administration.
Is Jeremy Clarkson going full MAGA going to be attractive to British voters?
Is it possible to be anti-racist and not support policies that result in ethnic replacement? Why should the global majority be a minority in the British countryside?
The Great Replacement conspiracy theory (as believed by Elon and anagrams thereof) is the idea that there is a deliberate plan to replace white people with immigrants, rapidly and at scale, which we see echoes of in Clarkson's "They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants".
Anti-racist policies say we let people be people, regardless of the colour of their skin. If a Black British person, or an Asian British person, or an immigrant wants to move to the countryside, they can. Immigration into the UK is restricted, but once somebody has been accepted, they have the same rights as a native-born person.
Most people will try to avoid paying tax, if they can. On a tiny scale, a very lefty uni friend of mine was slight and skinny enough to wear kids clothes, which she did as they were cheaper - no VAT. As a matter of interest, do you use a tax adviser to reduce the amount of tax you pay?
All of them are farming entirely voluntarily. They could sell up at current prices and live very well indeed doing nothing.
Ultimately, this is NOT a problem for the current generation of farmers. Long term this is a problem that is going to make food worse, more expensive and give us less food resilience.
Sure, but there is now widespread realisation and explicit regret within most strata of the Tory Party (and of course within the entirety of the Reform Party) that the Cameron era and post-Cameron Governments failed to reverse Blair's constitutional 'reforms' and the fast track to national decline that they have brought about. What comes next is likely to be a Reform/Tory combination, and there is no way we can apply the precedent of avowedly right wing Governments tolerating the left wing ratchet effect (or enthusiatically adding to it) the way Cameron, May, Sunak, and frankly Boris did.
On the latest polling the choice at the next GE will likely be between a Tory and Reform government or a Labour minority government supported by the LDs
Albeit even the latter would require Starmer to scrap the WFA cut and the tractor tax both of which the LDs (and indeed the SNP too) now oppose
Take out Jeremy Clarkson, who has become a national treasure following Clarkson's Farm, and I'm not sure the traction that this protest would get today. But plenty more people understand how a farm works than did before he appeared with his Prime series.
Now of course for him it's a plaything and I think people realise that he is the exception. Because what the prog did very well was illustrate how thin farming margins can be and how many if not most are living on the edge.
You only have to look at rates of suicide of farmers to understand this.
If you are old If you run a farm or business If you have a pension
This government is out to get you
I can see you're craving the halcyon days of the EU. No struggling businesses. Long hot summers sitting on your lamborghini tractor. No taxes. Pensions accessible in 28 countries. You could follow the sun all the year round.... Public Services free and on tap.
Even the Governor of the Bank of England has seen the light.....
And if we could do a simulcast of being on our LNER apps I could prove to everyone that apart from the 10.45 departure there simply are no tickets available to buy to go from London to Newcastle on any day next week.
Imagine if, instead of raising employers' NI, Reeves had done as many are suggesting and broken their manifesto promise by raising income tax and/or employees' NI. What would businesses and other government critics now be saying?
At a guess: reducing people's disposable income will be hugely damaging to the economy - even lower growth due to less spending, and this will lead to redundancies and businesses having to close. The Chancellor must go!
To govern is to chose.
Starmer and Reeves chose to raise taxes on workers and business.
And then exempted the public sector.
They would have been better off spreading the tax increase and saying "we're all in this together".
The fuel duty increase should have been implemented as well.
“We’re all in this together” would have at least led to general groans but an accepting of the need to raise funds in the short term. With some skillful economic management, they could een have reversed an income tax increase before the next election, to say “thank you” to everyone.
Instead, they’ve picked on a few specific groups of people, who can organise against the government. Today it’s the turn of the farmers, and the news tonight is going to be of Jeremy Clarkson and hundreds of tractors on TV with opposition politicians.
Jeremy Clarkson wrote:
I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves have a sinister plan.
They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms.
But before they can do that, they have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers.
That’s why they had a Budget which makes farming nigh on impossible.
That feels a teensy little bit over-the-top and possibly rather insulting to people who are being carpet bombed and ethnically cleansed. It's also kinda moving towards Great Replacement Theory nonsense when there is zero evidence that the new Labour government are going to increase immigration compared to the last administration.
Is Jeremy Clarkson going full MAGA going to be attractive to British voters?
Is it possible to be anti-racist and not support policies that result in ethnic replacement? Why should the global majority be a minority in the British countryside?
You confuse me William. Who are you saying are the global majority and who the countryside minority? And where exactly is this evidence for ethnic replacement in the countryside?
Whites are a minority globally but they dominate the British countryside. I'm questioning whether @bondegezou ought not to support a policy designed to get farms out of the hands of their hereditary owners in order to bring us closer to a racially just world.
Behave, William
If you follow that logic, then the slave trade was a benevolent practice enabling black Africans to share in the foundation of the richest and most powerful nation on earth, rather than keeping it for white Europeans (we'll ignore the indigenous north-American peoples, as is tradition).
You jest (I think) but that is literally the revisionist view.
There's also an issue that farmers have always faced: farms are not infinitely divisible. If a farmer has a large family (and they often do...) then splitting up the farm doesn't work, as one marginal farm becomes two unproductive ones. This means that some kids often get left with very little. This can cause their kids some (ahem) rivalry if the parents are not very careful. The wise ones ensure that only one or two of their kids like farming. The one who doesn't get the farm can just move onto another farm or marry a lass who has a farm... In theory...
Having to sell some parcels of land to pay IHT might cause a marginal farm to become unproductive, so the whole has to be sold. And as has been pointed out many times, the purchaser will be either a large agribusiness who does not pay IHT, or to people who will not farm the land.
Though it isn't always a problem. Many moons ago, I was walking in the unfashionable western side of the Peak District. I came across an elderly couple in a farmyard, and we chatted. They were working the land alone, with a bit of help from neighbouring farmers, as none of their kids wanted to go into farming. They seemed quite sad about that.
Isn't this a problem for most parents? My Mum owned a house. She had two kids. I now own a maisonette.
Yes but with farmers the asset is the livelihood, parental housing is not their children's career.
Presumably, if one's dad owns a big factory (toolmaker, say ) then one pays inheritance tax (if above standard thresholds) on the machinery, buildings and the land?
The difference is, that for family-owned concerns, it's probably not normally millions in land value (although maybe it is, some old city-centre factory ripe for conversion into flats).
As far as I can see shares in family businesses which are trading limited companies are exempt from IHT provided they have been held for two years.
'Good luck to everyone protesting today against Labour’s demented family farm tax. Farmers work all hours and all year round to feed this country. We should be doing more to champion British food and keep our farmers on the land. Instead Reeves is clobbering British agriculture with a tax that is spiteful and punitive and economically disastrous. End it now.'https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/1858783436833493303
Don't most of us work "all year round"? Is there some job category where you get 6 months off?
If you have livestock you can't just leave it for 2 weeks whilst you go to Malaga.
You might be able to get a neighbour to keep an eye out but then they might be too busy themselves.
My Mum was a single-handed GP, with a legal obligation to provide medical cover for her patients. If she wanted a holiday, she had to arrange cover. The same applies to lots of professions.
All of them are farming entirely voluntarily. They could sell up at current prices and live very well indeed doing nothing.
Ultimately, this is NOT a problem for the current generation of farmers. Long term this is a problem that is going to make food worse, more expensive and give us less food resilience.
How so? Most other OECD countries have IHT on land, yet they still manage to produce food.
I went to a minor public school full of the children of well off farmers. The school emptied during the Countryside Alliance March except for me and a handful of other lefty townies. The day after, someone rather pompously asked me what I was doing during the march. I told them I spent the day breaking in to farms. It didn't make me very popular nor did an essay I wrote for my Economics A Level on ending the Common Agricultural Policy.
Imagine if, instead of raising employers' NI, Reeves had done as many are suggesting and broken their manifesto promise by raising income tax and/or employees' NI. What would businesses and other government critics now be saying?
At a guess: reducing people's disposable income will be hugely damaging to the economy - even lower growth due to less spending, and this will lead to redundancies and businesses having to close. The Chancellor must go!
To govern is to chose.
Starmer and Reeves chose to raise taxes on workers and business.
And then exempted the public sector.
They would have been better off spreading the tax increase and saying "we're all in this together".
The fuel duty increase should have been implemented as well.
“We’re all in this together” would have at least led to general groans but an accepting of the need to raise funds in the short term. With some skillful economic management, they could een have reversed an income tax increase before the next election, to say “thank you” to everyone.
Instead, they’ve picked on a few specific groups of people, who can organise against the government. Today it’s the turn of the farmers, and the news tonight is going to be of Jeremy Clarkson and hundreds of tractors on TV with opposition politicians.
Jeremy Clarkson wrote:
I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves have a sinister plan.
They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms.
But before they can do that, they have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers.
That’s why they had a Budget which makes farming nigh on impossible.
That feels a teensy little bit over-the-top and possibly rather insulting to people who are being carpet bombed and ethnically cleansed. It's also kinda moving towards Great Replacement Theory nonsense when there is zero evidence that the new Labour government are going to increase immigration compared to the last administration.
Is Jeremy Clarkson going full MAGA going to be attractive to British voters?
Is it possible to be anti-racist and not support policies that result in ethnic replacement? Why should the global majority be a minority in the British countryside?
You confuse me William. Who are you saying are the global majority and who the countryside minority? And where exactly is this evidence for ethnic replacement in the countryside?
Whites are a minority globally but they dominate the British countryside. I'm questioning whether @bondegezou ought not to support a policy designed to get farms out of the hands of their hereditary owners in order to bring us closer to a racially just world.
That's not what you believe. That's not what I believe. Get back to me when you're ready to have a grown-up conversation.
Take out Jeremy Clarkson, who has become a national treasure following Clarkson's Farm, and I'm not sure the traction that this protest would get today. But plenty more people understand how a farm works than did before he appeared with his Prime series.
Now of course for him it's a plaything and I think people realise that he is the exception. Because what the prog did very well was illustrate how thin farming margins can be and how many if not most are living on the edge.
You only have to look at rates of suicide for farmers to understand this.
Actually I don't think it is a play thing now. He originally bought it for IHT reasons and had others farm the land. I think he probably thought great I will also make a Top Gear tv show out of this as well with minimal effort, money in the bank.
However, retirement of the contract farmer and COVID coincided, he was stuck there and I think that changed his focus. Since then he has spun out all these other businesses, he launched the beer, since when he has bought out the brewery and that is expanding, he has opened the pub (which I bet he rolls out multiple locations on the same model), the farm shop, the restaurant....for a play thing that's taking on a lot of responsibility, even if others run them day to day.
Imagine if, instead of raising employers' NI, Reeves had done as many are suggesting and broken their manifesto promise by raising income tax and/or employees' NI. What would businesses and other government critics now be saying?
At a guess: reducing people's disposable income will be hugely damaging to the economy - even lower growth due to less spending, and this will lead to redundancies and businesses having to close. The Chancellor must go!
To govern is to chose.
Starmer and Reeves chose to raise taxes on workers and business.
And then exempted the public sector.
They would have been better off spreading the tax increase and saying "we're all in this together".
The fuel duty increase should have been implemented as well.
“We’re all in this together” would have at least led to general groans but an accepting of the need to raise funds in the short term. With some skillful economic management, they could een have reversed an income tax increase before the next election, to say “thank you” to everyone.
Instead, they’ve picked on a few specific groups of people, who can organise against the government. Today it’s the turn of the farmers, and the news tonight is going to be of Jeremy Clarkson and hundreds of tractors on TV with opposition politicians.
Jeremy Clarkson wrote:
I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves have a sinister plan.
They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms.
But before they can do that, they have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers.
That’s why they had a Budget which makes farming nigh on impossible.
That feels a teensy little bit over-the-top and possibly rather insulting to people who are being carpet bombed and ethnically cleansed. It's also kinda moving towards Great Replacement Theory nonsense when there is zero evidence that the new Labour government are going to increase immigration compared to the last administration.
Is Jeremy Clarkson going full MAGA going to be attractive to British voters?
Is it possible to be anti-racist and not support policies that result in ethnic replacement? Why should the global majority be a minority in the British countryside?
The Great Replacement conspiracy theory (as believed by Elon and anagrams thereof) is the idea that there is a deliberate plan to replace white people with immigrants, rapidly and at scale, which we see echoes of in Clarkson's "They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants".
Anti-racist policies say we let people be people, regardless of the colour of their skin. If a Black British person, or an Asian British person, or an immigrant wants to move to the countryside, they can. Immigration into the UK is restricted, but once somebody has been accepted, they have the same rights as a native-born person.
What? I thought Elon was supposed to be in favour of the great replacement? I've lost track of what Musk believes and is believed to believe.
In response to @NickPalmer questioning if the conservatives will cancel the farmers IHT, Kemi is to join Jeremy Clarkson on stage to address and support the farmer's demonstration outside no 10
Also Scottish Labour are announcing they will reinstate the WFP
She may well be appearing but I bet decent money that unless Labour backs down (and it won't) the policy won't be changed by 2032...
If the policy is implemented we will see the actual effects.
If those are negative then the policy will be changed by someone at some point.
Are you sure......governments have a habit of sticking to their guns for both ideological and political reasons. They aren't run like a business...the cliff edge at £50-60k and £100-120k make no sense on a number of fronts if you want to maximise growth / productivity and not clear they maximise tax take either, yet here we are still with them 15 years later. We also have cliff edges in how many hours people can work per week.
If we see the whole farming sector steadily shutting down then that will lead to higher prices and outbreaks of panic buying.
Not a good image for governments.
It ill behoves the Tories to whine about farmers (as opposed to landowners, which is what IHT actually applies to) given how little they've done to promote fiid security and stop the supermarkets grinding the farmers down, as opposed to demanding more cheap food imports from Australia etc.
Putting farmers on a sounder economic footing would have been a better way toi approach the whole issue, including a rebalancing of agricultural land from its currently bloated values. But I have yet to read about Labour dealing with things like supermarket milk wholesale prices.
It's just another thing to be outraged about, see 20mph limits and all things Ed Miliband.
The IFS, Dan Neidle have done the work on this and it's going to affect very few farmers. The tax-free allowance for a couple is £2.65 million and there are only 462 inherited farms worth more than £1 million (out of around 200,000). And it's only the value above the allowance that is affected by IHT.
Much that I like Dan Neidle - I think he's wrong.
Our Uni friend has just inherited part of a farm and it's gone up for sale for £5m - now I don't know how much land there is but as an anecdote it means I question Dan's figures...
The figures Reeves quoted about it only affecting a quarter of farms would be taken from Defra figures on land holdings, which count all parcels of land, even a handful of acres or a field being rented out by a non farmer would be classified as farmland.
Regarding the policy, I don't think it'll land as much tax as predicted, and the tax intake will be staggered, it's difficult to predict when someone will die.
My understanding is that the livestock and machinery would need to be included in the £1 million APR relief as well as the land, again I would be surprised if Defra has done the research on this and knew the value sitting of what is sitting in every steading. Machinery values are extortionate now, though much of the newer stuff is on HP.
Given the average size of a dairy herd is north of 230 head in this part of Scotland, I think many herds livestock value alone will be over 400k
Will be interesting to see the finer details on the policy when finished
All of them are farming entirely voluntarily. They could sell up at current prices and live very well indeed doing nothing.
Ultimately, this is NOT a problem for the current generation of farmers. Long term this is a problem that is going to make food worse, more expensive and give us less food resilience.
How so? Most other OECD countries have IHT on land, yet they still manage to produce food.
That's an EU type argument, most other countries aren't in the EU and manage perfectly well outside it - yet leaving it was extremely disruptive for UK exporting businesses. Making a change to a current system is not the same as the system always having existed differently. Each country I'd imagine handles agriculture slightly differently outwith IHT stuff.
There's also an issue that farmers have always faced: farms are not infinitely divisible. If a farmer has a large family (and they often do...) then splitting up the farm doesn't work, as one marginal farm becomes two unproductive ones. This means that some kids often get left with very little. This can cause their kids some (ahem) rivalry if the parents are not very careful. The wise ones ensure that only one or two of their kids like farming. The one who doesn't get the farm can just move onto another farm or marry a lass who has a farm... In theory...
Having to sell some parcels of land to pay IHT might cause a marginal farm to become unproductive, so the whole has to be sold. And as has been pointed out many times, the purchaser will be either a large agribusiness who does not pay IHT, or to people who will not farm the land.
Though it isn't always a problem. Many moons ago, I was walking in the unfashionable western side of the Peak District. I came across an elderly couple in a farmyard, and we chatted. They were working the land alone, with a bit of help from neighbouring farmers, as none of their kids wanted to go into farming. They seemed quite sad about that.
Isn't this a problem for most parents? My Mum owned a house. She had two kids. I now own a maisonette.
Yes but with farmers the asset is the livelihood, parental housing is not their children's career.
Lots of other people want to hand down a business to their children. This isn't some unique feature of farming life.
'Good luck to everyone protesting today against Labour’s demented family farm tax. Farmers work all hours and all year round to feed this country. We should be doing more to champion British food and keep our farmers on the land. Instead Reeves is clobbering British agriculture with a tax that is spiteful and punitive and economically disastrous. End it now.'https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/1858783436833493303
Don't most of us work "all year round"? Is there some job category where you get 6 months off?
I don't know about you, but I get five and a half weeks of leave a year.
There's also an issue that farmers have always faced: farms are not infinitely divisible. If a farmer has a large family (and they often do...) then splitting up the farm doesn't work, as one marginal farm becomes two unproductive ones. This means that some kids often get left with very little. This can cause their kids some (ahem) rivalry if the parents are not very careful. The wise ones ensure that only one or two of their kids like farming. The one who doesn't get the farm can just move onto another farm or marry a lass who has a farm... In theory...
Having to sell some parcels of land to pay IHT might cause a marginal farm to become unproductive, so the whole has to be sold. And as has been pointed out many times, the purchaser will be either a large agribusiness who does not pay IHT, or to people who will not farm the land.
Though it isn't always a problem. Many moons ago, I was walking in the unfashionable western side of the Peak District. I came across an elderly couple in a farmyard, and we chatted. They were working the land alone, with a bit of help from neighbouring farmers, as none of their kids wanted to go into farming. They seemed quite sad about that.
Isn't this a problem for most parents? My Mum owned a house. She had two kids. I now own a maisonette.
Yes but with farmers the asset is the livelihood, parental housing is not their children's career.
Presumably, if one's dad owns a big factory (toolmaker, say ) then one pays inheritance tax (if above standard thresholds) on the machinery, buildings and the land?
The difference is, that for family-owned concerns, it's probably not normally millions in land value (although maybe it is, some old city-centre factory ripe for conversion into flats).
As far as I can see shares in family businesses which are trading limited companies are exempt from IHT provided they have been held for two years.
Indeed.
I imagine it is more difficult to structure a farm as shares in a family business because of the farmhouse.
This is all just going to make work for tax lawyers and accountants and gain very little for the government in the end, isn't it?
Take out Jeremy Clarkson, who has become a national treasure following Clarkson's Farm, and I'm not sure the traction that this protest would get today. But plenty more people understand how a farm works than did before he appeared with his Prime series.
Now of course for him it's a plaything and I think people realise that he is the exception. Because what the prog did very well was illustrate how thin farming margins can be and how many if not most are living on the edge.
You only have to look at rates of suicide for farmers to understand this.
Actually I don't think it is a play thing now. He originally bought it for IHT reasons and had others farm the land. I think he probably thought great I will also make a Top Gear tv show out of this as well with minimal effort, money in the bank.
However, COVID, he was stuck there and I think that changed his focus. Since then he has spun out all these other businesses, he launched the beer, since when he has bought out the brewery and that is expanding, he has opened the pub (which I bet he rolls out multiple locations on the same model), the farm shop, the restaurant....for a play thing that's taking on a lot of responsibility, even if others run them day to day.
I can't stand the man, but I've got to admit he certainly seems to have some business acumen.
For a party that made a huge advance at the GE, has the luxury of opposition, and with the new government enjoying the briefest of disappointing honeymoons, the Lib Dem polling has been really crap.
You wouldn't know that they'd won 72 seats at the last general election, the best result for a third party since... 1923.
For a party that made a huge advance at the GE, has the luxury of opposition, and with the new government enjoying the briefest of disappointing honeymoons, the Lib Dem polling has been really crap.
You wouldn't know that they'd won 72 seats at the last general election, the best result for a third party since... 1923.
And if we could do a simulcast of being on our LNER apps I could prove to everyone that apart from the 10.45 departure there simply are no tickets available to buy to go from London to Newcastle on any day next week.
Simply not true. I am on the LNER website right now and there are tickets available for every train from 8.30am onwards.
Edit. This is for Monday next week but the same applies to the other days.
To all those people who make farming families out to be rich: I'd like to see them get up at dawn and work until dusk, in all sorts of weathers. To have a year where the weather means all your profits are wiped out, or where government legislation floods the market with cheap meat. Where tourists routinely stray off the paths, interfere with livestock and knock down walls and fences. Where you have to go out in the snow to find ewes that are lambing. If they want us to be rich, then they should fucking well pay more for British food. Until then, I'll go work in an office and they can ****ing well starve.
Said to me, in rather stronger terms, by a farming relative.
Anyone who has watched Clarkson's farm ought to be aware that while the asset might by very great, the profits are often marginal. I'm afraid in this instance, as in others, its Labour revealing its prejudices. I knew a phd student at UEA who hated, literally hated farmers because his ancesters had been farm workers. I can see him bringing in policies such as this.
There's also an issue that farmers have always faced: farms are not infinitely divisible. If a farmer has a large family (and they often do...) then splitting up the farm doesn't work, as one marginal farm becomes two unproductive ones. This means that some kids often get left with very little. This can cause their kids some (ahem) rivalry if the parents are not very careful. The wise ones ensure that only one or two of their kids like farming. The one who doesn't get the farm can just move onto another farm or marry a lass who has a farm... In theory...
Having to sell some parcels of land to pay IHT might cause a marginal farm to become unproductive, so the whole has to be sold. And as has been pointed out many times, the purchaser will be either a large agribusiness who does not pay IHT, or to people who will not farm the land.
Though it isn't always a problem. Many moons ago, I was walking in the unfashionable western side of the Peak District. I came across an elderly couple in a farmyard, and we chatted. They were working the land alone, with a bit of help from neighbouring farmers, as none of their kids wanted to go into farming. They seemed quite sad about that.
Isn't this a problem for most parents? My Mum owned a house. She had two kids. I now own a maisonette.
Yes but with farmers the asset is the livelihood, parental housing is not their children's career.
Presumably, if one's dad owns a big factory (toolmaker, say ) then one pays inheritance tax (if above standard thresholds) on the machinery, buildings and the land?
The difference is, that for family-owned concerns, it's probably not normally millions in land value (although maybe it is, some old city-centre factory ripe for conversion into flats).
As far as I can see shares in family businesses which are trading limited companies are exempt from IHT provided they have been held for two years.
Indeed.
I imagine it is more difficult to structure a farm as shares in a family business because of the farmhouse.
This is all just going to make work for tax lawyers and accountants and gain very little for the government in the end, isn't it?
The populist comedy bit is the simultaneous belief that -
1) All Real Farners have to do is {insert tax avoidance here} to be unaffected. This will cost no time or money to do. 2) All the Evul Land Investors will be captured in the Inland Revenue’s web. Inextricably.
There's also an issue that farmers have always faced: farms are not infinitely divisible. If a farmer has a large family (and they often do...) then splitting up the farm doesn't work, as one marginal farm becomes two unproductive ones. This means that some kids often get left with very little. This can cause their kids some (ahem) rivalry if the parents are not very careful. The wise ones ensure that only one or two of their kids like farming. The one who doesn't get the farm can just move onto another farm or marry a lass who has a farm... In theory...
Having to sell some parcels of land to pay IHT might cause a marginal farm to become unproductive, so the whole has to be sold. And as has been pointed out many times, the purchaser will be either a large agribusiness who does not pay IHT, or to people who will not farm the land.
Though it isn't always a problem. Many moons ago, I was walking in the unfashionable western side of the Peak District. I came across an elderly couple in a farmyard, and we chatted. They were working the land alone, with a bit of help from neighbouring farmers, as none of their kids wanted to go into farming. They seemed quite sad about that.
Isn't this a problem for most parents? My Mum owned a house. She had two kids. I now own a maisonette.
Yes but with farmers the asset is the livelihood, parental housing is not their children's career.
Presumably, if one's dad owns a big factory (toolmaker, say ) then one pays inheritance tax (if above standard thresholds) on the machinery, buildings and the land?
The difference is, that for family-owned concerns, it's probably not normally millions in land value (although maybe it is, some old city-centre factory ripe for conversion into flats).
As far as I can see shares in family businesses which are trading limited companies are exempt from IHT provided they have been held for two years.
I went to a minor public school full of the children of well off farmers. The school emptied during the Countryside Alliance March except for me and a handful of other lefty townies. The day after, someone rather pompously asked me what I was doing during the march. I told them I spent the day breaking in to farms. It didn't make me very popular nor did an essay I wrote for my Economics A Level on ending the Common Agricultural Policy.
Ironic that reportedly the majority of them voted to leave the CAP
Take out Jeremy Clarkson, who has become a national treasure following Clarkson's Farm, and I'm not sure the traction that this protest would get today. But plenty more people understand how a farm works than did before he appeared with his Prime series.
Now of course for him it's a plaything and I think people realise that he is the exception. Because what the prog did very well was illustrate how thin farming margins can be and how many if not most are living on the edge.
You only have to look at rates of suicide for farmers to understand this.
Actually I don't think it is a play thing now. He originally bought it for IHT reasons and had others farm the land. I think he probably thought great I will also make a Top Gear tv show out of this as well with minimal effort, money in the bank.
However, COVID, he was stuck there and I think that changed his focus. Since then he has spun out all these other businesses, he launched the beer, since when he has bought out the brewery and that is expanding, he has opened the pub (which I bet he rolls out multiple locations on the same model), the farm shop, the restaurant....for a play thing that's taking on a lot of responsibility, even if others run them day to day.
I can't stand the man, but I've got to admit he certainly seems to have some business acumen.
Stewart Lee on Top Gear
Clarkson, with his outrageous politically incorrect opinions, which has every week to a deadline in the Sunday Times, almost as if they weren't real....
I am sorry but farmers have been mollycoddled for long enough.
100% tax relief which is effectively dodges inheritance tax, no wonder Clarkson became a farmer.
What are the changes?
Agricultural property relief (APR) allows eligible farmland to be inherited with 100pc tax relief, and business property relief can be claimed on qualifying assets (such as farmland or equipment) not covered by APR.
From 6 April 2026, the full 100pc relief will be restricted to the first £1m of combined agricultural and business property. After that, the relief drops to 50pc. Assets above the threshold will be subject to an effective 20pc inheritance tax charge, meaning thousands of farmers will have to start paying death duties.
However, the Government says that the actual threshold before paying inheritance tax could be up to £3m, taking into account exemptions for each partner in a couple and for the farm property.
There's a very good argument for looking at the problem of agricultural land (whether its use is economically efficient and environmentally beneficial; whether it's being abused by the very rich as a tax dodge, etc). But bringing in an ill thought out measure like this, with virtually no consultation, which overturns the arrangements of the last half century, and is quite likely to have negative unintended consequences, is not the way to go about it.
I cannot see a single argument why farmers should have 100% relief.
'Good luck to everyone protesting today against Labour’s demented family farm tax. Farmers work all hours and all year round to feed this country. We should be doing more to champion British food and keep our farmers on the land. Instead Reeves is clobbering British agriculture with a tax that is spiteful and punitive and economically disastrous. End it now.'https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/1858783436833493303
Don't most of us work "all year round"? Is there some job category where you get 6 months off?
I don't know about you, but I get five and a half weeks of leave a year.
I take this to be you volunteering to be taxed more heavily instead.
To all those people who make farming families out to be rich: I'd like to see them get up at dawn and work until dusk, in all sorts of weathers. To have a year where the weather means all your profits are wiped out, or where government legislation floods the market with cheap meat. Where tourists routinely stray off the paths, interfere with livestock and knock down walls and fences. Where you have to go out in the snow to find ewes that are lambing. If they want us to be rich, then they should fucking well pay more for British food. Until then, I'll go work in an office and they can ****ing well starve.
Said to me, in rather stronger terms, by a farming relative.
This another strawman though. I don't think anyone thinks otherwise (particularly after Clarkson's farm). This is about a few very large and wealthy landowners, and also stopping the British countryside being bought up by billionaires as a tax dodge mechanism.
It's a relatively small amount of revenue for HMRC but a good example of them getting early before it becomes a big issue.
It isn't just about a few very large and wealthy landowners. Far from.
Incidentally, and from that conversation: how is the land valued for IHT purposes? An uphill farm might be worth relatively little from a farming perspective, which a family might want to continue doing. But it might be worth much more with the farmhouse converted into a non-farming home or B&B, and with some of the barns 'converted' into housing for townies - something that cannot be done and the farm remain as a singular farm. It'd be the highest valuation, wouldn't it? And if the inheritors are forced to sell, what happens if the land does not reach that estimate?
Tax advisers are going to be very busy.
Many farmers want to farm. From my experience they grumble and complain (including my distant relatives...), but they love farming. And that doubles when there's a many-generation familial connection with the land.
It'll be valued purely on agricultural purposes by a land agent, even if planning permission has been outlined unless there are houses there, or started being built. You can, if you don't like one valuers results, ask for another opinion, but likelihood is any competent agent would come up with a figure not too far out
Interesting question about a forced sale, plenty of land has been sitting on the market here (SW Scotland) for more than a year, some sales fallen through too, and not all poorer land. Spot on about tax advisers, agri lawyers, agents and accountants will be in huge demand
There's also an issue that farmers have always faced: farms are not infinitely divisible. If a farmer has a large family (and they often do...) then splitting up the farm doesn't work, as one marginal farm becomes two unproductive ones. This means that some kids often get left with very little. This can cause their kids some (ahem) rivalry if the parents are not very careful. The wise ones ensure that only one or two of their kids like farming. The one who doesn't get the farm can just move onto another farm or marry a lass who has a farm... In theory...
Having to sell some parcels of land to pay IHT might cause a marginal farm to become unproductive, so the whole has to be sold. And as has been pointed out many times, the purchaser will be either a large agribusiness who does not pay IHT, or to people who will not farm the land.
Though it isn't always a problem. Many moons ago, I was walking in the unfashionable western side of the Peak District. I came across an elderly couple in a farmyard, and we chatted. They were working the land alone, with a bit of help from neighbouring farmers, as none of their kids wanted to go into farming. They seemed quite sad about that.
Isn't this a problem for most parents? My Mum owned a house. She had two kids. I now own a maisonette.
Yes but with farmers the asset is the livelihood, parental housing is not their children's career.
Presumably, if one's dad owns a big factory (toolmaker, say ) then one pays inheritance tax (if above standard thresholds) on the machinery, buildings and the land?
The difference is, that for family-owned concerns, it's probably not normally millions in land value (although maybe it is, some old city-centre factory ripe for conversion into flats).
As far as I can see shares in family businesses which are trading limited companies are exempt from IHT provided they have been held for two years.
You still get a £1million tax free threshold (spread over the claims for agricultural & business property relief) though.
I guess the remaining loophole is that foreign entities can own UK farmland through an offshore holding company & pass that on tax free to their heirs. It does seem un-equal that non-UK residents get to do this, but UK residents don’t? Maybe something similar to the 6% / decade charge that is applied to trusts ought to be applied to all UK property held in this way. (Sounds an awful lot like a 0.5% land value tax! How very Georgist...)
'Good luck to everyone protesting today against Labour’s demented family farm tax. Farmers work all hours and all year round to feed this country. We should be doing more to champion British food and keep our farmers on the land. Instead Reeves is clobbering British agriculture with a tax that is spiteful and punitive and economically disastrous. End it now.'https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/1858783436833493303
Don't most of us work "all year round"? Is there some job category where you get 6 months off?
In Ireland there's a saying that the best three things about teaching are June, July and August - the months of the summer holidays.
Traditionally this would have been so schoolchildren would be free to help on the family farm during the busiest part of the year. A medium-distance cousin owns a farm nearby where the fields are separated from the milking shed by the road to the nearest town. So, twice a day, the herd of cows has to be walked to and from the milking shed along the main road.
I will often see the cousin with the herd of cows if I've timed my trip to town badly, when heading to town on the weekend, or a bank holiday, or when enjoying annual leave. As an office drone I work the standard 228 days a year (52 5-day weeks + 1 day - 8 bank holidays - 25 days).
I know a guy locally who does occasional work with dairy herds, perhaps if the farmer is going to a wedding, bits and pieces. Certainly there aren't many farmers buying in help for 138 days in the year, unless there's so much work to do they can't do it alone.
The tax change to IHT might be justified. Many farmers might be doing reasonably well financially. But I don't think there's much mileage in claiming they don't work bloody hard for it.
I am sorry but farmers have been mollycoddled for long enough.
100% tax relief which is effectively dodges inheritance tax, no wonder Clarkson became a farmer.
What are the changes?
Agricultural property relief (APR) allows eligible farmland to be inherited with 100pc tax relief, and business property relief can be claimed on qualifying assets (such as farmland or equipment) not covered by APR.
From 6 April 2026, the full 100pc relief will be restricted to the first £1m of combined agricultural and business property. After that, the relief drops to 50pc. Assets above the threshold will be subject to an effective 20pc inheritance tax charge, meaning thousands of farmers will have to start paying death duties.
However, the Government says that the actual threshold before paying inheritance tax could be up to £3m, taking into account exemptions for each partner in a couple and for the farm property.
I went to a minor public school full of the children of well off farmers. The school emptied during the Countryside Alliance March except for me and a handful of other lefty townies. The day after, someone rather pompously asked me what I was doing during the march. I told them I spent the day breaking in to farms. It didn't make me very popular nor did an essay I wrote for my Economics A Level on ending the Common Agricultural Policy.
Ironic that reportedly the majority of them voted to leave the CAP
The shitey subsidies system since (farmers paid for anything, including leaving the industry, everything except actually producing food) have been the responsibility of our own Government, and that's the way it should be.
I went to a minor public school full of the children of well off farmers. The school emptied during the Countryside Alliance March except for me and a handful of other lefty townies. The day after, someone rather pompously asked me what I was doing during the march. I told them I spent the day breaking in to farms. It didn't make me very popular nor did an essay I wrote for my Economics A Level on ending the Common Agricultural Policy.
Ironic that reportedly the majority of them voted to leave the CAP
I am sorry but farmers have been mollycoddled for long enough.
100% tax relief which is effectively dodges inheritance tax, no wonder Clarkson became a farmer.
What are the changes?
Agricultural property relief (APR) allows eligible farmland to be inherited with 100pc tax relief, and business property relief can be claimed on qualifying assets (such as farmland or equipment) not covered by APR.
From 6 April 2026, the full 100pc relief will be restricted to the first £1m of combined agricultural and business property. After that, the relief drops to 50pc. Assets above the threshold will be subject to an effective 20pc inheritance tax charge, meaning thousands of farmers will have to start paying death duties.
However, the Government says that the actual threshold before paying inheritance tax could be up to £3m, taking into account exemptions for each partner in a couple and for the farm property.
There's a very good argument for looking at the problem of agricultural land (whether its use is economically efficient and environmentally beneficial; whether it's being abused by the very rich as a tax dodge, etc). But bringing in an ill thought out measure like this, with virtually no consultation, which overturns the arrangements of the last half century, and is quite likely to have negative unintended consequences, is not the way to go about it.
I cannot see a single argument why farmers should have 100% relief.
As you are an urban, Whig Liberal no surprise there then!
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Yesterday they bought out their latest, and it's here
I am sorry but farmers have been mollycoddled for long enough.
100% tax relief which is effectively dodges inheritance tax, no wonder Clarkson became a farmer.
What are the changes?
Agricultural property relief (APR) allows eligible farmland to be inherited with 100pc tax relief, and business property relief can be claimed on qualifying assets (such as farmland or equipment) not covered by APR.
From 6 April 2026, the full 100pc relief will be restricted to the first £1m of combined agricultural and business property. After that, the relief drops to 50pc. Assets above the threshold will be subject to an effective 20pc inheritance tax charge, meaning thousands of farmers will have to start paying death duties.
However, the Government says that the actual threshold before paying inheritance tax could be up to £3m, taking into account exemptions for each partner in a couple and for the farm property.
There's a very good argument for looking at the problem of agricultural land (whether its use is economically efficient and environmentally beneficial; whether it's being abused by the very rich as a tax dodge, etc). But bringing in an ill thought out measure like this, with virtually no consultation, which overturns the arrangements of the last half century, and is quite likely to have negative unintended consequences, is not the way to go about it.
I cannot see a single argument why farmers should have 100% relief.
As you are an urban, Whig Liberal no surprise there then!
I wonder if the Bamfords will be on the protest. 8000 acres in the Cotswolds needs defending. They can ride down in their own tractors so a little bit of free advertising as well. Apparently Clarkson is worth £55 million. Chicken feed - excuse the pun-compared to the Bamfords
There's also an issue that farmers have always faced: farms are not infinitely divisible. If a farmer has a large family (and they often do...) then splitting up the farm doesn't work, as one marginal farm becomes two unproductive ones. This means that some kids often get left with very little. This can cause their kids some (ahem) rivalry if the parents are not very careful. The wise ones ensure that only one or two of their kids like farming. The one who doesn't get the farm can just move onto another farm or marry a lass who has a farm... In theory...
Having to sell some parcels of land to pay IHT might cause a marginal farm to become unproductive, so the whole has to be sold. And as has been pointed out many times, the purchaser will be either a large agribusiness who does not pay IHT, or to people who will not farm the land.
Though it isn't always a problem. Many moons ago, I was walking in the unfashionable western side of the Peak District. I came across an elderly couple in a farmyard, and we chatted. They were working the land alone, with a bit of help from neighbouring farmers, as none of their kids wanted to go into farming. They seemed quite sad about that.
Isn't this a problem for most parents? My Mum owned a house. She had two kids. I now own a maisonette.
Yes but with farmers the asset is the livelihood, parental housing is not their children's career.
Presumably, if one's dad owns a big factory (toolmaker, say ) then one pays inheritance tax (if above standard thresholds) on the machinery, buildings and the land?
The difference is, that for family-owned concerns, it's probably not normally millions in land value (although maybe it is, some old city-centre factory ripe for conversion into flats).
As far as I can see shares in family businesses which are trading limited companies are exempt from IHT provided they have been held for two years.
Aha, another loophole identified for closure.
Thereby making busineses uneconomic and shutting them down.
To all those people who make farming families out to be rich: I'd like to see them get up at dawn and work until dusk, in all sorts of weathers. To have a year where the weather means all your profits are wiped out, or where government legislation floods the market with cheap meat. Where tourists routinely stray off the paths, interfere with livestock and knock down walls and fences. Where you have to go out in the snow to find ewes that are lambing. If they want us to be rich, then they should fucking well pay more for British food. Until then, I'll go work in an office and they can ****ing well starve.
Said to me, in rather stronger terms, by a farming relative.
This another strawman though. I don't think anyone thinks otherwise (particularly after Clarkson's farm). This is about a few very large and wealthy landowners, and also stopping the British countryside being bought up by billionaires as a tax dodge mechanism.
It's a relatively small amount of revenue for HMRC but a good example of them getting early before it becomes a big issue.
It isn't just about a few very large and wealthy landowners. Far from.
Incidentally, and from that conversation: how is the land valued for IHT purposes? An uphill farm might be worth relatively little from a farming perspective, which a family might want to continue doing. But it might be worth much more with the farmhouse converted into a non-farming home or B&B, and with some of the barns 'converted' into housing for townies - something that cannot be done and the farm remain as a singular farm. It'd be the highest valuation, wouldn't it? And if the inheritors are forced to sell, what happens if the land does not reach that estimate?
Tax advisers are going to be very busy.
Many farmers want to farm. From my experience they grumble and complain (including my distant relatives...), but they love farming. And that doubles when there's a many-generation familial connection with the land.
But it seems that the vast majority of people weighing into this discussion (including those interviewed in the press claiming to be representing farmers) are simply unaware of this, or chose not to mention it because it undermines their case.
Similarly, there was someone on the Today program this morning complaining that the big estates will just put their land into trust and avoid the tax, which smaller farms can’t afford to do. In reality, trusts pay a 6% tax every 10 years on the value of the property in the trust - a number that just happens to compound to a very similar rate to the IHT rate of 20% being applied to farmland if you consider an estate attracting inheritance tax every thirty years or so - so there’s no real tax benefit to doing this.
(There is an unfortunate caveat that this 6% tax doesn’t apply to trusts created before 2006, so the large estates which were astute enough to transfer their wealth into a trust decades ago do escape this tax: if the Treasurty’s intent is to make trusts tax-equivalent to not having a trust then leaving these older trusts untouched just entrenches the extant landed genry class further & they ought to be taxed at the same rates as everyone else.)
nb. The above is based on my fairly quick perusal of the HMRC advice & a few articles by property lawyers - there may be other tax loopholes that people are keeping quiet about of course!
The 2006 trust issue is an important point. Some of the bigger estates already have this set up and have had it for decades, so should be able to see a way out of this. If the policy is about clobbering all large landowners fair enough, there should be no exemptions. I think Reeves (if still in a a job) and Starmer can close some loopholes in this in future, but have been poorly advised or unaware of the situation
All of them are farming entirely voluntarily. They could sell up at current prices and live very well indeed doing nothing.
Ultimately, this is NOT a problem for the current generation of farmers. Long term this is a problem that is going to make food worse, more expensive and give us less food resilience.
On the contrary, this is going to have a small effect of making farming more productive. Less profitable farmers will have more incentive to sell up.
And he's right that the great hardship these landowners are expecting us to weep about is that they have to become multimillionaires in cash terms not asset terms.
Taking a step back, it is interesting that this agricultural policy change has cut across typical political dividing lines on here. I imagine most of pb is urban so not an urban/rural thing...
I wonder if the Bamfords will be on the protest. 8000 acres in the Cotswolds needs defending. They can ride down in their own tractors so a little bit of free advertising as well. Apparently Clarkson is worth £55 million. Chicken feed - excuse the pun-compared to the Bamfords
Are you saying that wealthy people shouldn’t be allowed to support those less well off as them over an issue and policy they believe passionately in whether they personally benefit or not?
I went to a minor public school full of the children of well off farmers. The school emptied during the Countryside Alliance March except for me and a handful of other lefty townies. The day after, someone rather pompously asked me what I was doing during the march. I told them I spent the day breaking in to farms. It didn't make me very popular nor did an essay I wrote for my Economics A Level on ending the Common Agricultural Policy.
Ironic that reportedly the majority of them voted to leave the CAP
The NFU backed Remain
You have a touching faith in the influence of unions on their members.
To all those people who make farming families out to be rich: I'd like to see them get up at dawn and work until dusk, in all sorts of weathers. To have a year where the weather means all your profits are wiped out, or where government legislation floods the market with cheap meat. Where tourists routinely stray off the paths, interfere with livestock and knock down walls and fences. Where you have to go out in the snow to find ewes that are lambing. If they want us to be rich, then they should fucking well pay more for British food. Until then, I'll go work in an office and they can ****ing well starve.
Said to me, in rather stronger terms, by a farming relative.
This another strawman though. I don't think anyone thinks otherwise (particularly after Clarkson's farm). This is about a few very large and wealthy landowners, and also stopping the British countryside being bought up by billionaires as a tax dodge mechanism.
It's a relatively small amount of revenue for HMRC but a good example of them getting early before it becomes a big issue.
It isn't just about a few very large and wealthy landowners. Far from.
Incidentally, and from that conversation: how is the land valued for IHT purposes? An uphill farm might be worth relatively little from a farming perspective, which a family might want to continue doing. But it might be worth much more with the farmhouse converted into a non-farming home or B&B, and with some of the barns 'converted' into housing for townies - something that cannot be done and the farm remain as a singular farm. It'd be the highest valuation, wouldn't it? And if the inheritors are forced to sell, what happens if the land does not reach that estimate?
Tax advisers are going to be very busy.
Many farmers want to farm. From my experience they grumble and complain (including my distant relatives...), but they love farming. And that doubles when there's a many-generation familial connection with the land.
But it seems that the vast majority of people weighing into this discussion (including those interviewed in the press claiming to be representing farmers) are simply unaware of this, or chose not to mention it because it undermines their case.
Similarly, there was someone on the Today program this morning complaining that the big estates will just put their land into trust and avoid the tax, which smaller farms can’t afford to do. In reality, trusts pay a 6% tax every 10 years on the value of the property in the trust - a number that just happens to compound to a very similar rate to the IHT rate of 20% being applied to farmland if you consider an estate attracting inheritance tax every thirty years or so - so there’s no real tax benefit to doing this.
(There is an unfortunate caveat that this 6% tax doesn’t apply to trusts created before 2006, so the large estates which were astute enough to transfer their wealth into a trust decades ago do escape this tax: if the Treasurty’s intent is to make trusts tax-equivalent to not having a trust then leaving these older trusts untouched just entrenches the extant landed genry class further & they ought to be taxed at the same rates as everyone else.)
nb. The above is based on my fairly quick perusal of the HMRC advice & a few articles by property lawyers - there may be other tax loopholes that people are keeping quiet about of course!
The 2006 trust issue is an important point. Some of the bigger estates already have this set up and have had it for decades, so should be able to see a way out of this. If the policy is about clobbering all large landowners fair enough, there should be no exemptions. I think Reeves (if still in a a job) and Starmer can close some loopholes in this in future, but have been poorly advised or unaware of the situation
Eg the Blenheim estate was (IIRC) put into trust back in the 90s in order to avoid it passing to the control of the eldest son whom the Duke regarded as wildly unsuited to own or run the estate. (It was extremely difficult for the Duke to disinhereit him as this would apparently have required an Act of Parliament to be passed.) It seems that this has turned out to be quite astute financially as the income and benefits of the estate will continue to acrue to the Duke’s heirs whilst being free of inheritance tax in perpetuity or until the government changes the tax laws on such trusts.
To all those people who make farming families out to be rich: I'd like to see them get up at dawn and work until dusk, in all sorts of weathers. To have a year where the weather means all your profits are wiped out, or where government legislation floods the market with cheap meat. Where tourists routinely stray off the paths, interfere with livestock and knock down walls and fences. Where you have to go out in the snow to find ewes that are lambing. If they want us to be rich, then they should fucking well pay more for British food. Until then, I'll go work in an office and they can ****ing well starve.
Said to me, in rather stronger terms, by a farming relative.
Anyone who has watched Clarkson's farm ought to be aware that while the asset might by very great, the profits are often marginal. I'm afraid in this instance, as in others, its Labour revealing its prejudices. I knew a phd student at UEA who hated, literally hated farmers because his ancesters had been farm workers. I can see him bringing in policies such as this.
The odd thing is that, up until the 1950s, there was a strong rural farming vote for Labour, particularly in East Anglia.
'Good luck to everyone protesting today against Labour’s demented family farm tax. Farmers work all hours and all year round to feed this country. We should be doing more to champion British food and keep our farmers on the land. Instead Reeves is clobbering British agriculture with a tax that is spiteful and punitive and economically disastrous. End it now.'https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/1858783436833493303
Don't most of us work "all year round"? Is there some job category where you get 6 months off?
I don't know about you, but I get five and a half weeks of leave a year.
I take this to be you volunteering to be taxed more heavily instead.
I'm just querying your view that most of us don't get any time off.
I only really know one farmer. Well, knew, because he sadly died in his mid 40s a few years back. He was a sheep farmer in Derbyshire. I was at school with him. He went off to university to do something scientific, but when his Dad got dementia he came back to run the family farm. He did manage to take a day off now and then - some of which he filled with sheepy things like sheep competitions; some of which he filled with cricket - but the basic assumption was that he was working seven days a week, 365 days a year. Though he did say that while there were some days of very hard work, particularly during the Spring, there was also a lot of days where *something* needed doing but there was a lot of space in the day for watching Loose Women. He was not a rich man. But on balance he enjoyed his lifestyle. He got to spend a lot of time outdoors in the Peak District, which 70% of the time was joyous. I suspect IHT would have seen the farm leave the family when he died. Sadly he never married, had no children.
I have no strong feelings on taxation of agriculture, but my understanding is that the point of IHT relief is presumably to keep family farms intact rather than seeing everything bought up by agribusinesses. This strikes me as a good thing. That said, it's also my understanding that this pushes up the value of high quality agricultural land to a position where farmers can't actually buy it and service the debt, and therefore is pushing farms more and more into the hands of agribusinesses and IHT-avoidance loopholes. The Rachel Reeves solution is counter-productive, but the current solution is also counter-productive.
To all those people who make farming families out to be rich: I'd like to see them get up at dawn and work until dusk, in all sorts of weathers. To have a year where the weather means all your profits are wiped out, or where government legislation floods the market with cheap meat. Where tourists routinely stray off the paths, interfere with livestock and knock down walls and fences. Where you have to go out in the snow to find ewes that are lambing. If they want us to be rich, then they should fucking well pay more for British food. Until then, I'll go work in an office and they can ****ing well starve.
Said to me, in rather stronger terms, by a farming relative.
Anyone who has watched Clarkson's farm ought to be aware that while the asset might by very great, the profits are often marginal. I'm afraid in this instance, as in others, its Labour revealing its prejudices. I knew a phd student at UEA who hated, literally hated farmers because his ancesters had been farm workers. I can see him bringing in policies such as this.
The odd thing is that, up until the 1950s, there was a strong rural farming vote for Labour, particularly in East Anglia.
Yes, though that tended to be farm workers rather than farm owners, I think.
Imagine if, instead of raising employers' NI, Reeves had done as many are suggesting and broken their manifesto promise by raising income tax and/or employees' NI. What would businesses and other government critics now be saying?
At a guess: reducing people's disposable income will be hugely damaging to the economy - even lower growth due to less spending, and this will lead to redundancies and businesses having to close. The Chancellor must go!
To govern is to chose.
Starmer and Reeves chose to raise taxes on workers and business.
And then exempted the public sector.
They would have been better off spreading the tax increase and saying "we're all in this together".
The fuel duty increase should have been implemented as well.
“We’re all in this together” would have at least led to general groans but an accepting of the need to raise funds in the short term. With some skillful economic management, they could een have reversed an income tax increase before the next election, to say “thank you” to everyone.
Instead, they’ve picked on a few specific groups of people, who can organise against the government. Today it’s the turn of the farmers, and the news tonight is going to be of Jeremy Clarkson and hundreds of tractors on TV with opposition politicians.
Jeremy Clarkson wrote:
I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves have a sinister plan.
They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms.
But before they can do that, they have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers.
That’s why they had a Budget which makes farming nigh on impossible.
That feels a teensy little bit over-the-top and possibly rather insulting to people who are being carpet bombed and ethnically cleansed. It's also kinda moving towards Great Replacement Theory nonsense when there is zero evidence that the new Labour government are going to increase immigration compared to the last administration.
Is Jeremy Clarkson going full MAGA going to be attractive to British voters?
It's clickbait, but I have to hand it to Clarkson: he can be a nob but he's done more to stand-up for British farming that anyone else has done in about 40 years.
'Good luck to everyone protesting today against Labour’s demented family farm tax. Farmers work all hours and all year round to feed this country. We should be doing more to champion British food and keep our farmers on the land. Instead Reeves is clobbering British agriculture with a tax that is spiteful and punitive and economically disastrous. End it now.'https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/1858783436833493303
Don't most of us work "all year round"? Is there some job category where you get 6 months off?
I don't know about you, but I get five and a half weeks of leave a year.
I take this to be you volunteering to be taxed more heavily instead.
I'm just querying your view that most of us don't get any time off.
I only really know one farmer. Well, knew, because he sadly died in his mid 40s a few years back. He was a sheep farmer in Derbyshire. I was at school with him. He went off to university to do something scientific, but when his Dad got dementia he came back to run the family farm. He did manage to take a day off now and then - some of which he filled with sheepy things like sheep competitions; some of which he filled with cricket - but the basic assumption was that he was working seven days a week, 365 days a year. Though he did say that while there were some days of very hard work, particularly during the Spring, there was also a lot of days where *something* needed doing but there was a lot of space in the day for watching Loose Women. He was not a rich man. But on balance he enjoyed his lifestyle. He got to spend a lot of time outdoors in the Peak District, which 70% of the time was joyous. I suspect IHT would have seen the farm leave the family when he died. Sadly he never married, had no children.
I have no strong feelings on taxation of agriculture, but my understanding is that the point of IHT relief is presumably to keep family farms intact rather than seeing everything bought up by agribusinesses. This strikes me as a good thing. That said, it's also my understanding that this pushes up the value of high quality agricultural land to a position where farmers can't actually buy it and service the debt, and therefore is pushing farms more and more into the hands of agribusinesses and IHT-avoidance loopholes. The Rachel Reeves solution is counter-productive, but the current solution is also counter-productive.
The best thing that could happen would frankly be a collapse in agricultural land values.
All of them are farming entirely voluntarily. They could sell up at current prices and live very well indeed doing nothing.
Ultimately, this is NOT a problem for the current generation of farmers. Long term this is a problem that is going to make food worse, more expensive and give us less food resilience.
On the contrary, this is going to have a small effect of making farming more productive. Less profitable farmers will have more incentive to sell up.
And he's right that the great hardship these landowners are expecting us to weep about is that they have to become multimillionaires in cash terms not asset terms.
More productive usually means worse for the environment.
No doubt we'll end up with DEFRA having to pay out more money for various schemes to compensate. Recycling the same money, but with a cut taken off for jobsworths and tax lawyers.
Note that the Netherlands elected it's most right wing gov't ever after their own gov'ts previous run in with farmers.
What we're seeing here is how a cliquey North London left-wing metropolitan Fabian set understands neither business nor farming, and how that so readily bleeds into policy.
I've been astonished at how politically inept they've been, but they've never done it before and lack the humility to listen to anyone who has.
'Good luck to everyone protesting today against Labour’s demented family farm tax. Farmers work all hours and all year round to feed this country. We should be doing more to champion British food and keep our farmers on the land. Instead Reeves is clobbering British agriculture with a tax that is spiteful and punitive and economically disastrous. End it now.'https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/1858783436833493303
Don't most of us work "all year round"? Is there some job category where you get 6 months off?
I don't know about you, but I get five and a half weeks of leave a year.
I take this to be you volunteering to be taxed more heavily instead.
I'm just querying your view that most of us don't get any time off.
I only really know one farmer. Well, knew, because he sadly died in his mid 40s a few years back. He was a sheep farmer in Derbyshire. I was at school with him. He went off to university to do something scientific, but when his Dad got dementia he came back to run the family farm. He did manage to take a day off now and then - some of which he filled with sheepy things like sheep competitions; some of which he filled with cricket - but the basic assumption was that he was working seven days a week, 365 days a year. Though he did say that while there were some days of very hard work, particularly during the Spring, there was also a lot of days where *something* needed doing but there was a lot of space in the day for watching Loose Women. He was not a rich man. But on balance he enjoyed his lifestyle. He got to spend a lot of time outdoors in the Peak District, which 70% of the time was joyous. I suspect IHT would have seen the farm leave the family when he died. Sadly he never married, had no children.
I have no strong feelings on taxation of agriculture, but my understanding is that the point of IHT relief is presumably to keep family farms intact rather than seeing everything bought up by agribusinesses. This strikes me as a good thing. That said, it's also my understanding that this pushes up the value of high quality agricultural land to a position where farmers can't actually buy it and service the debt, and therefore is pushing farms more and more into the hands of agribusinesses and IHT-avoidance loopholes. The Rachel Reeves solution is counter-productive, but the current solution is also counter-productive.
The best thing that could happen would frankly be a collapse in agricultural land values.
There's a fair few farmers who want this but won't admit it right now. There are plenty of guys whose families will have owned for decades with little borrowing, plenty of larger business will be highly leveraged. Spoke to one tenant, who wasn't too fussed about the new IHT rules
Collapse in land value more likely happen if loads of farmers want to sell at once. Huge disparity in prices between north and south of the UK too
In response to @NickPalmer questioning if the conservatives will cancel the farmers IHT, Kemi is to join Jeremy Clarkson on stage to address and support the farmer's demonstration outside no 10
Also Scottish Labour are announcing they will reinstate the WFP
She may well be appearing but I bet decent money that unless Labour backs down (and it won't) the policy won't be changed by 2032...
If the policy is implemented we will see the actual effects.
If those are negative then the policy will be changed by someone at some point.
Are you sure......governments have a habit of sticking to their guns for both ideological and political reasons. They aren't run like a business...the cliff edge at £50-60k and £100-120k make no sense on a number of fronts if you want to maximise growth / productivity and not clear they maximise tax take either, yet here we are still with them 15 years later. We also have cliff edges in how many hours people can work per week.
If we see the whole farming sector steadily shutting down then that will lead to higher prices and outbreaks of panic buying.
Not a good image for governments.
It ill behoves the Tories to whine about farmers (as opposed to landowners, which is what IHT actually applies to) given how little they've done to promote fiid security and stop the supermarkets grinding the farmers down, as opposed to demanding more cheap food imports from Australia etc.
Putting farmers on a sounder economic footing would have been a better way toi approach the whole issue, including a rebalancing of agricultural land from its currently bloated values. But I have yet to read about Labour dealing with things like supermarket milk wholesale prices.
They also expanded UK exports to Australia and NZ
For what? Model London Routemaster buses?
Whisky, salmon, cauliflower, broccoli etc
Compared to the mass bulk from ANZ I doubt very much that that compensates. 245kg of broccoli at £11K or so isn't much.
And a little hint: salmon doesn't come from farm farms, just fish farms, which are a different industry.
Breakdown of 2024 election vote by sexuality. Tories got their highest vote share among straight women, Labour among lesbian/gay women, Reform with straight men and the greens and lib dems with bisexual women. https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1857482400474747384
'Good luck to everyone protesting today against Labour’s demented family farm tax. Farmers work all hours and all year round to feed this country. We should be doing more to champion British food and keep our farmers on the land. Instead Reeves is clobbering British agriculture with a tax that is spiteful and punitive and economically disastrous. End it now.'https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/1858783436833493303
Don't most of us work "all year round"? Is there some job category where you get 6 months off?
I don't know about you, but I get five and a half weeks of leave a year.
I take this to be you volunteering to be taxed more heavily instead.
I'm just querying your view that most of us don't get any time off.
I only really know one farmer. Well, knew, because he sadly died in his mid 40s a few years back. He was a sheep farmer in Derbyshire. I was at school with him. He went off to university to do something scientific, but when his Dad got dementia he came back to run the family farm. He did manage to take a day off now and then - some of which he filled with sheepy things like sheep competitions; some of which he filled with cricket - but the basic assumption was that he was working seven days a week, 365 days a year. Though he did say that while there were some days of very hard work, particularly during the Spring, there was also a lot of days where *something* needed doing but there was a lot of space in the day for watching Loose Women. He was not a rich man. But on balance he enjoyed his lifestyle. He got to spend a lot of time outdoors in the Peak District, which 70% of the time was joyous. I suspect IHT would have seen the farm leave the family when he died. Sadly he never married, had no children.
I have no strong feelings on taxation of agriculture, but my understanding is that the point of IHT relief is presumably to keep family farms intact rather than seeing everything bought up by agribusinesses. This strikes me as a good thing. That said, it's also my understanding that this pushes up the value of high quality agricultural land to a position where farmers can't actually buy it and service the debt, and therefore is pushing farms more and more into the hands of agribusinesses and IHT-avoidance loopholes. The Rachel Reeves solution is counter-productive, but the current solution is also counter-productive.
The best thing that could happen would frankly be a collapse in agricultural land values.
There's a fair few farmers who want this but won't admit it right now. There are plenty of guys whose families will have owned for decades with little borrowing, plenty of larger business will be highly leveraged. Spoke to one tenant, who wasn't too fussed about the new IHT rules
Collapse in land value more likely happen if loads of farmers want to sell at once. Huge disparity in prices between north and south of the UK too
The likes of Dyson must be furious. They bought thousands of acres as an IHT wheeze and will now be looking at selling at a loss...
And if we could do a simulcast of being on our LNER apps I could prove to everyone that apart from the 10.45 departure there simply are no tickets available to buy to go from London to Newcastle on any day next week.
Simply not true. I am on the LNER website right now and there are tickets available for every train from 8.30am onwards.
Edit. This is for Monday next week but the same applies to the other days.
Ah ok. There are no open returns. You have to specify a return date.
Is this the end of the world? No. Is it an irritant? Yes.
I have just finished reading Aldrich and Cormac's monumental Spying and The Crown. It examines the mutual relationship between the secret services and the monarchy from Elisabeth 1 to Elisabeth 11. There are fascinating facts and intriguing insights aplenty and also laugh out loud moments. I particularly liked this anecdote; King George V1 asked Field Marshall Alan Brooke what sort of man Montgomery was. Brooke said; 'He is a very good soldier, but I think he is after my job.' George replied: What a relief! I thought he was after mine.' The book finishes with the intriguing fact that the late Queen kept a meticulous diary. I wonder whether it will ever see the light of day?
'Good luck to everyone protesting today against Labour’s demented family farm tax. Farmers work all hours and all year round to feed this country. We should be doing more to champion British food and keep our farmers on the land. Instead Reeves is clobbering British agriculture with a tax that is spiteful and punitive and economically disastrous. End it now.'https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/1858783436833493303
Don't most of us work "all year round"? Is there some job category where you get 6 months off?
I don't know about you, but I get five and a half weeks of leave a year.
I take this to be you volunteering to be taxed more heavily instead.
I'm just querying your view that most of us don't get any time off.
I only really know one farmer. Well, knew, because he sadly died in his mid 40s a few years back. He was a sheep farmer in Derbyshire. I was at school with him. He went off to university to do something scientific, but when his Dad got dementia he came back to run the family farm. He did manage to take a day off now and then - some of which he filled with sheepy things like sheep competitions; some of which he filled with cricket - but the basic assumption was that he was working seven days a week, 365 days a year. Though he did say that while there were some days of very hard work, particularly during the Spring, there was also a lot of days where *something* needed doing but there was a lot of space in the day for watching Loose Women. He was not a rich man. But on balance he enjoyed his lifestyle. He got to spend a lot of time outdoors in the Peak District, which 70% of the time was joyous. I suspect IHT would have seen the farm leave the family when he died. Sadly he never married, had no children.
I have no strong feelings on taxation of agriculture, but my understanding is that the point of IHT relief is presumably to keep family farms intact rather than seeing everything bought up by agribusinesses. This strikes me as a good thing. That said, it's also my understanding that this pushes up the value of high quality agricultural land to a position where farmers can't actually buy it and service the debt, and therefore is pushing farms more and more into the hands of agribusinesses and IHT-avoidance loopholes. The Rachel Reeves solution is counter-productive, but the current solution is also counter-productive.
The best thing that could happen would frankly be a collapse in agricultural land values.
There's a fair few farmers who want this but won't admit it right now. There are plenty of guys whose families will have owned for decades with little borrowing, plenty of larger business will be highly leveraged. Spoke to one tenant, who wasn't too fussed about the new IHT rules
Collapse in land value more likely happen if loads of farmers want to sell at once. Huge disparity in prices between north and south of the UK too
The likes of Dyson must be furious. They bought thousands of acres as an IHT wheeze and will now be looking at selling at a loss...
Watch the Dyson YouTube channel. His farms are run to the highest standards possible.
And if we could do a simulcast of being on our LNER apps I could prove to everyone that apart from the 10.45 departure there simply are no tickets available to buy to go from London to Newcastle on any day next week.
Simply not true. I am on the LNER website right now and there are tickets available for every train from 8.30am onwards.
Edit. This is for Monday next week but the same applies to the other days.
Ah ok. There are no open returns. You have to specify a return date.
Is this the end of the world? No. Is it an irritant? Yes.
'Good luck to everyone protesting today against Labour’s demented family farm tax. Farmers work all hours and all year round to feed this country. We should be doing more to champion British food and keep our farmers on the land. Instead Reeves is clobbering British agriculture with a tax that is spiteful and punitive and economically disastrous. End it now.'https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/1858783436833493303
Don't most of us work "all year round"? Is there some job category where you get 6 months off?
I don't know about you, but I get five and a half weeks of leave a year.
I take this to be you volunteering to be taxed more heavily instead.
I'm just querying your view that most of us don't get any time off.
I only really know one farmer. Well, knew, because he sadly died in his mid 40s a few years back. He was a sheep farmer in Derbyshire. I was at school with him. He went off to university to do something scientific, but when his Dad got dementia he came back to run the family farm. He did manage to take a day off now and then - some of which he filled with sheepy things like sheep competitions; some of which he filled with cricket - but the basic assumption was that he was working seven days a week, 365 days a year. Though he did say that while there were some days of very hard work, particularly during the Spring, there was also a lot of days where *something* needed doing but there was a lot of space in the day for watching Loose Women. He was not a rich man. But on balance he enjoyed his lifestyle. He got to spend a lot of time outdoors in the Peak District, which 70% of the time was joyous. I suspect IHT would have seen the farm leave the family when he died. Sadly he never married, had no children.
I have no strong feelings on taxation of agriculture, but my understanding is that the point of IHT relief is presumably to keep family farms intact rather than seeing everything bought up by agribusinesses. This strikes me as a good thing. That said, it's also my understanding that this pushes up the value of high quality agricultural land to a position where farmers can't actually buy it and service the debt, and therefore is pushing farms more and more into the hands of agribusinesses and IHT-avoidance loopholes. The Rachel Reeves solution is counter-productive, but the current solution is also counter-productive.
The best thing that could happen would frankly be a collapse in agricultural land values.
Depends on the reason. Drops in land value are always good in themselves as far as I am concerned and that applies to both farm land and housing. But if it is happening because farms are going bust then it is a very bad thing.
Note that the Netherlands elected it's most right wing gov't ever after their own gov'ts previous run in with farmers.
What we're seeing here is how a cliquey North London left-wing metropolitan Fabian set understands neither business nor farming, and how that so readily bleeds into policy.
I've been astonished at how politically inept they've been, but they've never done it before and lack the humility to listen to anyone who has.
Can you explain, in simple terms, why farmers deserve to pass on their farms to their heirs 100% tax free when others (with similar levels of assets in their estates) don’t?
And if we could do a simulcast of being on our LNER apps I could prove to everyone that apart from the 10.45 departure there simply are no tickets available to buy to go from London to Newcastle on any day next week.
Simply not true. I am on the LNER website right now and there are tickets available for every train from 8.30am onwards.
Edit. This is for Monday next week but the same applies to the other days.
Ah ok. There are no open returns. You have to specify a return date.
Is this the end of the world? No. Is it an irritant? Yes.
To all those people who make farming families out to be rich: I'd like to see them get up at dawn and work until dusk, in all sorts of weathers. To have a year where the weather means all your profits are wiped out, or where government legislation floods the market with cheap meat. Where tourists routinely stray off the paths, interfere with livestock and knock down walls and fences. Where you have to go out in the snow to find ewes that are lambing. If they want us to be rich, then they should fucking well pay more for British food. Until then, I'll go work in an office and they can ****ing well starve.
Said to me, in rather stronger terms, by a farming relative.
This another strawman though. I don't think anyone thinks otherwise (particularly after Clarkson's farm). This is about a few very large and wealthy landowners, and also stopping the British countryside being bought up by billionaires as a tax dodge mechanism.
It's a relatively small amount of revenue for HMRC but a good example of them getting early before it becomes a big issue.
It isn't just about a few very large and wealthy landowners. Far from.
Incidentally, and from that conversation: how is the land valued for IHT purposes? An uphill farm might be worth relatively little from a farming perspective, which a family might want to continue doing. But it might be worth much more with the farmhouse converted into a non-farming home or B&B, and with some of the barns 'converted' into housing for townies - something that cannot be done and the farm remain as a singular farm. It'd be the highest valuation, wouldn't it? And if the inheritors are forced to sell, what happens if the land does not reach that estimate?
Tax advisers are going to be very busy.
Many farmers want to farm. From my experience they grumble and complain (including my distant relatives...), but they love farming. And that doubles when there's a many-generation familial connection with the land.
It'll be valued purely on agricultural purposes by a land agent, even if planning permission has been outlined unless there are houses there, or started being built. You can, if you don't like one valuers results, ask for another opinion, but likelihood is any competent agent would come up with a figure not too far out
Interesting question about a forced sale, plenty of land has been sitting on the market here (SW Scotland) for more than a year, some sales fallen through too, and not all poorer land. Spot on about tax advisers, agri lawyers, agents and accountants will be in huge demand
I inherited a farm,. well, a small field, about 15 years back (ultimately from an ancestor, as it happens). It was tiny but still had to be valued by a specialist from a major Lothian surveying firm. The rent took some years just to pay the survey fee!
And no I'm not selling, and yes, I do buy my food from farmers, or with minimum middleman, where possible, rather than supermarkets. Especially milk, cheese, meat, game and some cereals.
Note that the Netherlands elected it's most right wing gov't ever after their own gov'ts previous run in with farmers.
What we're seeing here is how a cliquey North London left-wing metropolitan Fabian set understands neither business nor farming, and how that so readily bleeds into policy.
I've been astonished at how politically inept they've been, but they've never done it before and lack the humility to listen to anyone who has.
Can you explain, in simple terms, why farmers deserve to pass on their farms to their heirs 100% tax free when others (with similar levels of assets in their estates) don’t?
There is an argument that keeping family farms intact is a public good and therefore should be treated differently.
Taking a step back, it is interesting that this agricultural policy change has cut across typical political dividing lines on here. I imagine most of pb is urban so not an urban/rural thing...
New MoreinCommon poll shows voters oppose the tractor tax by a 57% to 24% margin.
A massive 75% of Tory voters think a a farmer who passes their farm to the next generation should not be required to pay inheritance tax on it as do 74% of Reform voters and 56% of LDs.
56% of 2019 Conservative voters who switched to vote Labour in 2024 also believe family farms should be exempt from inheritance tax.
Labour and Green voters are more divided but still 45% of Labour voters and 47% of Green voters think the farmer inheritance tax exemption should have been kept
Imagine if, instead of raising employers' NI, Reeves had done as many are suggesting and broken their manifesto promise by raising income tax and/or employees' NI. What would businesses and other government critics now be saying?
At a guess: reducing people's disposable income will be hugely damaging to the economy - even lower growth due to less spending, and this will lead to redundancies and businesses having to close. The Chancellor must go!
To govern is to chose.
Starmer and Reeves chose to raise taxes on workers and business.
And then exempted the public sector.
They would have been better off spreading the tax increase and saying "we're all in this together".
The fuel duty increase should have been implemented as well.
“We’re all in this together” would have at least led to general groans but an accepting of the need to raise funds in the short term. With some skillful economic management, they could een have reversed an income tax increase before the next election, to say “thank you” to everyone.
Instead, they’ve picked on a few specific groups of people, who can organise against the government. Today it’s the turn of the farmers, and the news tonight is going to be of Jeremy Clarkson and hundreds of tractors on TV with opposition politicians.
Jeremy Clarkson wrote:
I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves have a sinister plan.
They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero windfarms.
But before they can do that, they have to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers.
That’s why they had a Budget which makes farming nigh on impossible.
That feels a teensy little bit over-the-top and possibly rather insulting to people who are being carpet bombed and ethnically cleansed. It's also kinda moving towards Great Replacement Theory nonsense when there is zero evidence that the new Labour government are going to increase immigration compared to the last administration.
Is Jeremy Clarkson going full MAGA going to be attractive to British voters?
It's clickbait, but I have to hand it to Clarkson: he can be a nob but he's done more to stand-up for British farming that anyone else has done in about 40 years.
Good on him.
Commentators on Reddit suggest Clarkson is getting £10m per series of clarksons farm. That is why he tries every type of farming instead of concentrating on one type with the inevitable losses.
Note that the Netherlands elected it's most right wing gov't ever after their own gov'ts previous run in with farmers.
What we're seeing here is how a cliquey North London left-wing metropolitan Fabian set understands neither business nor farming, and how that so readily bleeds into policy.
I've been astonished at how politically inept they've been, but they've never done it before and lack the humility to listen to anyone who has.
There are approximately 108000 farmers in the UK. If you look online, it gives the population of North London as 978100, although I think that's just N postcodes. The population of London north of the Thames is several million.
Ah, but how many North Londoners are "left-wing"? Well, 40% of Londoners voted Labour in the last Assembly elections.
So, 40% of 978100 is 391240. That means there are roughly 3.6 times as many in the North London left-wing set, on conservative assumptions of how we define "North London", compared to farmers.
Taking a step back, it is interesting that this agricultural policy change has cut across typical political dividing lines on here. I imagine most of pb is urban so not an urban/rural thing...
New MoreinCommon poll shows voters oppose the tractor tax by a 57% to 24% margin.
A massive 75% of Tory voters think a a farmer who passes their farm to the next generation should not be required to pay inheritance tax on it as do 74% of Reform voters and 56% of LDs.
56% of 2019 Conservative voters who switched to vote Labour in 2024 also believe family farms should be exempt from inheritance tax.
Labour and Green voters are more divided but still 45% of Labour voters 47% of Green voters think the farmer inheritance tax exemption should have been kept
Just about to use a train for the first time in many weeks and it's been cancelled. Going to M'chester Airport. Damn. And the snow has already melted here so it surely can't be that bad.
And if we could do a simulcast of being on our LNER apps I could prove to everyone that apart from the 10.45 departure there simply are no tickets available to buy to go from London to Newcastle on any day next week.
Simply not true. I am on the LNER website right now and there are tickets available for every train from 8.30am onwards.
Edit. This is for Monday next week but the same applies to the other days.
Ah ok. There are no open returns. You have to specify a return date.
Is this the end of the world? No. Is it an irritant? Yes.
A trial in which return tickets have been scrapped to make fares simpler will be extended as part of a shake-up of the country's railways.
Transport Secretary Mark Harper confirmed that LNER, which operates trains along the East Coast mainline, will extend its trial of selling single tickets only on its routes from Spring.
If it continues to be successful it will be extended to other operators.
Comments
You might be able to get a neighbour to keep an eye out but then they might be too busy themselves.
The farmers I know don't go on holiday.
"The reforms to agricultural property relief ensure that wealthier estates and the most valuable farms pay their fair share to invest in our schools and health services that farmers and families in rural communities rely on"
Which is far less idiotic (if somewhat meaningless) rhetoric.
To be fair to the Telegraph, it seems to be HYUFD who put quotes around words she didn't say, rather than them.
Sure, but there is now widespread realisation and explicit regret within most strata of the Tory Party (and of course within the entirety of the Reform Party) that the Cameron era and post-Cameron Governments failed to reverse Blair's constitutional 'reforms' and the fast track to national decline that they have brought about. What comes next is likely to be a Reform/Tory combination, and there is no way we can apply the precedent of avowedly right wing Governments tolerating the left wing ratchet effect (or enthusiatically adding to it) the way Cameron, May, Sunak, and frankly Boris did.
We ought to be doing more launch testing to make sure this definitely doesn’t happen though.
If you follow that logic, then the slave trade was a benevolent practice enabling black Africans to share in the foundation of the richest and most powerful nation on earth, rather than keeping it for white Europeans (we'll ignore the indigenous north-American peoples, as is tradition).
"Turkish strikes in Syria cut water to one million people"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c79zj7rz3l4o
The difference is, that for family-owned concerns, it's probably not normally millions in land value (although maybe it is, some old city-centre factory ripe for conversion into flats).
Anti-racist policies say we let people be people, regardless of the colour of their skin. If a Black British person, or an Asian British person, or an immigrant wants to move to the countryside, they can. Immigration into the UK is restricted, but once somebody has been accepted, they have the same rights as a native-born person.
People are *jealous* of tax avoiders.
Most people will try to avoid paying tax, if they can. On a tiny scale, a very lefty uni friend of mine was slight and skinny enough to wear kids clothes, which she did as they were cheaper - no VAT. As a matter of interest, do you use a tax adviser to reduce the amount of tax you pay?
They hate tax evaders.
All of them are farming entirely voluntarily. They could sell up at current prices and live very well indeed doing nothing.
Ultimately, this is NOT a problem for the current generation of farmers. Long term this is a problem that is going to make food worse, more expensive and give us less food resilience.
Now of course for him it's a plaything and I think people realise that he is the exception. Because what the prog did very well was illustrate how thin farming margins can be and how many if not most are living on the edge.
You only have to look at rates of suicide of farmers to understand this.
Even the Governor of the Bank of England has seen the light.....
My Mum was a single-handed GP, with a legal obligation to provide medical cover for her patients. If she wanted a holiday, she had to arrange cover. The same applies to lots of professions.
However, retirement of the contract farmer and COVID coincided, he was stuck there and I think that changed his focus. Since then he has spun out all these other businesses, he launched the beer, since when he has bought out the brewery and that is expanding, he has opened the pub (which I bet he rolls out multiple locations on the same model), the farm shop, the restaurant....for a play thing that's taking on a lot of responsibility, even if others run them day to day.
Regarding the policy, I don't think it'll land as much tax as predicted, and the tax intake will be staggered, it's difficult to predict when someone will die.
My understanding is that the livestock and machinery would need to be included in the £1 million APR relief as well as the land, again I would be surprised if Defra has done the research on this and knew the value sitting of what is sitting in every steading. Machinery values are extortionate now, though much of the newer stuff is on HP.
Given the average size of a dairy herd is north of 230 head in this part of Scotland, I think many herds livestock value alone will be over 400k
Will be interesting to see the finer details on the policy when finished
Each country I'd imagine handles agriculture slightly differently outwith IHT stuff.
I imagine it is more difficult to structure a farm as shares in a family business because of the farmhouse.
This is all just going to make work for tax lawyers and accountants and gain very little for the government in the end, isn't it?
You wouldn't know that they'd won 72 seats at the last general election, the best result for a third party since... 1923.
Skynet deployment delayed till 2026, possibly
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/skynet-6
Edit. This is for Monday next week but the same applies to the other days.
1) All Real Farners have to do is {insert tax avoidance here} to be unaffected. This will cost no time or money to do.
2) All the Evul Land Investors will be captured in the Inland Revenue’s web. Inextricably.
Clarkson, with his outrageous politically incorrect opinions, which has every week to a deadline in the Sunday Times, almost as if they weren't real....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7CnMQ4L9Pc&
Interesting question about a forced sale, plenty of land has been sitting on the market here (SW Scotland) for more than a year, some sales fallen through too, and not all poorer land. Spot on about tax advisers, agri lawyers, agents and accountants will be in huge demand
You still get a £1million tax free threshold (spread over the claims for agricultural & business property relief) though.
I guess the remaining loophole is that foreign entities can own UK farmland through an offshore holding company & pass that on tax free to their heirs. It does seem un-equal that non-UK residents get to do this, but UK residents don’t? Maybe something similar to the 6% / decade charge that is applied to trusts ought to be applied to all UK property held in this way. (Sounds an awful lot like a 0.5% land value tax! How very Georgist...)
Traditionally this would have been so schoolchildren would be free to help on the family farm during the busiest part of the year. A medium-distance cousin owns a farm nearby where the fields are separated from the milking shed by the road to the nearest town. So, twice a day, the herd of cows has to be walked to and from the milking shed along the main road.
I will often see the cousin with the herd of cows if I've timed my trip to town badly, when heading to town on the weekend, or a bank holiday, or when enjoying annual leave. As an office drone I work the standard 228 days a year (52 5-day weeks + 1 day - 8 bank holidays - 25 days).
I know a guy locally who does occasional work with dairy herds, perhaps if the farmer is going to a wedding, bits and pieces. Certainly there aren't many farmers buying in help for 138 days in the year, unless there's so much work to do they can't do it alone.
The tax change to IHT might be justified. Many farmers might be doing reasonably well financially. But I don't think there's much mileage in claiming they don't work bloody hard for it.
OTOY is a computer graphics firm that over the past few years has cut out a niche in reproducing the Shatner-era Star Trek actors, with some remarkable success, see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KXU2Ob8gYY
Yesterday they bought out their latest, and it's here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgOZFny7F50
https://home.otoy.com/unification/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14100327/Ukraine-fires-missile-Russia-WW3-fears-Kremlin-threatens-nuclear-response-long-range-Western-weapons-used-territory.html
And he's right that the great hardship these landowners are expecting us to weep about is that they have to become multimillionaires in cash terms not asset terms.
I only really know one farmer. Well, knew, because he sadly died in his mid 40s a few years back. He was a sheep farmer in Derbyshire. I was at school with him. He went off to university to do something scientific, but when his Dad got dementia he came back to run the family farm.
He did manage to take a day off now and then - some of which he filled with sheepy things like sheep competitions; some of which he filled with cricket - but the basic assumption was that he was working seven days a week, 365 days a year. Though he did say that while there were some days of very hard work, particularly during the Spring, there was also a lot of days where *something* needed doing but there was a lot of space in the day for watching Loose Women.
He was not a rich man. But on balance he enjoyed his lifestyle. He got to spend a lot of time outdoors in the Peak District, which 70% of the time was joyous.
I suspect IHT would have seen the farm leave the family when he died. Sadly he never married, had no children.
I have no strong feelings on taxation of agriculture, but my understanding is that the point of IHT relief is presumably to keep family farms intact rather than seeing everything bought up by agribusinesses. This strikes me as a good thing. That said, it's also my understanding that this pushes up the value of high quality agricultural land to a position where farmers can't actually buy it and service the debt, and therefore is pushing farms more and more into the hands of agribusinesses and IHT-avoidance loopholes. The Rachel Reeves solution is counter-productive, but the current solution is also counter-productive.
Good on him.
No doubt we'll end up with DEFRA having to pay out more money for various schemes to compensate. Recycling the same money, but with a cut taken off for jobsworths and tax lawyers.
I've been astonished at how politically inept they've been, but they've never done it before and lack the humility to listen to anyone who has.
Collapse in land value more likely happen if loads of farmers want to sell at once. Huge disparity in prices between north and south of the UK too
And a little hint: salmon doesn't come from farm farms, just fish farms, which are a different industry.
https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1857482400474747384
Is this the end of the world? No. Is it an irritant? Yes.
The book finishes with the intriguing fact that the late Queen kept a meticulous diary. I wonder whether it will ever see the light of day?
And no I'm not selling, and yes, I do buy my food from farmers, or with minimum middleman, where possible, rather than supermarkets. Especially milk, cheese, meat, game and some cereals.
A massive 75% of Tory voters think a a farmer who passes their farm to the next generation should not be required to pay inheritance tax on it as do 74% of Reform voters and 56% of LDs.
56% of 2019 Conservative voters who switched to vote Labour in 2024 also believe family farms should be exempt from inheritance tax.
Labour and Green voters are more divided but still 45% of Labour voters and 47% of Green voters think the farmer inheritance tax exemption should have been kept
https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1858787981303185664
Ah, but how many North Londoners are "left-wing"? Well, 40% of Londoners voted Labour in the last Assembly elections.
So, 40% of 978100 is 391240. That means there are roughly 3.6 times as many in the North London left-wing set, on conservative assumptions of how we define "North London", compared to farmers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64548794
A trial in which return tickets have been scrapped to make fares simpler will be extended as part of a shake-up of the country's railways.
Transport Secretary Mark Harper confirmed that LNER, which operates trains along the East Coast mainline, will extend its trial of selling single tickets only on its routes from Spring.
If it continues to be successful it will be extended to other operators.