Farmer protests come to London
Tuesday's demonstration will see thousands of farmers demonstrating against inheritance tax hikes and much more.
Farmers will be protesting en masse in Westminster on Tuesday. For years, farmers have been angry about how hard it is to earn a living. They feel supermarkets are ripping them off. Consumers are more interested in cheap food rather than buying British. The costs of fuel, fertiliser and feed went through the roof thanks to the thawing of the world economy, post Covid, and the war in Ukraine. Subsidies have favoured big farmers. The drive to Net Zero means that agricultural land is being turned over to more lucrative and heavily subsidised solar farms.
Many of these concerns were expressed by Welsh farmer Gareth Wyn Jones at the Battle of Ideas festival in 2022. Watch his speech in the debate ‘Can we fix Britain?’ here:
Until now, the UK has avoided the large-scale farmer protests that have become commonplace in the EU. But the lightning rod for the latest protests has been the Budget, where Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that inheritance tax would be applied to farms for the first time in decades. The government seems to think that only better-off farmers will be affected.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer argues that ‘for a typical case, which is parents with a farm they want to pass on to one of their children, by the time you’ve taken into account not only the exemption for the farm property itself, but also the exemption for spouse to spouse, then parent to child, it’s £3m before any inheritance tax will be payable. That’s why I am absolutely confident the vast majority of farms and farmers will not be affected by this.’
But farmers believe that many more farms will have to be sold to pay tax bills in the future rather than being passed on to farmers’ families. More broadly, they believe they have been taken for granted by metropolitan politicians and commentators who have little understanding of the difficulties facing farmers today. For example, John McTernan, a former adviser to Tony Blair, caused a furore when he told GB News that he was in favour of ‘doing to farmers what Margaret Thatcher did to the miners’. (Watch here.)
Another grandee of the liberal left, Observer columnist Will Hutton, used his column on Sunday to support the removal of the inheritance tax exemption. ‘The hoarding of land that has gone on since the bung was introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1984, which has so steadily driven up land prices and farmers’ rents, will at last be checked as some of the larger estates are obliged to sell parcels of land to pay inheritance tax, as they did before 1984 without the world falling in, rather than be enabled to own it in perpetuity.’
What will become of farming in the UK? Will Labour’s plans be the death knell for small farmers? What are the parallels with the farmer protests on the continent?
EUROPE’S FARMER PROTESTS
The plight of farmers is by no means restricted to the UK. In fact, European farmers have been at the forefront of a populist rebellion against the out-of-touch political class whose environmental policies have threatened the livelihoods of thousands of farmers. Our friends at MCC Brussels have been following this issue closely, and we recommend a short video they made on the topic, as well as a comprehensive report they published.
Watch the short video:
Or read the MCC report on the issue: The Silent War on Farming: How EU policies are destroying our agriculture by Thomas Fazi.
The report is also discussed in this podcast:
And you have to ask yourself ‘why’? Why make farmers lives more difficult?
I cannot help feel there are other motives at play. It cannot just be money surely?
Maybe someone can explain it to me?