Matt Goodwin, Substacks, 19 November 1024
What today’s farmers’ protest is REALLY about
Today, as you read this, somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 farmers are descending on the streets of London to protest against new taxes being imposed on Britain’s family farms —which will force many out of business. It will be the biggest protest against Keir Starmer’s Labour government since it came to power in July.
And I will be standing alongside them.
Why?
Because our nation’s farmers have every reason to feel deeply angry and upset. Not only will because of how Labour’s outrageous and idiotic policy will impose a new inheritance tax of 20% on agricultural assets worth more than £1 million, which were previously exempt, but because of how the Labour government and the British state have been launching a much bigger war against our rural communities, farms, and the countryside, all of which have long been central to our national identity.
One person who let the cat out the bag is former Labour Party advisor John McTernan, the man who ten years ago dismissed Britain’s pro-Brexit voters as “the lumpen mass with their half-formed thoughts and fully-formed prejudices”.
This time around McTernan decided to take aim at Britain’s farmers, using a television debate to say out loud what Labour presumably want to keep private.
“We can do to the farmers what Thatcher did to the miners”, said McTernan. “It’s an industry we could do without. We don’t need small farmers.”
Keir Starmer and his already deeply unpopular Labour government can try and distance themselves from the comments all they want. But we know this is what the Labour Party and its urban radical progressive activists genuinely think.
Just look around.
The pages of the Guardian are filled with accusations that farmers are little more than tax dodgers, rather than people who put food on British tables for thousands of years.
During similar protests earlier this year, which swept across not only Britain but much of Europe, the left-leaning media class likewise fell over itself trying to dismiss and deride farmers as conspiracy theorists and “far-right extremists” —a term that’s now applied to pretty much everybody who challenges the elite consensus.
And look too at the relentless attacks on celebrity Jeremy Clarkson, who in recent years has done more than most to highlight the barriers facing our nation’s farmers —the mundane, endless struggle of regulations, taxes, and energy costs.
Politics is tribal, and the simple fact is that Labour’s tribe does not include farmers getting up at 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.
Instead, they clearly just see farmers as a source of tax revenue, whose money should be spent on Labour’s pet projects —out-of-work benefits, pay rises for public sector workers, and providing endless welfare, healthcare, mobile phones, cash cards, and more to the rapidly rising number of asylum seekers and illegal migrants.
Consider just a few numbers.
Keir Starmer’s Labour government just took winter fuel payments off Britain’s pensioners to save £1.5 billion and is now smashing tens of thousands of family farms up and down the country with higher taxes to raise £520 million by the time of the next election while spending £17 billion on giving asylum to tens of thousands of people who should be deported out of Britain.
Am I being deliberately provocative? Perhaps. But these numbers also reflect specific political choices. And Keir Starmer’s choice is clear for all to see —he chooses asylum-seekers and illegal migrants over Britain’s pensioners and family farms.
What the new tax on farming also shows is that Labour simply doesn’t understand the difference between a farm having valuable assets, and a farm having tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds available to pay the new death tax.
£1 million will buy a farm of roughly 100 acres, give or take. The average size of a farm in Britain is over 200 acres, according to official data. What this means is that only the smallest, least productive farms will avoid this tax, while the family farms that are drawn into it will be sent huge tax bills which they won’t have the cash to pay.
Civil servants in the Treasury suggested this policy before. But some Tory ministers saw sense and realised the £1 million threshold was simply too low and would kill off too many medium-sized family farms, the bedrock of our countryside.
Starmer’s Labour government, in contrast, hasn’t seen sense. Instead, Labour’s decision-makers, most of whom congregate in north London, clearly seem to believe that farmers “hoard” land for their own enrichment, prompting Elon Musk, yesterday, to compare Keir Starmer’s new policy to Joseph Stalin’s approach to farming.
Labour either do not realise that while a farm can be a valuable asset on paper the farming family do not have the cash to pay a death tax, or they don’t care.
Clearly, what they want to see are family farms being forced to sell up or broken into smaller plots so they can pay the tax bill, which in turn will accelerate the privatisation and large corporate takeover of the British countryside.
They don’t care if farms, which in many cases have been passed down from one generation to the next over centuries, are smashed apart. They want the revenue today and think the countryside is fair game.
Labour Ministers even say this is all well and good because farmers will benefit from government grants to plant trees and protect peat bogs. One Labour Minister even went on Times Radio to say farmers will get to enjoy better public services so that makes up for them selling a farm that has been in their family for generations!
So, yes, farmers have every right to feel angry. And it’s not just this tax; what they’ve been facing in recent years from Labour and the British state more widely is nothing short of a full-on war against the countryside and rural communities.
It began in 2004.
Never forget that Tony Blair’s Labour Government deployed riot police to attack the hundreds of thousands of people who joined the Countryside Alliance’s “Liberty and Livelihood” march, to register their concerns about how rural ways of life were being undermined and thrown aside by an urban and out-of-touch political elite.
And now, today, we can see this all around us.
It’s not only reflected in the draconian new taxes but in a cultural, media, and political class that is openly hostile toward the British countryside and rural communities.
The BBC’s “Countryfile” television show runs episodes about how the countryside, we are told, is racist, and how farmers are destroying the planet.
The National Trust has got in on the act, running projects to get hikers from the “global majority” (read: non-white people) into the countryside.
This is an openly anti-White term, drawn from Critical Race Theory, which is now going mainstream in our government departments, schools, universities, and legacy media corporations, like the BBC.
It is rooted in a theory which wants to repudiate or ‘deconstruct’ all of the things that make us who we are —our shared history, our shared identity, our shared values, our shared ways of life, and the symbols of these things, like the countryside.
Recently, in a debate with the BBC’s Nick Robinson, I even found myself in the bizarre position of being told that none of this is happening, that there is no attempt by the elite class to reframe the countryside as “racist”, when, very clearly, there is.
Urban elites are now so absorbed in radical theories like Critical Race Theory and the culture of repudiation that they no longer even recognise these things when they’re unfolding and influencing the national debate before their very eyes.
At the same time, rural communities are having to watch global corporations, like airlines, as well as investment funds and property developers, buy up large swathes of the countryside, kicking out people who have worked the land for years to grow forests for carbon offsetting. Seriously —this is actually happening.
The Labour-run Welsh Government is the worst offender here. They’re waging war on the Welsh countryside and the Welsh people who live there and work on the land.
They’ve been buying farmland to turn into wilderness to get to Net Zero. They want to change rural life and farming practices to deliver their “anti-racist Wales action plan”.
No wonder farmers turned out en masse to protest Welsh Labour’s conference. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was forced to escape out the back door. Really.
This is what the British people pay their taxes for today. Government propaganda attacking them as “racist” and backwards. And now a new inheritance tax on farms, which is the most potent symbol of this all-out war on the British countryside.
There is a solution, of course.
As Rupert Lowe, the Reform UK MP for Great Yarmouth said: “I don’t think farmers should have to pay inheritance tax, I don’t think family businesses should have to pay inheritance tax. In fact, I don’t think anyone should have to pay inheritance tax – it’s snatching already taxed money from the dead. Scrap the lot.”
Inheritance tax is the most despised tax of all. It hangs over the heads of countless families, levied at a time of great sadness. As a country, because of political choices taken by both Left and Right, we are now spending billions funding accommodation for fake asylum seekers, have a spiralling benefits bill which is supporting millions of people who are out-of-work, and throwing billions more at a public sector that remains unreformed, inefficient and unproductive.
So why, for once, don’t we start making better political choices in this country, such as by dumping this new tax, saying goodbye to inheritance tax forever, and making it clear that crucial symbols of our national identity —like our family farms, rural communities, and the countryside—remain firmly off limits. Who’s with me?
Other
Politics LIVE: Furious farmers descend on Westminster as Reeves claims ‘demented’ inheritance tax raid will fund NHS
Rachel Reeves has claimed her inheritance tax raid on farmers will fund the NHS ahead of planned protests in London today.
The Chancellor, who ended agricultural death duty exemptions in her maiden Budget last month, dug her heels in as ex-Top Gear star Jeremy Clarkson prepares to join farmers demonstrating against the move.
She will now force farms worth more than £1million to face a 20 per cent inheritance tax levy.
Reeves, who is under fire over the accuracy of her seemingly coveted CV, said that Sir Keir Starmer’s Government had “taken difficult decisions” to fill funding gaps.
Environment Secretary Steve Reed added: “The reforms to agricultural property relief ensure that wealthier estates and the most valuable farms pay their fair share to invest in our schools and health services that farmers and families in rural communities rely on.”
Despite Labour defending the policy, the National Farmers’ Union has 1,800 members registered to lobby their local MPs in person in Westminster, while a separate protest has 15,000 people registered to attend a rally at Richmond Terrace.
Speaking just hours before today’s protest, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “Good luck to everyone protesting today against Labour’s demented family farm tax.
“Farmers work all hours and all year round to feed this country. We should be doing more to champion British food and keep our farmers on the land.
“Instead Reeves is clobbering British agriculture with a tax that is spiteful and punitive and economically disastrous. End it now.”
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