SCOTTISH farmers have vowed “to make Labour listen” as hundreds joined a 10,000-strong march on Westminster to protest Keir Starmer’s tax raid on family farms.
Andrew Connon, the vice president of the National Farmers’ Union Scotland (NFUS), led a contingent of Scottish farmers to a mass demonstration in Whitehall on Tuesday, where they buttonholed Labour MPs and met with Scottish Secretary Ian Murray.
They joined a protest the Metropolitan Police estimated to number 10,000 in central London demanding Labour reverse their plans to impose inheritance tax on farms.
Labour want to remove the agricultural exemption which farmers have enjoyed for decades.
Under the new system, farms will continue to be exempt up to the value of £1 million and the value over that will be taxed.
Labour insist their plans will only affect around 500 farms, figures rubbished by the National Farmers Union, which says that 75% of farms will now face an unexpected tax bill. The union represents 45,000 “farming and growing businesses”.
Connon told The National: “We’ve been here to try and lobby with the MPs, Labour MPs and MSPs, we’ve also had a meeting with the Secretary of State for Scotland Ian Murray and to highlight our huge concerns about this draconian potential taxation.”
He added: “There’s Labour MPs and they’re listening, they have to listen hard, we’re going to make them listen hard.”
“There’s a lot of work to do, this is only the start, we cannot let up on this, there is far to much at stake here.”
The NFUS vice president said he had never “seen or heard emotion and anxiety like I’ve heard the last two or three weeks” from farmers worried about the possibility of paying inheritance tax.
Farmers are warning they will need to break up and sell on farms that have been in their families for generations in order to foot the bill, with Connon (above) branding Labour’s plans a “threat to generations of hard work”.
He added: “Farmers are custodians really, they have the land there, they don’t really realise the money and it passes on. Farmers are asset rich and cash poor, most of them never really see the benefits of it, they pass it to the next generation to continue the business giving their offspring a business to go forward with and down the generations it goes.”
Connon estimated that “several hundred” farmers had travelled from Scotland to London for the protest from all corners of the country, including Orkney, the Highlands, Argyll and Dumfriesshire.
Seamus Logan (below), the SNP MP for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East said Labour must “rethink” the plans. He added: “They don’t seem to understand they are hurting relatively small farmers including tenant farmers who make a huge contribution to the nation’s food security.
“I’m calling on the UK Government to think again and show farmers they understand their plight and their contribution to the nation’s security.”
A rally in Whitehall, just outside Downing Street, drew a crowd of thousands who gathered to hear speeches including from former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson.
Clarkson bought the Diddly Squat farm in the Cotswolds in 2008 and previously said that avoiding inheritance tax was “the critical thing”.
Speaking as he joined the rally, the TV presenter said: “If she’d have wanted to take out the likes of James Dyson and investment bankers and so on, she would have used a sniper’s rifle, but she’s used a blunderbuss and she’s hit all this lot.”
The rally was also attended by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage (above).
Protesters held up signs reading: “Never bite the hand that feeds you”. Another banner read: “Rachel Reaper killing feeders”.
Speaking at a Westminster select committee as protests went on outside, Environment Secretary Steve Reed said farmers’ fears were misplaced.
He said: “The numbers I’ve heard bandied around are enormous and very, very frightening if people were to believe them.”
In response to farmers’ claims that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’s figures said more people would be affected than the Treasury’s estimates, Reed said this was misguided because “ownership is much more complex than one person, one farm”.
