Multi Millionaires Complaining Again

[ARealitycheck]

I see our multi-millionaire landowners had another moan today at a labour party conference. Oh the woes of having to pay half the tax over a period 8 years longer than the rest of the public.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2ljdvqegkeo

Not a good look when the spokesperson is the owner of a farm obviously worth £5m who has been in receipt of circa £90k subsidy money annually in recent years. While standing in front of machinery that is built anywhere but the UK.

Well, when Covid came along every business under the sun was supported, to the tune of hundred of billions of pounds. Which exceeds the total spent on farm subsidies over the the last century. Likewise when the summer riots kicked off businesses could claim compensation through the Riot Compensation Act.

In terms of flooding, there are various compensation schemes for businesses, including farms - the Build Back Better scheme, the Property Flood Resilience Repair Grant Scheme and the Farming Recovery Fund to name a few.

Not every business under the sun

Even younger Mr Archer would be at Harper not Cirencester!!.

Starmers tax ends up either with mega farms, with poor quality, mass production and no care for the land, the animals or the drugs/sprays etc used.
Or lots of executive houses.
Or lots of shitty little farms like France which all need state support
Or horseiculture where there are lots of horses, but we are even more reliant on imported food(which is at odds with increasing defence spending) and increased air miles.
Or lots and lots of waste land.

Believe me, as far as I was concerned the crap show that was covid response is mostly responsible for todays financial problems. The year it happened I had started a new business. Had invested into it. Because it was only circa 6 months old when Covid lockdowns came, I received the sum total of diddly squat.

I managed to find other work to tide me over, but the goverment did sod all that helped me. All the while for two years healthy people sat in their gardens having bbq with their friends.

The mass farming has already happened. Look at how many pigs are kept in in door pens instead of in the fields.

Yes. What continues to annoy me about this thread is the notion that this tax and this alone will be the ruination of the family farm.

Many farms today aren't run as family concerns. Those that are are hanging on by a thread unless they've managed to diversify, oddly enough further away from food production.

The truth is, however much I don't agree with the IHT on family farms, if we really wanted to hang on to the farming industry as it once was, we needed to get upset about a number of other things years ago.

Mass farming is a result of the same root cause which resulted in all mass production. The desire for produce affordable to a greater mass of people. The old hill farmer ekeing out a living from five cows with names like buttercup and blossom was disappearing in the 40s. James Herriot documents it in his books.

What we are left with is the majority of smallholdings being run by middle class monied folks who are in it for the lifestyle change and don't rely on the income, industrial level farming owned by people who have nothing to do with the running of the farm and the poor fourth generation farmer trying to compete. This is the type of farmer having to diversify away from food production.

Absolutely! Let them pay!
Mr Trump will send us his chlorinated chicken and hormonal beef whilst farmland will be covered by wind turbines and soil becomes dust in ten years time.
It's only fair after all.

Insurance companies.

The country is totally in debt mainly because of covid still, the government couldn't have possibly funded EVERYTHING for all that time, sounds like you did ok starting a new business n all :-)

Absolutely! Let them pay!
Mr Trump will send us his chlorinated chicken and hormonal beef whilst farmland will be covered by wind turbines and soil becomes dust in ten years time.
It's only fair after all.

UK winning!

They wont insure after a second incident

I agree entirely that most of the debt we currently have is down to covid response. But all the more reason for the wealthy to pay their share, and as much as some may not agree. A family with an over £3m asset isn't poor.

@TizerorFizz

our bigger issue is millions not working at all

Nail on the head. If more people actually worked and paid taxes/claimed fewer benefits, then tax revenue would rise and we could start affording the public services we need.

We really can't keep having a smaller and smaller proportion of our adult population gainfully employed and paying taxes.

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

Il have to ask the farmer who told me that next time I see her. It’s pretty opaque to the rest of us outside the system, who struggle to find work that pays more than £25k pa while requiring qualifications that cost a lifelong £50k - £75k debt.

Well, I was in exactly the same situation as I had started my own business 6 months earlier when my husband died. I got no support from the government, but had the most amazing summer of 2020 and 2021 in the sunshine, with friends and family, walking, and reflecting on the previous 25 years. So, I actually enjoyed the lockdowns. I went back to work in 2022, then decided to retire for good last year.

Yes, as a country we are lumbered with a huge amount of debt but there wasn’t really an alternative at the time, was there? With hindsight there were things that could have been done differently…but we were in truly unchartered waters.

Yes this :-) in fact most people have actually been able to spin a positive on it, when there's nothing you can do about a certain situation you might as well make the most of it! Well done 😍

I agree.

I believe the initial lockdown was required until we had an idea of what it was we were dealing with. The continued one throughout that summer was incorrect. That was the time to let the healthy gain herd immunity in time for the seasonal winter cold and flu season. The vaccine program was playing catch up constantly.

Our debt is not just from covid!! As if. We have a huge liability for private sector pensions and servicing our debt that has mounted up. We need more people working, not retiring early and running out of money. We want the best services but don’t have enough paying taxes to pay for them. So we borrow. RR is at the borrowing limit, so what now?

The UK's national debt is roughly £2,500 billion. Covid cost roughly £400 billion. So, no, it's not all down to covid. The UK has had an annual deficit virtually every year for the last 20-30 years. It all adds up and gets worse because we have to borrow to pay interest on prior year's borrowings!

Until 2020, even allowing for the GFC, our debt to GDP was 65%, by the time of Covid in 2020, it was over 85%.

Austerity crashed our productivity and its never recovered.

Unemployment is on par with historic averages, we've a problem with sickness levels but the reality is we've millions of people in work but they stay poor, on working benefits, paying little in the way of tax.

Our productivity is a huge reason for our debts and the interest rates we pay now are down to Truss, we were on european interest rate averages before she came along, she trebled them! and they haven't gone down.

Austerity did not crash productivity. Productivity slowed due to the financial crisis. Our debt is 96% of GDP. So we cannot sit back and think taxing farmers is the answer to this. It’s like fiddling while Rome burns.

• What is strangling our economy is high land prices, inequality and the costs of poverty. The BBC says that on current trends If trends in income inequality continue, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The amount the U.K. has to spend on housing is beyond a joke, both of the homeless and to landlords via housing benefit.

Productivity is not going to improve among poor people forced to work long hours for no rewards while this continues.