Clarkson and Kirstie are wrong about farmers

You might have expected this kind of Labour-bashing stuff from two personalities with strong Tory links. Allsopp was an advisor on housing to David Cameron though says she has not openly backed the Conservatives “for years”; Clarkson has regularly attacked the party in his Sun column.

And neither are likely to feel the pinch from this extension of taxation to agriculture. She is the daughter of a Baron who ran the auction house Christie’s and is said to be worth £16 million in her own right; former public schoolboy Clarkson’s fortune is estimated at £55 million. Nevertheless, last May, he wrote in the Times that one reason for buying his Diddly Squat farm was that “Land is a better investment than any bank can offer. The government doesn’t get any of my money when I die. And the price of the food that I grow can only go up.”

But of course, they are entitled to their opinions – and these are opinions shared by many farmers. Steve Ridsdale, head of the British Farming Union, told the Daily Mail that Reeves’s changes “will decimate the industry”. Tom Bradshaw of the larger National Farmers’ Union said: “This Budget not only threatens family farms but will also make producing food more expensive.”

So, what exactly is making them so angry – and is the anger actually justified? Up until now agricultural land and buildings were exempt from inheritance tax. This was a huge tax break for the farming industry, which inevitably led to distortions in the running of the economy and the levels of taxation for no very good reason. 

Millionaires with absolutely no interest in farming have been buying up farmland just so when they die their estate will pay far less inheritance tax. Some are not the least bit interested in running farms, feeding people, protecting the countryside or improving food security; it is a tax scam pure and simple. And in doing so, they are forcing up the price of farmland by outbidding those who actually want to own and run a farm.

Tim Jelfs, deputy chairman of the National Farmers Union in Dorset, told the BBC: “This loophole is there where we have lots of city money coming in particularly in Dorset… buying big acreage of land, driving the price of land up to unsustainable figures.”

Why should farmers be exempt from a tax on inherited wealth in the first place? As Paul Johnson, head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has made clear there is no justification for excluding a large sector of the economy from inheritance tax.

“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,” he said. “The changes will affect actually a remarkably small number of some of the most valuable farms. The majority will still not be affected by this.”

Turn on the TV or radio in recent days and you will have heard farmers screaming blue murder that Reeves will destroy the industry and make it impossible for them to pass on the farm to their children. 

The first claim is dubious as lower demand from tax dodgers and more land for sale will, as any GCSE economics student could tell you, bring down the price of land. Which should encourage those who want to get into farming to do so. 

True it will make it more difficult for farmers to pass on their farms to their children – but why have we been encouraging this? I would love to leave my house and pension to my relatives tax-free, but that is never going to happen. I am quite rightly taxed on my unearned property wealth and so too should farmers. 

If there was a national interest in sons or daughters of farmers staying on the same farm for generation after generation, then that might just about justify the tax break the agricultural industry has enjoyed for decades. But there isn’t. 

Don’t right wingers like Clarkson and Allsopp believe in more competition, the merging of smaller firms into larger more efficient ones, new entries into the market to improve supply and bring down prices. Don’t they think that the free market should decide and that like nature, free enterprise is red in tooth and claw?

Apparently, they do for every other sector of the economy, but not for Tory-voting farmers. Not for Tory-voting farmers who already get billions of pounds of taxpayers money every year to subsidise their businesses and their lifestyle, but also seem to think they have a God-given right to hand their business over to their children tax free. 

Of course you feel sympathy for some of the smaller farmers for whom the goalposts have shifted. But only around a quarter of them will be affected by Reeves’s changes. There is no economic justification for better-off farmers avoiding some of the pain we will all feel as the Tories’ black hole gets filled in.

Doubtless Jeremy and Kirsty will be leading the tweed clad tractor drivers as they bring our cities to a standstill in an effort to keep their huge tax breaks. All the while claiming that the “urban elite” don’t understand their country ways and their vital contribution to our way of life. 

I have news for them, we do understand. The rest of us cannot subsidise all farmers with our money forever. A small part of our largesse has quite rightly been removed as it was a pointless and damaging tax break which cost a fortune. As they say nearly say in the countryside, it’s time we all mucked in.