We might finally have discovered a group that the Labour Party loathes more than the white working classes: the men and women who work night and day to produce our food.
This became clear in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s recent autumn budget. She announced that the Labour government intended from April 2026 onwards to impose a 20% inheritance tax on all agricultural assets worth more than £1 million. James Heale of The Spectator reports the Today programme as citing a government brief that describes the farmers descending on Westminster in protest at the move as a “well-organised, self-serving, noisy lobby” that needs to be “stood up to.”
At first glance, it seems very foolish to alienate farmers. Even if the motive is there, why make life harder for the people without whom the superabundance we encounter in butchers and supermarkets would vanish? The answer is that we have on our hands a new kind of class warfare. In this case, it is declared not in the name of the poor against the rich, but against hard-working, conservative-minded folk who toil with their hands and on behalf of a more indolent, pen-pushing managerial class. It helps, of course, that the members of this latter group vote overwhelmingly for Labour and make up much of Britain’s bloated public sector. Thus, while social workers, DEI consultants, and other such bureaucrats get treated like clients, everyone else is viewed as little more than an ATM machine.
In a rare moment of perspicacity, even the Sky News journalist Beth Rigby put the point to Starmer that there is a pattern to the sorts of people he targets for taxation: aspiring, productive individuals who operate away from the state in the freer, less bureaucratic pastures of civil society.
Inheritance tax is objectionable enough in principle, but when levied against farmers it is bound to cause especially grim second-order effects. Even farming families who succeed in weathering Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s attack on their livelihoods will be forced to pass on costs to the consumer, resulting in higher prices for staple foodstuffs.
Labour’s get-out has so far been to insist that the measure is meant only to target rich, ‘tax-dodging’ farmers. This claim is bolstered by the number-crunchers at the Treasury. They argue that, since there were just 462 inherited farms valued at over £1 million in 2021-22, it is reasonable to suppose that the number of farmers affected by the new tax will be somewhere in the region of 500 per year. Surely such a tiny number of farmers must be inordinately rich if they qualify?
The problem is that Reeves’s underlings have crunched the numbers in a very particular, self-serving way. After all, the National Farmers Union (NFU) and the Country Land and Business Association warn that as many as 70,000 farms will be affected by the move. They do so on the basis of calculations, verified not only by the BBC but also by the government’s own Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), that around 30-35% of British farms are worth over £1 million. With a total of 209,000 farm holdings in the nation as a whole, that yields a figure of around 70,000.
Whether they are hit this year or the next does not change the fact that diligent farmers who care for their posterity must now live in the shadow of a looming tax bill—one that, given the considerable number of those in agriculture who are asset-rich but cash-poor, is likely to put many of the people producing our food out of business. This tawdry government is simply hoping to distract us with their 500-per-year figure.
All this low-ball estimate reflects is the happy fact that, short of an apocalyptic scenario, not all of these 70,000 farmers with assets valued at over £1 million are going to die in a single year. It is a dim-witted tautology to point out that only the dead will be affected by a tax that punishes death. Since we all die in the end, the real story is that a great many more than 500 farmers, a profession with the same rates of mortality as any other, will be fleeced by the state eventually, if not today.
As ever, the pretext given by the government is the need to fill the “black hole” in the public finances. Even if we grant this, is it really in the national interest for the state to shake down our farmers for this money?
Leaving aside the £3 billion this government spends each year putting up illegal immigrants in hotels at our expense, according to a Conservative Way Forward report public sector bodies have long wasted up to £212 million of tax money enlisting the services of DEI tsars across all kinds of institutions, from the NHS to Warwickshire County Council.
The same report found that £880 million of public money has been injected into the coffers of ‘charities’ that push open borders, trans ideology, and climate alarmism. Overall, it was estimated that “over £7 billion worth of savings … are to be had by the British taxpayer if the government [a Conservative one when the report was released] stops funding the politically motivated campaigns that are dividing us and making us poorer.”
As should be plain, it is not the people who feed us so much as the mandarins paid to indoctrinate us who are bleeding Britain dry. It is due to political ideology, not fiscal necessity, that Starmer has chosen to raid farmers instead of the woke bureaucrats who profit from this taxpayer-funded patronage system that the Tories, lest we forget, failed to dismantle while in office.
The situation becomes even more absurd when we consider that the Treasury itself expects the new inheritance tax to raise little more than £500 million per year by the end of the decade. Put in perspective, that is the equivalent of 25 hours’ worth of NHS spending.
Moreover, the new measure is likely to do profound damage to the integrity of the countryside. Families too poor to foot a six-figure tax bill upon the death of a loved one may have no choice but to sell the lot—and there can be little doubt that all manner of vultures, from global conglomerates to tasteless property developers, are already swirling around these rural homes in the hope of taking advantage.
As Lord (Andrew) Lloyd-Webber, protesting in solidarity with farmers, told Bev Turner of GB News, “They [farms] will all be bought by foreigners, outsiders, people who are not buying it for the love of the countryside.”
Jeremy Clarkson, the undoubted star of this farmers’ revolt, has been even more defiant, accusing the Labour government of “ethnically cleans[ing]” the countryside so that they can build “new immigrant towns” on the “carpet-bombed” farmland. It is not a coincidence that the Labour-run Welsh government regards its own rural communities as too white and in need of a curative ‘anti-racist’ onslaught.
Starmer’s war on farmers is one of the more blatant examples of a weak leader allowing the worst of client politics to trump the common good of the nation. The commentator Matt Goodwin gives a crisp summary of what this approach to politics involves, writing that
“Labour’s tribe does not include farmers getting up before dawn to feed their flock and sow their seeds. Labour, instead, is a public sector party that’s now driven by urban left progressives who either don’t care about the great British countryside or don’t understand it.”
No political community is immune to tribalism. Since complex societies contain a variety of interest groups, it is unsurprising that these differences should make themselves known in politics—whether in fights between city-dwellers and rural folk or rivalries between the public and the private sector.
Far from exploiting these divisions or deliberately expanding the size of one’s own client group, it takes a mixture of courageous leadership and genuine patriotism to ensure that the focus of politics remains the flourishing of the country as a whole. Alas, Keir Starmer and the globally-minded managerial types for whom he works know nothing of either virtue.
