Labour’s Net Zero zealotry is a threat to our food security

The Labour government is stepping up its war on British farmers.

In October last year, it delivered the first blow to the agricultural industry, when chancellor Rachel Reeves outlined plans to change agricultural property relief (APR). This will mean that from April 2026, farmers inheriting land and property worth over £1million will have to pay inheritance tax at an effective rate of 20 per cent. This leaves an estimated two-thirds of England’s farming families facing a potentially ruinous tax bill. As most of these farmers tend to be asset-rich, but cash-poor, the tax will most likely be paid by selling off a portion of farmland, or indeed selling up completely.

With their very livelihoods on the line, farmers have been staging regular protests against the government’s plans, ever since they were announced. Yet rather than listen to farmers’ concerns over inheritance tax, Labour is now escalating its assault on agriculture.

On Friday last week, environment secretary Steve Reed revealed that in order to meet its target of Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050, the government is contemplating taking nearly 10 per cent – or 760,000 hectares – of English farmland out of production. As the government sees it, the fertilisers used to grow crops, the methane and manure from ruminant livestock, and the energy and fuel used to power farm machinery and vehicles are all contributing to climate change. Decommissioning productive farmland would therefore be an easy way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions – and would also free up land to be used for other eco-initiatives, such as tree-planting, solar farms and new habitats for wildlife.

While still only at the consultation stage, the proposals will no doubt win the approval of our green-hued political and media classes and their bourgeois cheerleaders. They see Net Zero as a righteous cause, a supreme objective that trumps all other needs and concerns – including, it seems, the small matter of feeding ourselves.

Net Zero secretary Ed Miliband has tried, quite audaciously, to claim that these proposals will actually benefit Britain’s food supply. He says that ‘the biggest threat’ to ‘food security’ is actually ‘the climate crisis’. Those who work in the agricultural sector would likely disagree with Green Ed. The biggest threat to food security on the horizon right now is not the so-called climate crisis – it is surely Labour’s plans to radically reduce food production, in the name of tackling the climate crisis. After all, what else does the government expect to happen if it prevents agricultural activity on vast areas of land that are currently used for farming? Indeed, if the government’s aim was to endanger food security, to hinder our ability to feed ourselves as a nation, it could have hardly come up with a better proposal.

Yet Labour just doesn’t seem to get it. This party of the public sector and professional managerial class is too far removed from the sphere of material production, too distant from the activity of actually making and cultivating things, to fully grasp the damage its policies will do. One suspects the only time ministers encounter agricultural labour is right at the end of the production process, in the aisles of Waitrose. For them, the countryside is a holiday destination, not a place of work and industry.

The class in power finds it all too easy to govern at several removes from people’s lives and from industry on the ground, drawing up policies according to Treasury spreadsheets and legally enshrined climate-change targets. And so first Labour set about sacrificing farms in the name of balancing the books. Now it threatens to decimate farmland in the name of Net Zero.

Labour ministers should probably check in with their chums in the EU to see where this technocratic, greenist assault on the agricultural sector can lead. Over the past few years, farmers across Europe have been in open revolt against their political masters. Their specific grievances may have varied between countries. But there has been little mistaking the common root to their fury – namely, the EU’s green agenda.

In the name of achieving the EU’s target of Net Zero by 2050 – the key commitment of the 2020 European Green Deal – national elites have been slowly choking their agricultural industries. Much as the British government seems determined to do, they have been issuing demands from up on high, such as reductions in fertiliser use and limits on pesticides, in order to meet an arbitrary decarbonisation timetable. Over the past year especially, those whose livelihoods were about to be decimated at the stroke of a regulators’ pen have been pushing back.

Something similar is now happening in the UK. We’ve already seen the stirring of a farmers’ revolt over the past few months in the face of a ruinous inheritance tax. Now, as the government ponders dealing an even more significant blow to farming through its Net Zero policies, many more could find themselves in open conflict with the government.

Britain’s political class has long governed in blissful ignorance of the reality of farming and the rural communities that rely on it. The contradictions between its Net Zero commitments and the realities of production, from food to energy, have largely remained hidden from view. But no more. If the farmers’ revolt in Europe is any indication, Labour is in for a deservedly rude awakening.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.