Land and Protest in Parody Britain
The mood in Baku is not great.
Many leaders of major economies failed to turn up. The US, under Trump, is about to withdraw completely from international climate cooperation. It would be wrong to blame Trump for not meeting our climate targets, we were already far off (The World’s Best Hope to Beat Climate Change Is Vanishing). But electing a climate denier is a portent for our times.
The Paris Agreement of a 1.5C climate target is being quietly abandoned, and nobody really wants to talk about what this actually means.
What are the consequences of failing to meet any of our emission reduction targets?
I mean, we know what the consequences are.
We’ve been told about the runaway climate “tipping points”, which once set off cannot be halted on timescales that we really operate at, such as the Amazon turning into a savanna, the collapse of the great polar ice sheets, and huge quantities of carbon released from melting permafrost. We can watch the new reality unfold in Valencia then complain angrily about Just Stop Oil or ULEZ.
So, are we getting a mass revolt of people demanding insulated homes and publicly-owned energy? Are people rebelling about the cost of living or profiteering from the big energy companies?
No.
What gets people on the streets is asking wealthy landowners to pay some inheritance tax.
[Previously, farming businesses qualified for 100% relief on inheritance tax on agricultural and business property. But now the tax is being imposed on farms worth more than £1m, with an effective rate of 20% on assets above that threshold, rather than the normal 40% rate for inheritance tax]
The sense of entitlement from these people is off the scale. Jeremy Clarkson – who spoke at the rally at Westminster today told the Times in 2021 that avoiding inheritance tax was the “critical” factor in deciding to buy his Cotswolds farm.
Newspapers report a Devon farmer called Sue Hosegood, holding a sign reading “Farmer Harmer Starmer”. Sue and her husband, William, said they were worried for their three sons who are involved in the business. “There is no future if we have to pay tax every generation,” William said.
Sure Sue, paying taxes is a bummer.
Now we’re getting a convergence of more Brexit Bollocks about the ‘Metropolitan Elite’, and a Gammon Rage and rebellion from the Shires led by Darren Grimes and Nigel Farage.
As the climate and energy advisor Jon Burke noted: “I’d have some sympathy for this ‘we want to save family farming’ line from farmers if they were good custodians of the land, but we have 90%+ of UK meadows lost; insects decimated; degraded soil; 300,000km hedgerows lost. There is no future for U.K farming with these practices.”
This is true. British farming practices are an unmitigated environmental disaster. But farmers are locked into a ludicrous food system that is broken at every level. Small farmers are often exploited by supermarkets and on precarious leaseholds. But these are not the people you are seeing mobilised in Westminster. This is the wrath of landed power unused to anything but inter-generational privilege.
The Countryside Alliance
Tom Bradshaw, the head of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has accused the government of an extraordinary “betrayal”. “I don’t think I have ever seen the industry this angry, this disillusioned, this upset,” he said.
It’s not really a “betrayal” to ask people to pay inheritance tax is it though?
Land is a class issue. What we’re seeing here is some highly privileged people arriving in huge tractors worth £200k covered in Union Jacks whineing that they’re being asked to pay inheritance tax for the first time. Having been accustomed to having their peers and relatives permanently in power, they are now shocked by any policy impineging on them.
Many of these people have been groomed by the Telegraph and radicalised by the Daily Mail. Their “betrayal” comes from a monumental sense of entitlement and consuming a diet of journalism that portrays Keir Starmer as a dangerous radical and the arrival of the most right-wing Labour government as tantamount to armageddon.
Among the rebels out today was the Earl of Derby. Edward Stanley, the 19th Earl of Derby, told the Financial Times (‘UK landed estates warn Budget tax changes will ‘kill off’ business‘) that having to pay some more tax is “shockingly awful”.
Edward owns a grouse moor in the Peak District and lives in Knowsley Hall (below). The FT tells us: “Knowsley Hall, which the Stanley family has owned since 1385, can be rented for holidays, weddings and filming; the ancestral home also has a 550-acre safari with rhinos and baboons and a stud for boarding racehorses.”
The Financial Times also quotes James Hervey-Bathurst, who, it tells us inherited Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire, near the Welsh border, from his mother in 1988, said his family would “be having to allocate cash to pay tax which would otherwise go into the business” in anticipation of inheritance tax.
What a weird country.
Labour MP Steve Reed defended the government’s budget plans saying: “Our public services are broken. The Government is asking rich estates and the most valuable farms to pay their fair share. Small family farms will not be affected. Only about 500 estates a year will pay more under the new scheme than they do today.”
We live in a country which is seeing increasing social breakdown. This week it was revealed that a record 36% of children live in poverty in Britain. That’s 5.2 million children. A total of 16 million people in the UK live in poverty. That’s 24% of the population.
You look at COP in Baku and you get ‘End the Net Zero Madness’. You look at the state of grotesque social inequality and you get protest from the landed gentry. Britain seems like a weird distorted place. It seems irredeemable.
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“What are the consequences of failing to meet any of our emission reduction targets?”
One is that farming will go away. The only reason we (fatally) started farming was because the climate stabilised. {I say only, there was the other reason in that we had eaten most of the mega-fauna}. Since we have now destabilised the climate, farming will soon be no longer possible. Let’s see these outraged privileged ‘farmers’ protest about that. At some point they’ll realise that “Labour’s war on farming” is nowt compared to nature’s war on homo sapiens. By then though even they won’t be able to afford the fuel to drive tractors to protests in London even if they manage to cross all the potholes and collapsed bridges.
If you want proof of the effect on food growing from a destabilised climate, talk to any allotment holder this year. That’s on top of the devastation individual farmers (who actually grow food as apposed to shooting it) have suffered over the year across the world. Many of the blogs I follow on youtube from fellow allotment holders report a bad year from the wet weather which boosted slug populations and destroyed much growth. Some of us just gave up trying this year.
Because we have decimated frog, hedgehog and bird populations in the ongoing 6th mass extinction, those slugs had a huge free lunch all year. It could be argued that all packets of vegetable seeds should be merely relabelled slug food!
The Onion recently summed it up:
@Mark Bevis, this entry in the All Hail the Planet environmental series looks at the psychology behind ignoring the pertinent facts and science:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/all-hail/2024/11/20/why-our-brains-are-wired-to-ignore-the-climate-crisis-all-hail
which makes some good points, although I think it bottles its conclusion (telling a better story is perhaps of some short-term value, but the solution must involve systems change on a global scale, and what happens when your opponents then tell a better — if less honest — one?).
Whilst the article points aren’t necessarily wrong, the article isn’t even halfway there.
Climate chaos is ‘merely’ a symptom of ecological overshoot. The focus on one symptom echoes our treatment of cancer. Focus on fixing the symptoms, using an enormous amount of resources, rather than removing the causes. This suits the corporate profiteers of course and their government sponsors, in the classic divide-and-rule tactics. Even if we could fix climate chaos (*) – collapse of global industrial civilisation would still happen due to overshoot, other symptoms of which include biodiversity loss, resource depletion, overpopulation, peaks in efficiency, peaks in innovation, and most significantly pollution. Climate change itself is a pollution problem to the tune of 40 billion tons of CO2 per annum. Runaway climate change is where nature joins in with natural source CH4 emissions.
The psychology is important, because our education system & culture teaches us to think in binary – black/white, commie/capitalist, left/right, gay/straight, poor/rich, Tory/Labour, Leave/Join, Democrat/Republican, even these days male/female, and so on, without an allowance for that fact that third or more options are available; and also teaches us to think in terms of problems and solutions, rather than dealing with predicaments that have outcomes, and thus hinders our learning to adapt to and live with those outcomes. Which is the only game left in town.
As Erik Michaels regularly points out, civilisation itself is unsustainable, along with technology use:
https://problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.com/
It’s an evolutionary predicament – we are not evolved for the world we are in, nor are we evolved for long term problem solving. Our senses are geared to ‘is that movement in the bush over there my lunch, or am it’s lunch?’ – the flight or fight situation – corporations exhibit the same thinking with short-term profit making their main goal – and our minds are geared to living co-operatively in small groups of up to 200 people, not competitively and certainly not individual competitiveness. The concept that we have dominion of, and separation from, nature, is laughable, ecologically suicidal, and nature will brutally disabuse our cultures, if not our species, of these concepts.
All species have the evolutionary trait to fill out all available ecological niches if they can, which we’ve done on steroids. Thus growth-overshoot-collapse-regrowth is a natural evolutionary trait, it is just normally in a balanced ecology checks and balances exist (predator-prey, diseases, resource limits) that keep species in check.
Our species overshoot is so vast that we are in the bind that if we continue burning FF and continue the fantasy of unlimited economic growth on a finite planet – we’ll overheat & overpollute the planet and billions (not hundreds of millions Mr Hallam) will die.
If we end FF and abolish money and GDP then billions will die of starvation (between 1/4 and 1/2 of the population requires FF for food in the form of the Haber-Bosch process). One hell of a predicament….
But it has gotten worse – climate chaos no longer matters much – it is the pollution. With micro-plastics, PFAS forever chemicals, tyre rubber all combining to disrupt hormones and sterilising all mammal species. Without any change (and as you say, change would have to be on a global scale) the human race will be extinct within 4 generations, and there may be no children after 2060:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-09-12/why-2-is-the-most-dangerous-number-no-one-is-talking-about/
Prevention is better than cure is a truer phrase than we realise!
(*) we can’t, it is a predicament with an outcome, not a problem with a solution; and the IPCC itself have stated in reports outside of COP##s that climate is unsolveable on time scales suitable to humans)
A good piece. Can you imagine if our SNP government found a backbone , and did what they should have done years ago, by introducing a land tax. Remind me; what percentage of the land in Scotland is owned by a few hunderd people that pay virtually nothing toward keeping the country running.
What a bunch of ‘entitled’ shysters. Would have been even more delighted to see the ‘king’ protesting about his private lands also becoming subject to inheritance tax, but no, hold on, he and his family are still exempt, at least this policy is a start, and oh how they squeal.
the forestry commission & ministry of attack own a great deal of land in the uk so mibbe tak a swatch at all these forests i.e., plantations that were created tae bolster the war effort & basically have led tae a great deal mair environmental disruption, flooding, further manmade alleviation schemes in terms ae concretisation, building ae completely unnecessary infrastructure as a means tae short term profits fur the munny hungry venture capitalists i.e., cunts that seem tae huv taen a particular dislike taewards athing that wis wance green & bountiful
I don’t understand inheritance tax. I read the bbc report but still none the wiser.
If the farmer dies and passes the farm to their child, do they pay tax on the amount the child sells the farm on for? Is that when the tax happens?
Some of the articles suggest the child would have to pay money simply to have it passed to them and before they have realised any value from a sale. Is that right? Does that mean they would have to find money from somewhere just to own the property?
Genuinely unsure how it works. If it’s as the above rather than when/if they sell it can see how this may be a problem. Surely that can’t be right. Can anyone enlighten me?
It’s essentially the second scenario you set out, Ross. If payable (there are a bunch of exemptions) Inheritance Tax is levied on the value of the estate at death. Lack of ready cash to pay the tax isn’t a problem unique to farmers though.
Thanks for that. Okay, I’m actually not so sure where I stand on this then haha!
If they’re getting money in cash I can see it but if they’re needing to pay just to have the value of an unrealised asset, I need to work this out in my head what I think is fair.
Genuinely not quite sure what I think. They haven’t been given money to take from, they’ve been given an unrealised asset.
I don’t think farms make an awful lot profit, this seems like a payment rather than a tax to me.
Whatever we should do, we should try to encourage farmers to farm rather than sell to corporate green belt asset snatchers that’s for sure.
Is this the case for all assets? If I got a house from my parents that’s worth say 400k am I expected to pay a payment before getting to own the house and selling it?
Here’s some coverage here:
Think you’ve missed the link.
Cheers
Here https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/why-are-farmers-storming-westminster/id1640878689?i=1000677502655
IHT is a tax that only affects about 4% of the population. If you live in a fairly normal to relatively large house and own no land, inheritance tax just isn’t an issue. There is an exemption anyway for primary homes. and farms have double the exemption that non farmers have, so are going to be more favorably treated than Joe Millionaire with no “farm” land.
Clarkson, Dyson, Dacre, Lloyd-Webber et al. own farm land primarily as a means of avoiding IHT. They are not farmers and have no interest in farming. Clarkson is an interesting but largely irrelevant case, as he actually does farm (as a hobby and for TV) but has no interest or need to turn a profit on it as he gets his money from other sources.
The rest of them will be renting out their land to actual farmers and getting income from it that way. I have no idea what their tax arrangements are for that income, but I would be willing to bet they are paying a lower rate of tax on it than I am paying on my pension.
IHT exists as a means of pulling back into the national coffers unearned gains from hoarded wealth, be it in the form of land, property, or jewels. 96% of us will never have to worry about it, even in the prosperous and asset inflated south east of England.
Alistair,
You’re saying a farmer farming land which in theory is worth millions, but has not been, and if we want them to continue farming, never will be realised into usable cash is a millionaire? I don’t think they are.
Of course go after the Dysons if they are using it in some way but if the results is affecting real farmers based on theoretical land value, I’m not in favour. Find some other way.
Some details here:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/19/what-are-inheritance-tax-changes-affecting-uk-farmers
Basically, if the total value of the land & farm is £1,000,001, then 20% tax is due when the owner dies and passes it to a family member. But unlike other inheritance tax dues, the new farmer gets 10 years to pay the £200,000. The £20K per year they could then have to pay would be paid for by sheep subsidies if they have a large farm, although the sheep subsidies are being phased out, if not already. There does seem to be some confusion about combining the value of the land with the value of the business that is the farm on that same land.
It all looks like work creation scheme for lawyers and estate agents – afterall, who determines the value of an acre of land?
It’s all a bit crap really, the concept of humans owning land is an anthropogenic construct, and will come to an end as it is unsustainable and ecologically destructive. Much of the land held by the wealthier estates is stolen property, taken from the English by the Normans after 1066, shame the law of handling stolen property doesn’t seem to apply here. See the books by Guy Shrubsole.
Thanks. I genuinely didn’t realise an heir was expected to pay a payment on the value of an asset like this.
Unless I’m picking this up wrong, I think this might be unfair in my view.
People owning land is a reality for the foreseeable, I’m afraid.
They aren’t, the quoted figures, from Mr Bevis. are not based on anything like reality.
Ross
In Inheritance Tax basically fulfills two functions.
1)Raises funds to support government spending.
2)It s a mechanism to try and reduce generational inequality. To put it very simply generational inequality occurs if little Johnny has rich parents and little Jimmy has poor parents . Little Johnny is born with a massive advantage over little Jimmy which will impact their life chances almost regardless of the efforts or abilities of the 2 children.
I expected there would be inheritance tax on cash and liquidised assets.
I know what the function of it is.
I’ve always considered myself pretty left wing but if I’m reading this all correct I’m maybe less supportive than the orthodox left wing view, if this is it, than I thought.
Where did you get those numbers?
The exemptions are much greater than £1m; each parent can bequeath £1m in land value and another £500k, in other exemptions, tax free. Total: £3m, a value greater than the bulk of “family” farms.
If the bequest was just land, no buildings and no equipment, a single farmer could pass on £1,000,001 (your example figure), then it would cost 20p, with ten years to pay. Not £200k.
Okay but £3m isn’t being bequeathed though?
Something which in theory is worth 3m but if you’re just going to farm it as your father did, you’re expected to stump up cash from your own money?
It is part of the Estate passed on from one generation to another just as my house is part of any estate I intend to pass onto my children in my will. My estate will be subject to Inheritance Tax of 40% above £325K value while the farmers is not currently and will only be subject to 20% above £1 million which in practice will be above 2 million. Is that fair?
Inheritance Tax for farmers was abolished in 1984 and the lack of inheritance tax is thought to be a significant factor in the increase in land value. The. proposed tax may help decrease the price of land and consequently actually reduce the numbers of farmers who will have to pay the tax!
Yes I think I’ve decided I’m less in favour of this than I imagined I would be. I’ve got no great affinity with farmers but glad this has come up as I’ve been educated.
I didn’t think people would have to pay just to farm their family’s farm. It doesn’t seem like a tax, it seems like a payment.
I’m not even sure i agree with this idea of payment to own the family home either. Pay a tax on the sale sure. I can see a lot of gifts happening.
Appreciate I’m not an expert on this but I don’t like this idea at all, never mind farmers getting a so called discount.
Oh well, learn something every day.
Of course it, whatever is being bequeathed, is.
Land, farm buildings and viable equipment are all saleable assets with value.
The intention behind this legislation is not to harm small, family farms and those who farm them. Its to stop the likes of Dyson and Clarkson. Those two and other wealthy individuals have been buying up land, because they’d intended to pass it on tax free; this has had the effect of driving up land prices, far beyond what they’d yield as assets in any otherbusiness. That in turn has made it near impossible for real farmers to acquire more land for actual farming. It certainly has effectively ruled out anyone from entering the business, who wants to grow or raise crops or livestock for its own sake, unless they have several millions won’t be missed.
…millions that won’t be missed.
If you read my post again I don’t dispute they can be sold and a realised gain made. At that point, I’ve no issue with a tax.
I’m disputing having to pay a payment on the unrealised notional value out your own pocket before a sale is made.
Ergo if you don’t have any intention of selling and just wanted to farm your family’s land, you have to pay out your own pocket to do so. I could be wrong on this but that’s how it’s been explained above.
Ross – I believe it is because what is being bequeathed is being used for income generating purposes. Similarly if I passed my house onto children and they didn’t sell it but rented it out they would be liable to inheritance tax I believe.
There is a view that this change will lead to more people owning farms to actually farm and produce food, rather than using farmland simply it as a way to pass on tax-free wealth to their offspring.
Clarkson has already stated that this is why he bought a farm; to avoid tax on his wealth and pass it on to his kids untouched.
Farmers and landowners constantly remind us that they are running businesses. Businesses pay tax.
Hi John,
Sure, but they will pay tax on the income which is fair enough. No problem there. I just don’t see why they should pay an additional payment before they even get an income. Out of money from their own pocket before they have been given anything.
Also, as I say I am not one to play the fiddle for farmers but I don’t think we can seriously compare unearned income from a flat landlord and earned income from a farmer who’s literally working the land. That’s earned and will be taxed.
I read the Metro into work this morning and there was a farmer from Orkney who is saying he may need to sell part of his land (who to, a developer?) just to pay the IHT so he can continye to work on his dad’s farm. Which will then be a smaller farm and thus less profitable.
It doesn’t seem fair to me.
Youll find noone more against private, buy to let landlords than me. But a child inheriting a family home is not the same in my opinion and they will be paying tax on the rental income anyway. It looks like a double tax.
If I was an estate owner I’d e keeping very quiet about this. If the great unwashed realise the land-owners are still getting a 50% ITH ‘discount’ compared to the non-landed there may be an outcry towards Starmer for being too lenient.
On a serious note, if we must have such taxes it would be better to apply them simply and without special carve-outs for special groups. Such ‘favouritism’ just leads to unintended consequences.
It has been clear for decades that farm-land has been dramatically over-priced due to this IHT ‘loophole’. The price of farmland bears no relation to its productive capacity. I imagine land prices will now decline a bit, possibly fixing the problem of inheritance tax for some of the marginal cases.
I agree with a comment below, the SNP could have made a bold statement with a land-tax but it is essentially a courin’ timerous beastie’ in awe of the Dukes of this world.
Interesting that there was little protest about the abolition of the red diesel subsidy, but millionaires are very upset about the prospect of getting taxed (at 20% on >£1MM, rather than 40% on stuff >£300K, unless you set up a trust).
eh, this is not entirely an accurate portrayal of farming which is a fkn hard job with no breaks and no remorse from the weather, instead of focussing on celebrity gobshites pretending to be something they’re clearly not away you and dae some fkn toil on a working farm or croft at this time ae year and see how you fkn like it, nob. As for machinery, steading etcetera being handed down, if this didn’t happen most of these small farms out and about would sink as fast as the ald seine netters/trawlers did during thatcher and the snp’s heyday, all these men and women were essentially owned by the bank, running a trawler out of the harbour was like taking yer mortgaged property out for a spin and praying to god ye got back with life limb and enough in the hold to pay yer way, there wouldn’t be any snp if it were not for people such as these originally shunted to the coast by interfering land commandeering cunts and improvers such as Telford so all you lowlanders & egocentric world beaters can get tae fk imo.