Over ten thousand protesters descended upon Whitehall in London on Tuesday over Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s planned tax raids on farmers, which critics warn will threaten the food security of the nation and the way of life for British farmers.
Despite the Metropolitan Police imposing an effective ban on tractors entering London, preventing farmers from staging similar disruptions as have been seen in recent years on continental Europe, the voices of enraged farmers still rung loudly on Tuesday, with the capital’s police force estimating that over 10,000 people attended the demonstration in Whitehall, the BBC reported.
The protest was called in response to the plans by the Labour government to remove the inheritance tax exemption for farms valued over £1 million — £2m for married couples — with those over the threshold facing a 20 per cent death tax.
The protest was joined by former Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson, who has become a folk hero of farmers in Britain and further afield following the success of his TV programme Clarkson’s Farm, which documents the struggles and nobility of the farming industry, urged the Labour government to “please back down”.
Clarkson suggested that the government should instead raise the money by slashing the deep state civil service bureaucracy in White Hall, quipping: “Walk into any offices around here, if you don’t understand what somebody’s job is, fire them.”
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage also joined the protest, describing the rally as “Farmer vs Starmer” and a direct threat against the beauty of the English countryside. Farage acknowledged that in recent years, some very wealthy individuals have bought up farmland to avoid inheritance tax, but he said that is not justification for punishing family farms, many of whom, he noted, have “looked after their land for centuries”.
“The farming industry has been through a very tough time in recent years, net zero, the idea that re-wilding is a good idea, the banning of hunting, solar farms springing up everywhere. [The farmers] feel as though they are devalued, that the urban elite don’t like them very much,” he said.
The Treasury, run by open communist sympathiser Chancellor Rachel Reeves, has claimed that 27 per cent of farms would be impacted by the tax hike, which the government claims is necessary to fund the chronically dysfunctional National Health Service (NHS) and other social welfare programmes.
However, The National Farmers Union (NFU) has rejected this estimate, claiming that up to three in four commercial farm businesses could be impacted.
The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) has suggested that as many as 70,000 farms could be swept up in the tax. The CLA has also calculated that an average 200 acre farm with annual profits of £27,000 could be slapped with a £435,000 inheritance tax bill to the state.
While the government has said that farmers could pay the bill over a ten year period, yet the the CLA said this would equate to around 159 per cent of their profits. Thus, many farmers would have to either break up their farms or sell them outright to pay the tax.
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, who also took part in the demonstration on Tuesday, said that his party will stand with farmers against the government “every step of the way”.
Davey accused the leftist government of failing to “understand how farming works… passing a farm from generation to generation, long term investment, and they don’t seem to understand that the farms may be asset rich but cash poor.”
“They say that they can pay [the inheritance tax] over ten years, well that will be a huge liquidity problem for farmers and so I think this has to stop,” he said.
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