Thousands of farmers gathered in central London on Tuesday in the biggest show of opposition to a policy announced by Britain’s center-left Labour government since it won power in July.
Angry at inheritance taxation changes outlined in last month’s budget by the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, protesters carried placards reading “No farmers no food,” while a procession of tractors drove past Parliament, voicing a broader sense of grievance among some of those who live in the countryside who accuse successive governments of betraying their interests.
The change under Ms. Reeves’s plan applies to people who inherit agricultural assets worth more than a million pounds, about $1.3 million. They were previously exempt from inheritance tax, but will have to pay it at 20 percent — half the standard rate — from April 2026.
The tax would be payable in installments over 10 years interest free, and would still exclude many estates worth less than £3 million because of various allowances, including for married couples. Government figures suggest that 73 percent of farms would be unaffected.
But critics say that the end of the exemption will lead to some families having to sell farms rather than passing them on to the next generation. The protest against what some call the “tractor tax” follows a demonstration in Wales where Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke last week.
Britain’s farmers tend to be less disruptive when protesting than some of their counterparts in continental Europe. However, Tuesday’s demonstration has some echoes of one held in 2002, when a previous Labour government was in power and hundreds of thousands of people gathered in London to protest plans to ban fox hunting with dogs.
“I think the industry is feeling betrayed, feeling angry,” Tom Bradshaw, president of the National Farmers’ Union, told Sky News, adding that “the human impact of this is simply not acceptable.”
In an earlier statement, he said that the inheritance tax change “not only threatens family farms but will also make producing food more expensive.”
Less diplomatic was a television personality, Jeremy Clarkson, who has made a series of shows about life on his farm in Oxfordshire. In an opinion article in the tabloid newspaper The Sun, he bizarrely suggested that the government wanted “to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers,” writing: “I’m becoming more and more convinced that Starmer and Reeves have a sinister plan. They want to carpet bomb our farmland with new towns for immigrants and net zero wind farms.”
Critics say that Mr. Clarkson is an example of how the exemption has incentivized some wealthy individuals to buy farmland in recent years, driving up land prices. In 2021 he told The Times of London in an interview that the main reason he purchased his land — from a local farmer who had to sell up after the 2008 financial crisis — was because it was exempt from inheritance tax. “That’s the critical thing,” he said.
Experts say that farmers will still receive preferential treatment compared with other people inheriting assets in Britain and that the total number of farms likely to be impacted each year is around 500 or less.
“What the budget did was reduce the amount of additional relief that farmers get on agricultural land,” said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a research institute. “It still means they’ll be significantly more generously treated than the rest of us — and still more generously treated, actually, than farms used to be in decades past.”
In a statement, Ms. Reeves and the cabinet minister responsible for agriculture, Steve Reed, described farmers as “the backbone of Britain,” adding that they “recognize the strength of feeling expressed by farming and rural communities in recent weeks.”
But they said that “with public services crumbling and a £22 billion fiscal hole that this government inherited, we have taken difficult decisions,” and that the changes would mean 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.”
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