For Londoners whose only contact with the countryside is the Diddlysquat range of Jeremy Clarkson products in the Amazon grocery store the arrival of lots of tractors in Whitehall today driven by actual farmers must be alarming. I say to them: do not worry — they come in peace; they mean no harm.
They wear wellingtons and weatherproofed jackets habitually; the photogenic girl farmers with lambs (well, teenage sheep) are lovely. And to single young women in the protest area, may I point out that some of these farmers are bachelors from places where the male to female ratio is the opposite of London’s and they’ll probably be hanging around in bars following the demonstration. Just saying.
They’re angry, not with us but with the government on account of the imposition of 20 per cent inheritance tax on farms which were formerly free of it. Minette Batters, the formidable former head of the National Farmers’ Union, the NFU, pointed out today that last year Sir Keir Starmer addressed the farmers to explain that once a family farm is gone, it’s not coming back.
Quite so, Sir Keir. And how, exactly, has that changed since you won the election? The farmers were promised last year by Environment Secretary Steve Reed that there wouldn’t be inheritance tax on farms; those who voted Labour feel like suckers. They join those business owners who were also promised a benign pro-business regime and were unpleasantly surprised by the increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions. Four months into government, and Labour’s broad coalition is looking like a one-term phenomenon.
To those who can’t afford clever accountants, my advice is to make sure that they plan their deaths in advance
There has been some ugly briefing against the farmers from government, chiefly the Treasury. Ministers are insisting that they are not giving way, that only 500 farms a year would be affected, that the tax can be avoided for up to £3 million worth of farmland and anyway half the agricultural land being bought nowadays is by people trying to avoid inheritance tax.
Oh yes? Well, the really big, wealthy farmers will, like most large landowners, employ accountants to ensure that they successfully avoid any disagreeable surprises when one generation dies off. But to those who can’t afford clever accountants, my advice is to make sure that they plan their deaths in advance, because if you are stupid enough to go down with a heart attack rather than handing over the farm to your children seven years before death, they’ll be stuck with paying a fifth of the value of the farm over ten years. And if they don’t have an income to do that – and returns on farming are way smaller than for any other business – they’ll just have to sell land to meet the bill; and as Sir Keir sensibly pointed out, once it’s gone, it’s gone. Further: don’t let the spouse die unexpectedly either because their tax free allowance will go with them.
The Country Land and Business Association points out that an average 200-acre farm with profits of around £27,000 a year (yes…how far would that go in London?) could face a death tax bill of £435,000. Over a decade, according to the CLA, farmers would need to allocate 159 per cent of their profits every year, and each new generation of farmers would have to sell a fifth of their land to meet this new cost. So, after a couple of generations, it’s probably not worth farming at all.
And remember, there are only 209,000 farms in Britain (of which about a third are valued at £1 million or more); there should be many, many more for all sorts of reasons: for environmental protection (they can and are incentivised to farm for biodiversity), for greater (not absolute) food security, for a more balanced urban/rural balance. The Government is picking on a small and ageing cohort: almost 40 per cent, or two in five, farmers are aged 60 or more, and given the poor returns, it’s not surprising.
If the Government really is going ahead with its no-surrender approach, the British farmers may like to take lessons from their French friends
The Government is spinning that it’s not caving in to protests; it’s standing firm against the demonstrators. Really? It took them about a day in government before they conceded the hefty pay demands of consultants, doctors and nurses (which accounted for quite a chunk of its £22 billion black hole); striking works, is the lesson. British farmers are herbivorous compared with their French equivalents. But if the Government really is going ahead with its no-surrender approach, the British farmers may like to take lessons from their French friends. I seem to recall that at one point sheep were released into the French parliament; certainly the yellow vest protests got very ugly indeed. Some farmers collect human waste to spread on their fields (I know, yuk); I feel ministers wouldn’t be entirely happy if it were instead planted outside government buildings.
Does all this affect us in London? No, not directly. But indirectly, we patrons of London’s farmers’ markets do have occasional contact with suppliers of organic veg, (relatively) local meat, non-supermarket free range eggs and raw Guernsey milk (me, I go to the one in Notting Hill). Londoners who can afford it are rather keen on having local producers to provide them with food that they can trust more than the supermarket sort.
To be blunt, I do not trust big supermarkets, even if that makes me sound like Robert Kennedy Jnr. It drives me nuts when I scrutinise the labels on stuff that should be coming from England to find that it’s actually Spanish or Mexican or Kenyan. We should have no illusions that we’ll ever be self sufficient in food, but we can be way more productive than we are now. And if we don’t want the land to be subsumed into the ownership of the big, often intensive producers, we should want family farms to stay in families.
So… greet the arrivals in their tractors with a nice big smile. London may not know much about farmers but we wish them well. Next time, maybe they could bring some actual meat and veg with them and set up a few stalls for us to put our money where our mouths are. But if they’re really, really angry, they may just come back with slurry.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist for The Standard
