Is There a Bigger Agenda to the Farmers’ Inheritance-Tax ‘Sick Joke’?

SALLY BECK

THE British farming community is planning a mass lobby of Parliament next week and will be joined by Jeremy Clarkson. Farmers say Labour has declared ‘war on the countryside’ and that the government has broken its promise by introducing a ‘crippling’ inheritance tax on family farms. Nicknamed the ‘suicide charter’ by the farming community, the policy has already resulted in one death, while elderly farmers wonder if they should kill themselves to save their family’s legacy.

Clarkson, a fierce critic of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s recent Budget and its inheritance tax changes, said farmers were ‘very angry and anxious’ about their future. He owns a 1,000-acre farm in the Cotswolds called Diddly Squat, which made just £144 profit in its first year.

Our Parliamentary representatives are indifferent, as demonstrated last week by their response to the deputy leader of Reform UK, Richard Tice. He asked in the Commons: ‘Are the Minister, the Secretary of State and the Chancellor aware that so serious are the consequences of this policy that the heads of farming families in their 80s and 90s are seriously considering committing suicide before it comes into place?’

Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle prevented further debate on the subject, while Daniel Zeichner, Minister for Food Security and Rural Affairs, seemed to be lost for words. He said: ‘I find it hard to respond to a question like that.’

National Farmers Union (NFU) president Tom Bradshaw is livid and warned that Labour’s move would further fuel a mental-health crisis among farmers. Farming already has a high suicide rate with 36 per cent of farmers admitting they are depressed, while 47 per cent say they struggle with anxiety.

Bradshaw and his team have been inundated with calls from the elderly who feel they are a ‘burden’ on their families, adding: ‘The feelings of anger, betrayal and despair are palpable. The family farm tax is exacerbating the mental-health crisis that farmers are already facing. Just because a farm is an asset, it doesn’t mean those who work it are wealthy.

‘After decades of tightening margins, record inflation, extreme weather and increased production costs, many farmers and growers are at breaking point, unable to absorb any more cost burden.’

The NFU plan a mass demonstration in London next Tuesday, November 19, sanctioned by the Metropolitan Police. Originally restricted by the union to an organised lobbying event in a Westminster conference hall that holds only 1,800, thousands more farmers will now take to the streets. Before the extension was announced Clarkson commented: ‘It seems that if you are from Just Stop Oil or protesting about Gaza, you can do what you want. But farmers are treated differently by a government that is waging an all-out war on the countryside.’

News of the demonstration prompted ridiculous inflammatory comments from a former political adviser to the Labour Party and Tony Blair, John McTernan. He suggested that farmers are superfluous and should face the same fate as mine workers. ‘We should do to them what Margaret Thatcher did to the miners,’ he told GB News. ‘It’s an industry we can do without. If people are so upset that they want to go on to the streets and spray slurry, we don’t need small farmers.’ (In the 1980s, Mrs Thatcher authorised force against striking miners protesting against pit closures.)

Welsh cattle and sheep farmer Gareth Wyn Jones, a father of three, fears he will be the last of four generations to farm his land in North Wales. He agreed with Tice: ‘This is our closing-of-the-mines moment. It’s not just an attack on an industry, but on a people and our way of life. The only difference is you can live without coal, but you can’t live without food.’

Although Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer disowned McTernan’s comments, he has spectacularly broken his promise to the farming community. Last February he addressed the NFU at their annual conference and said: ‘We can’t have farmers struggling.’ He pledged to forge ‘a new relationship with the countryside and farmers’ and recognised that ‘losing a farm is not like losing any other business; it can’t come back’. Now, from April 2026, farms worth more than £1million will be forced to pay a levy of 20 per cent when they pass on their assets which will mean many will need to sell farmland to pay it.

Sir Keir insists that the policy will affect a minority of farmers, but the Country and Land Business Association (CLA) disagrees. It says roughly three-quarters of British farms, 70,000, will be affected, while there are just 108,300 farms left in the UK.

Analysis by the CLA, which represents owners of rural land, property and businesses in England and Wales, found that a typical family farm would have to put 159 per cent of annual profits into paying the new inheritance tax every year for a decade and could have to sell 20 per cent of its land. It found a typical 200-acre farm owned by one person with an expected profit of £27,300 would face a £435,000 inheritance tax bill.

According to the BBC, the Treasury will raise just £230million in 2026-27 from the levy, rising to £520million by the end of 2029-30, while the government will spend £11.6billion on international climate finance (ICF) between 2024 and 2026.

Farmers and government critics are wondering if there is a bigger agenda. Smaller family farms expect to go out of business leaving the way clear for the vultures of green energy and megafarms to pick at what is left. According to Shropshire dairy farmer Kelly Seaton, whose husband is a fourth-generation farmer: ‘This is on the back of Labour approving 7,000 acres of solar panels. This has increased land values and people fighting for land, while 56 per cent of non-farmers bought land in 2023, so that has increased land values.’

A giant solar farm, with as many as 100,000 panels, is to be built in the Ayrshire countryside. The £50million project will be built on agricultural land and take over a 143.8 acre (58.2 hectares) site.

The Conservative government passed a compulsory purchase order agreement that means councils can buy land they want for ‘green energy’ cheaply. Land is being bought to plant trees, ‘but you can’t eat trees,’ said Mrs Seaton. Smoke-belching industry needs farmland to meet Net Zero targets. ‘In a lot of areas, farmers can’t afford to buy farmland because they’re competing with big corporations buying farmland to offset their carbon footprint,’ Mrs Seaton said, adding: ‘Nothing sequesters carbon better than grass.’

Gareth Wyn Jones will fight to save his 375-year-old farm. He said: ‘The shameless tax grab will force thousands of farmers to sell up, decimating livelihoods, driving food inflation ever higher and leaving the beloved British countryside open to exploitation from foreign business interests.

‘Most farmers are scraping by each year barely turning a profit, working 18 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep their heads above water.

‘Owning a farm worth more than £1million does not make you rich. That figure is nothing more than a number on a spreadsheet. It isn’t cold, hard cash. Farmers are asset-rich and cash-poor.

‘Taxing farmers on the value of their estate is, therefore, little more than a sick, twisted joke. Because the only way for us to pay is to sell the very land and assets we’re being taxed on. And it’s not just farmers who will be affected. Simple supply and demand tell you that as British farms close, food inflation will rise.

‘Supermarkets will be entirely reliant on overseas produce which – as the recent floods in Spain show – is a fragile and unreliable ecosystem.

‘What we will see in the next 18 months is a rushed sell-off of farmland, likely to overseas developers. Those who remain in the industry will halt all investment. The countryside economy will slow, splutter and die. By April 2026, British farming will be a forgotten phrase.

‘Keir Starmer likes to talk of his time working on a farm aged 14 picking up stones – well, I can assure the Prime Minister, he won’t be welcome on any farm in Britain ever again.’

This article (Is There a Bigger Agenda to the Farmers’ Inheritance-Tax ‘Sick Joke’?) was created and published by The Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Sally Beck