Historians may already be pinching themselves in disbelief. It is looking as though Starmer’s government may be being pitched into a full-scale crisis by picking on… millionaire farmers. It turns out that outside North London the country is not as driven by spite and envy as Rachel Reeves appears to think. And the stereotype of a farmer as a rich git in a Range Rover is rapidly being debunked as a succession of authentic yokels who are asset rich but cash poor appear on our screens. They thought they were going after Sir James Dyson and have found themselves facing people like Gareth Wyn Jones. The Welsh farmer, who would not have looked out of place on a 1980s picket line, led the tractor protest outside the Welsh Labour Party conference in Llandudno, causing the Prime Minister to apparently leave by the back entrance, as Wyn Jones said, ‘Scuttling away like a rat. Not man enough to come out and face the people.’
A tax on farmers clobbers everyone
Does it have the potential to turn into a full French-style revolt? Yes, I think it might. First, this is existential for many farmers, and they will go to any lengths to stop their farms being broken up when they die. Government ministers have been believing their own propaganda, fed to them by Treasury spin doctors. They have been repeating the mantra that this only affects very few farmers and that there is a threshold of up to £3 million. But that simply isn’t true. Even Defra acknowledges that two-thirds of farms could be affected. And the £3 million figure only applies to farms already owned jointly by married couples, the small print explicitly rules out spousal transfers to minimise the tax. It’s also the case that on a small dairy farm the livestock, plant and machinery may be worth getting on £1 million on its own – the loss of BPR on business assets means that every acre is probably now above the £1 million threshold.
So this affects a lot of farmers and the government’s other messaging about transfers under the seven-year rule is also not as easy as it sounds. The average age of those actually owning the land could be 60-plus. Many are unable to get affordable life insurance to cover the transfer. Those most affected are typically 40-year-old farmers where 75-year-old dad still helps with milking and still owns the farm, because under the old regime there was no need to hand it over. They know they will have to sell up when the old man dies.
Secondly, we farmers have the means at our disposal to inflict real damage on the government. This has come at the start of the quiet time on British farms when arable farmers can’t get on the land until spring and livestock farmers have no calving or lambing to worry about and many dairy cows are being dried off. There is time to cause mischief and if this week’s negotiations between the government and the NFU fail to achieve any meaningful changes to the Budget there could be a serious revolt. There are already plans to boycott the disposal of sewage cake on British farms. That will cause a problem for the water companies and may lead to the government having to step in to deal with mountains of excrement. And the food supply may be disrupted. Grain and potatoes sitting in farm stores may be held back, causing economic damage to breweries, millers and chip factories. If the handful of ports that process our food imports are blockaded simultaneously, the shelves could soon be bare again, as they were under Covid, hastened by panic buying. And of course it would be very easy to bring motorways to a standstill if we wanted. Other sectors may come out in support. It isn’t just farmers being hit by the loss of IHT reliefs in the budget – hauliers may join blockages. And if family funeral directors stopped burying the dead we would be heading towards another winter of discontent.
Thirdly, the farmers have much broader support than anyone would ever have imagined. Starmer was possibly hoping to drive a wedge between landowners and tenant farmers but the Tenant Farmers’ Association has been one of the most vociferous opponents of the family farm tax as it will lead to tenanted farms being sold off and less land being let. Many see this as crony capitalism rather than socialism – a naked attempt to restructure British agriculture away from family farms and towards global corporates and feel that farmers are right to make a stand.
And the whole rural economy can understand that a tax on farmers clobbers everyone. I am now hit with an annual cost of life insurance of tens of thousands to cover the transfer to my son. That money will have to be found from our maintenance budget, as it is the only thing I can cut. So the builders, fencing and drainage contractors, tree surgeons, hedge layers and drystone wallers will lose out. It will cost the equivalent of at least one full-time job on this farm alone. Country people can see that the family farm tax is going to cause money to be sucked out of the rural economy and into the pockets of lawyers, accountants and life insurance companies. Coming on top of the reduction in subsidies, it will tip the rural economy into recession. So much for Labour’s growth agenda.
When even the left-dominated Scottish parliament has voted strongly against the family farm tax, Starmer and Reeves must surely think again. If they do not. they have the precedent of Mark Rutte’s government to ponder. He forced unpopular net zero policies on Dutch farmers. The farmers took to the highways in their tractors and the public sided with the farmers. Rutte is out and the BBB, or Farmer-Citizen party, is now part of the ruling coalition in the Netherlands. Starmer may have picked a fight with the wrong people.
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