What the new tax also shows is that Labour simply doesn’t understand the difference between a farm having valuable assets, and a farm having tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds available to pay the new death tax.

£1 million will buy a farm of roughly 100 acres, give or take. The average size of a farm in Britain is over 200 acres, according to official data. What this means is that only the smallest, least productive farms will avoid this tax, while the family farms that are drawn into it will be sent huge tax bills which they won’t have the cash to pay.

Civil servants in the Treasury suggested this policy before. But some Tory ministers saw sense and realised the £1 million threshold was simply too low and would kill off too many medium-sized family farms, the bedrock of our countryside.

Starmer’s Labour government, in contrast, hasn’t seen sense. Instead, Labour’s decision-makers, most of whom congregate in north London, clearly seem to believe that farmers “hoard” land for their own enrichment, prompting Elon Musk, yesterday, to compare Keir Starmer’s new policy to Joseph Stalin’s approach to farming.

Labour either do not realise that while a farm can be a valuable asset on paper the farming family do not have the cash to pay a death tax, or they don’t care.

Clearly, what they want to see are family farms being forced to sell up or broken into smaller plots so they can pay the tax bill, which in turn will accelerate the privatisation and large corporate takeover of the British countryside.

They don’t care if farms, which in many cases have been passed down from one generation to the next over centuries, are smashed apart. They want the revenue today and think the countryside is fair game.

Labour Ministers even say this is all well and good because farmers will benefit from government grants to plant trees and protect peat bogs. One Labour Minister even went on Times Radio to say farmers will get to enjoy better public services so that makes up for them selling a farm that has been in their family for generations!

So, yes, farmers have every right to feel angry. And it’s not just this tax; what they’ve been facing in recent years from Labour and the British state more widely is nothing short of a full-on war against the countryside and rural communities.

It began in 2004.

Never forget that Tony Blair’s Labour Government deployed riot police to attack the hundreds of thousands of people who joined the Countryside Alliance’s “Liberty and Livelihood” march, to register their concerns about how rural ways of life were being undermined and thrown aside by an urban and out-of-touch political elite.

And now, today, we see this assault on the countryside all around us.

It’s not only reflected in the draconian new tax but in a cultural, media, and political class that is openly hostile toward the British countryside and rural communities.

The BBC’s “Countryfile” television show runs episodes about how the countryside, we are told, is racist, and how farmers are destroying the planet.

The National Trust has got in on the act, running projects to get hikers from the “global majority” (read: non-white people) into the countryside.

This is an openly anti-White term, drawn from Critical Race Theory, which is now going mainstream in our government departments, schools, universities, and legacy media corporations, like the BBC.

It is rooted in a theory which wants to repudiate or ‘deconstruct’ all of the things that make us who we are —our shared history, our shared identity, our shared values, our shared ways of life, and the symbols of these things, like the countryside.

Recently, in a debate with the BBC’s Nick Robinson, I even found myself in the bizarre position of being told that none of this is happening, that there is no attempt by the elite class to reframe the countryside as “racist”, when, very clearly, there is.

Urban elites are now so absorbed in radical theories like Critical Race Theory and the culture of repudiation that they no longer even recognise these things when they’re unfolding and influencing the national debate before their very eyes.

At the same time, rural communities are having to watch global corporations, like airlines, as well as investment funds and property developers, buy up large swathes of the countryside, kicking out people who have worked the land for years to grow forests for carbon offsetting. Seriously —this is actually happening.

The Labour-run Welsh Government is the worst offender here. They’re waging war on the Welsh countryside and the Welsh people who live there and work on the land.

They’ve been buying farmland to turn into wilderness to get to Net Zero. They want to change rural life and farming practices to deliver their “anti-racist Wales action plan”.

No wonder farmers turned out en masse to protest Welsh Labour’s conference. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was forced to escape out the back door. Really.

This is what the British people pay their taxes for today. Government propaganda attacking them as “racist” and backwards. And now a new inheritance tax on farms, which is the most potent symbol of this all-out war on the British countryside.

There is a solution, of course.

As Rupert Lowe, the Reform UK MP for Great Yarmouth said: “I don’t think farmers should have to pay inheritance tax, I don’t think family businesses should have to pay inheritance tax. In fact, I don’t think anyone should have to pay inheritance tax – it’s snatching already taxed money from the dead. Scrap the lot.”

Inheritance tax is the most despised tax of all. It hangs over the heads of countless families, levied at a time of great sadness. As a country, because of political choices taken by both Left and Right, we are now spending billions funding accommodation for fake asylum seekers, have a spiralling benefits bill which is supporting millions of people who are out-of-work, and throwing billions more at a public sector that remains unreformed, inefficient and unproductive.

So why, for once, don’t we start making better political choices in this country, such as by dumping this new tax, saying goodbye to inheritance tax forever, and making it clear that crucial symbols of our national identity —like our family farms, rural communities, and the countryside—remain firmly off limits. Who’s with me?

This article (Labour’s war on the countryside) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Matt Goodwin 

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