Britain’s main broadcaster has echoed the Labour government’s disputed claim that just hundreds—rather than tens of thousands—of family farms will be hit by inheritance tax reforms, prompting furious claims of bias.
BBC ‘Verify,’ a fact-checking service regularly bashed over its “record of failure,” yesterday claimed the National Farmers’ Union’s view that this new levy will impact up to 70,000 farms is “almost certainly an overestimate,” adding that the “true share of farms affected going forward is likely to be much closer to the Treasury estimates.”
But campaigners say the government relied on phoney figures while drafting this so-called “tractor tax,” which will do a great amount of damage to farmers across the country. Tory MP Stuart Andrew complained that “the government is refusing to say how many family farms are subject to their tax raid, only offering partial and out-of-date statistics which fail to account for the full scale of their reforms.”
The taxpayers pay for the BBC to be independent and free from bias, not for them to regurgitate Labour lines. This matter should be immediately looked into and corrected.”
The Verify unit, which boasts a team of 60 investigative journalists, has been forced to correct an error in one of its fact-checking articles after it confused hectares for acres.
BBC journalist Victoria Derbyshire also did her best to focus on personality rather than politics in a much-criticised interview with TV personality-turned-farmer Jeremy Clarkson during yesterday’s protest outside Parliament.
Migration Watch’s Mike Jones highlighted online that the BBC “never uses this line of questioning with BLM protesters or the array of environmental activists.”
BBC Radio 2 presenter Jeremy Vine then designated much of his show on Wednesday to a discussion on whether Clarkson was a good representative of the farmer movement, rather than on the far more important issue of how the tax will impact Britain’s food security.
It is no surprise, then, that Clarkson received the warm reception he did when he asked at the London demonstration: “Since when was the BBC the mouthpiece of this infernal government?”
While France now looks set to vote against the treaty between the EU and the South American Mercosur bloc following fresh protests by farmers, Starmer says he would stand by the budget which saw this levy imposed on farmers “all day long.” In order to keep up the pressure, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has urged farmers to protest not just in London but “in market towns all across the country, especially in ones that have small Labour majorities.”
