To support UK Farmers

[TheHateIsNotGood]

And due to KS's inability to face them in Wales today they are now thinking of going on strike. Because the govt are being too stubborn to reconsider how they apply IHT on working family farms. By all means close the loophole that allows the 'landed gentry' to take advantage of the agricultural exception but not with so blunt an instrument.

I was hoping to add a post to an existing thread but there isn't one despite it being headline news today.

I think that's ok. Due to wanting food security and not wanting to damage farming sector

BBC News - Farmers say they feel 'betrayed' by inheritance tax changes
www.bbc.com/news/articles/czj71zyy934o

A good review on farmers concerns, farm valuations, and the consequences.

Many farmers have huge overdrafts as well as assets.
I don't know if debt is included in the calculations.

From what I remember, it isn't if you claim benefits. £16K in savings, £8000 on credit cards, £4k loan = £16K to them.

calabria5 · Today 07:53
To be honest, it's a bit of a joke that farmers are protesting in London today, of all places

Maybe you should start a counter protest.

Not if it's their main home?

Live now

https://www.youtube.com/live/IHsLSoJO4Ps?si=9vdtv0f_09GlV67l

By the sound of it, it's only a small percentage of farms that will be affected anyway.

I don't think too many people are going to feel sorry for the 'poor' livestock farmers, tbh. I saw one this morning, arguing he is a 'guardian of the land' and 'pastoral England will be changed forever' if he can't pass his farm on. To be honest, I think as people are becoming more aware of the horrific reality of the beef industry, they'd be quite happy to see less cows in fields. It's not 'guardianship' - it's commercial exploitation of life at obscene levels. There is no need for it - it is unsustainable and about as far away from 'natural' as you can get. One day people will look back in horror that it was ever allowed at all. So the children of such farmers, if they are even interested in inheriting these bloody legacies, might be better advised to look at alternative occupations in the interests of a humane and sustainable future. Same for the intensive chicken farmers who throw chicks in mincers and other deplorable practices. Paying IHT should be the least of their worries. I know people will call me a lunatic woke vegan etc etc but I don't care. The reality of too many modern farming practices are deplorable and the faster people wake up to it the better, in my view.

Okay @calabria5 . Your message has been received, several times. I have read it, understand your agenda, and disagree wholeheartedly.

The only bit I agree with you on is the 'lunatic woke vegan'.

First, the mean farm size in the UK is 82 hectares, which is 202 acres. The median (i.e., the number that half of farms are smaller than) is 20 hectares, which is 50 acres. (Source) So even at your price per acre, half of all farms are worth less than £500,000.

Second, the IHT threshold for a family is in practice £3 million, as previously discussed. That buys 300 acres, again at your prices. That's bigger than the mean size and probably somewhere between the 80th and 90th percentile.

Third, whether or not someone makes a full-time living from their farm is surely irrelevant (although it might suggest that amalgamating some of them could be a good idea). And if a farm is too small to make a full-time living then IHT won't be payable anyway.

Perhaps the IHT changes will result in 50–100 families per year having to sell up, realise their very substantial capital, and do something else with their lives. That's perhaps sad for them at an individual level (although having several millions of pounds in cash might cushion the blow somewhat), but it's not some kind of national tragedy, and the fact that a couple of these people have the ear of a friendly Islington-bashing journalist at the Telegraph to whip up sympathy among that part of the population that derides any attempt at equity as "socialism" doesn't make it so.

Likewise. The land was sprayed to kill the grass, then nature moved in. Good agricultural land lost and replaced with field of thuggish weeds.

I agree with this and I think so would most farmers. Apart from anything else all the seeds from the thuggish weeds blow onto their cultivated land.

There’s a couple of fields near to us which haven’t been touched for years and from a distance it looks as if ragwort is growing as a crop - the fields are covered in it.

That's fine @Papyrophile .

Same for the intensive chicken farmers who throw chicks in mincers.

@calabria5 Lots of farmers and country people loathe factory farming. In fact, if Labour wanted to have a go at farmers maybe they should start on that.
You’re a vegan - intensive farming for crops such as avocados aren’t great for the environment either.

This.

The BBC has just fact checked this apparently and it will only apply to about 500 farms.

Why shouldn't the wealthiest contribute? And its still half what the rest of us have to pay.

500 farms a year or 500 farms ever?

"Stupid net zero targets". Hmmmmm. And yet this is the same group of people who set themselves up as "custodians of the land".

I think this is another mess by Labour (I voted for them by the way) similar to the winter fuel allowance debacle.

It seems to me that the general idea itself is correct but the Government hasn't properly worked out the details and threshold at which the tax should be paid.

Just like they failed to put in place a reasonable income threshold where pensioners should no longer receive the winter allowance.

So basically the average farmer who does not make a huge living and is not cash rich enough to pay these taxes will be badly affected rather than just the likes of Jeremy Clarkson.

Labour really needs to do better than this and gets its act together. This is just incredibly sloppy.

That's literally the point of the 2 million pound cap below which a married couple won't pay any IHT. I haven't seen a single proper case study where I didn't think, "yeah, you should be paying IHT, like the rest of us pay taxes." There was some muppet in the Times grumbling about it, and he didn't even know the value of his vast diversified estate because it was in such complicated trusts. If there was just one case study where you didn't think "God, this is embarrassing", the NFU would be plastering it everywhere. And there isn't because anyone grumbling about paying tax at 20% on land valued at over 2million is Taking The Piss. Just think of it as "major land owners forced to pay IHT".

The BBC has just fact checked this apparently and it will only apply to about 500 farms.

The BBC can’t tell the difference between hectares and acres so I’m not sure they’re a reliable source.

It's not a debacle in either case. Rachel Reeves doesn't wake up one morning, go on Google, pick the first number she likes, and base her policies on that. These things are all extensively costed and tested by civil servants who know what they're doing, and the CX or PM chooses from among the imperfect options based on political considerations, which in turn involve questions like what was in the manifesto, what their MPs will accept, what the party will accept, what the voters will accept, and what the country will accept.

For what it's worth, this also applied to policymaking under the Tories (apart from those coming from Nadine Dorries, who turned a 95% "Keep Channel 4 public" poll into "95% want it privatised"🙄). These things are not always perfect, but they aren't arbitrary. Less than 500 farm inheritances a year will be part of estates that exceed the threshold (in a lot of cases the farm will only be part of the inheritance).

Meanwhile the vast majority of pensioners who lose the WFA will be eligible for other benefits — they just have to claim them. At which point the usual suspects in the media roll out "Oh but Granny is too proud to rely on handouts", which might have made a tiny bit of emotional sense in the 1980s for someone born in 1910, but Granny has an iPad and has lived her entire life under the welfare state, and if she wants to get cold instead of filling in a form, that's her lookout. And the small number people who are on the edge of the threshold (there were guaranteed to be a few, whatever the level of that threshold — that's how it works when you govern for 68 million people) are guaranteed to be highlighted by the usual suspects, right next to an article bemoaning the state of funding in the NHS.

Anyone on a full state pension only ie no private pension gets nothing.

That’s a former Labour advisor, so no, it doesn’t make the position of the Labour Party who no longer employ him clear at all. Plus he seems to be talking about how to handle protest, not about dealing with farming per se.

We've got to ride this one out. They're angry enough as the french, Dutch, germans and Canadians are to cause havoc at ports blocking imports, distribution warehouses, supermarkets.

If they work together which they well may do. We'll be drinking black tea/coffee, there'll be no butter, cheese, milk. Meat sources will be scant.

While Rachel Reeves simpers at the wisdom of Bill Gates a computer geek with money and power. It's Joe Blogs who will suffer.

You are one of the 500 affected?

One of the 70,000, yes. It’s not 500 in total. The government has estimated 500 per year. My father in law is 90.

The huge factory farms won’t go on any sort of strike , they will continue producing and food will continue to be imported.

Supermarkets have contracts in place, so farmers will find themselves with hefty penalties, or loosing lucrative contracts. There are plenty of farmers who are not in opposition to the plans, who have seen swathes of agriculture land bought up, as a tax dodge. Driven out of business, not be IHT, but IHT dodgers.