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Britain’s farmers are fighting for their survival

Labour’s tax raid is putting an entire industry and way of life at risk.

Tim Black

Tim Black
Columnist

Topics Politics UK

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In November last year, thousands of farmers descended on Whitehall to protest against the UK government’s planned changes to inheritance tax, which could cripple the agricultural sector. If chancellor Rachel Reeves and her pals at the Treasury thought this was a momentary eruption of anger that would soon pass, they should think again.

Last week, farmers were back out in force. On Thursday, over 40 tractors took to the streets of Oxford and sounded their horns while environment secretary Steve Reed was trying to address a national farming conference. The following day, they engaged in ‘go slow’ tractor drives on key roads across England, from Devon to Cheshire, in an attempt to disrupt supermarket supply chains. The scenes were reminiscent of the European farmers’ revolt that has already shaken the continent’s governing classes to their core.

Described by campaign group Farmers to Action as a ‘warning shot’ to PM Keir Starmer, these protests are set to continue this Friday with what is being described as a ‘national action’. This will involve farmers parking up their tractors in supermarket carparks for several hours. The aim is to give the powers-that-be a taste of the disruption farmers could inflict in the weeks and months ahead.

Farmers’ determination to keep fighting against Labour’s planned changes to so-called agricultural property relief (APR) should surprise no one. This is a tax raid that threatens the very future of British farming – as both an industry and a way of life. It’s no wonder farmers are not backing down.

Under existing APR, farming families are able to pass on their land and property to the next generation without having to pay inheritance tax. Before the General Election, Labour had promised to leave this arrangement as it was. But come Reeves’s October budget, Labour had changed its tune. The chancellor announced that, from April 2026, farmers inheriting land and property worth over £1million – which really isn’t very much in farming terms – would pay inheritance tax at an effective rate of 20 per cent.

This threatens the viability of many farms, the majority of which are family run and owned. Yes, farmers may be asset rich on paper due to the amount of land they own. But thanks to price-squeezing supermarkets and high fertiliser and feed costs, they are very much cash poor in practice. For farmers to pay potentially tens and even hundreds of thousands of pounds in inheritance tax, in some cases far more than what they would actually earn in a year, would be near enough impossible without having to sell off swathes of their farmland. This will impact not only the farmers who inherit and own that land, but also the many workers and the communities that work and rely on it.

As Mrs Graham, a widowed farmer, told a reporter at the Oxford protest: ‘If those taxes had existed when my husband died, I would have had to sell the farm… The government cannot do what they’re doing – everything they are doing is crucifying us.’

She’s right. Labour’s APR move is in danger of killing farming in the UK. According to figures published by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, nearly two-thirds of farms are valued at over £1million. That means that the vast majority of farmers will one day face an inheritance-tax bill that could threaten the very existence of their farm.

Even supermarkets – which are hardly farmers’ friends – are growing concerned about the threat posed to the UK’s food industry by the changes to APR. Sophie Throup, head of agriculture at Morrisons, said this week that her company stands ‘with farmers’ and backs the protesters. While supermarkets have consistently exerted economic pressure on farmers, forever reducing the price at which they can sell their produce, they still ultimately rely on them to line the shelves of their stores. The prospect of farmers slowly selling off their land and reducing their yields, or even stopping work altogether, poses a threat to even the biggest supermarket chains.

Nevertheless, the government is continuing to act as if none of this matters – as if the ability to produce the food we eat is not really all that important. How else to explain its stubbornness on APR? Painfully estranged from so much of working Britain, Labour is simply unable to grasp the impact of its adherence to Treasury orthodoxy on the real economy. It is being warned of the destructive consequences of this inheritance-tax raid. And yet ministers can only respond with robotic, bean-counting talk of the need to ‘take difficult decisions’ in order to ‘balance the books’. Or as environment secretary Steve Reed told last week’s national farming conference: ‘I’m sorry that some of the action we had to take shocked you… but stable finances are the foundation of the economic growth needed.’

The Labour government seems stuck on technocratic autopilot, telling farmers fearing for their livelihoods that there is no alternative. Them’s the budgetary rules, it says time and again.

Yet as the ongoing protests show, farmers are not giving up. Sooner or later, this most deluded of governments will be brought face to face with the devastating consequences of its policies. A reckoning is coming.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.

Picture by: Getty.

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