The public outrage at Labour’s family farm tax isn’t going away any time soon. Today farmers from across the country have driven their tractors to Westminster in yet another protest at Rachel Reeves’s inheritance tax on agricultural assets, as countrymen fear for the future of family-owned farms. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot insist the majority of farms will be unaffected but their pleas for calm have landed on deaf ears as the Starmtroopers continue to lose rural supporters over the matter.
As frustrated farmers gathered outside of parliament today, the issue was also being discussed inside the walls of Westminster. The President of the National Farmers’ Union Tom Bradshaw cut a striking figure at the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee this morning, armed with a stark – and moving – warning for Starmer’s army.
Quizzed on the impact of the proposed tax on the mental health of farmers, Bradshaw wasn’t holding back. ‘The examples that I’m being sent through are often middle aged farmers concerned about their parent that doesn’t believe they have seven years to plan,’ the NFU president replied, nodding to the exemption from inheritance tax if the estate is gifted more than seven years before death. ‘They don’t have any way to plan through that. And yet they’ve given everything to producing the food for this country in that period, post-Second World War.’
Bradshaw went on soberly:
I am going to talk about the most severe human impacts – which we believe could end up being triggered by this – which is that those people who genuinely are either in ill health or don’t believe that they are going to be able to live for seven years, and may well decide that they shouldn’t be here. Now, no policy should ever be published that has that unintended side effect.
It’s not about the money, the farming union chief concluded. ‘This is a lifetime of work. It’s the heritage… and the custodianship of that farm.’
Hard-hitting stuff. Watch the clip here:
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