Letters

Letter from Mark Langabeer, Hastings and Rye Labour member.

Reportedly around 10,000 farmers went to Westminster to protest about Inheritance Tax being applied to farming land for the first time. Their representatives from the National Farmers Union, claim that the tax will decimate British Farming and threaten Britain’s future ‘food security’.

Some farmers are even calling for strike action but at present, the NFU are seeking talks with the Government, rather than supporting some form of action. The NFU claim that two thirds of farmers are affected by the tax, but the government puts the number at just over a quarter.

The tax is only payable on farms worth over a million pound (two million if owned by a couple), and even then it applies at 20 per cent, half of inheritance tax on other properties. As the Independent explained, “The allowance comes on top of the £500,000 a typical homeowner gets if they leave their home to their children or grandchildren, so a married couple can shelter up to £3m from HMRC, a sum which will exclude most farms”.

In other words, because for most farmers – as couples –  the tax exemption is £3 million, it only affects a small minority of farmers. That hasn’t stopped the Tories and their kept press from pretending the facts are different – when have they ever let the facts stand in the way of a good story? The likes of Jeremy Clarkson, and his Tory friends, are exploiting the genuine grievances of small farmers for their own anti-Labour interests. Don’t be fooled by these snake-oil salesmen.

Smaller farmers do have legitimate grievances, but they are nothing to do with Inheritance Tax. The  number of farms has fallen in recent times, as they have been squeezed by the big supermarket chains and have suffered from reduced subsidies after Brexit. Many have been driven out by the larger farming corporations. There has been an increase in the value of land, pricing younger, aspiring farmers out of the industry, and part of the reason for this is that many wealthy people bought farmland in the past, just to avoid inheritance tax!

The big majority of ordinary workers support the principle of a tax on inheritance. Why should birth mean a life of luxury for some, while others start life in poverty? The best way that Labour could help small farmers, so that they could earn a reasonable income, would be to break the power and the ownership of the relatively small number of big companies, organisations and super-rich individuals who dominate the ownership of land. There is no justification in this day and age for so much land to belong to Royalty, the Church and to posh universities. Land should be a national, state-owned asset, so farmland could be leased at reasonable rates to small farmers so they can make a good living.