The Land and the Taxman 

The land does not change. It is the same earth that fed our grandfathers and will feed our grandsons – if we let it. But now the taxman comes, and with him, trouble.

Rachel Reeves has decided that farmers must pay more. Inheritance tax relief on agricultural land must be capped. This is not just numbers on paper. It is a boot on the neck of men, women and children who work the soil. A farm that has been in a family for generations may now have to be sold – not because the son does not want it, but because the government has made it impossible to keep.

Farming is not like other businesses. A man may own five hundred acres and still be poor. The land is worth millions on paper, but the wheat sells for pennies. The margins are thin. The work does not stop. Cows do not care if it is Sunday. Wheat does not wait for the rain to pass. The government does not understand this. Or perhaps it understands too well.

Jeremy Clarkson called Reeves an idiot. It was a blunt thing to say, but sometimes bluntness is needed. The National Farmers’ Union is quieter, but their message is the same: this will break the next generation. A farm passed down is not just property. It is a way of life. Strip that away, and what is left?

Environment Secretary Steve Reed (from the memorable green fields of Croydon) says farmers must “do more with less.” It is the kind of thing a man says when he has never worked a field in his life. Less land. Less money. Less future. It is the slow death of a thing that has lasted centuries.

History has seen this before. The Soviets called it “collectivisation.” They took the land from the kulaks – the men who knew how to work it – and gave it to the state. The state did not know how to work it. The people went hungry. The land died. People died.

This Labour government is bitter but they’re not the Soviets, not yet. They will not send soldiers to seize the farms (the soldiers would not obey them if they dared send them). But the result may be the same. If a man cannot pass his land to his son, someone else will buy it. That someone will not be another farmer. It will be a corporation. A developer. A speculator. The fields will become solar parks. The pastures will become housing estates. The villages will become museums.

There is another way. After Mao, the Chinese let farmers keep small plots of their own. The land flourished. Men work hardest for what is theirs. This is not ideology. It is fact. Small farms do have a place in Britain, they are at the heart of the British Countryside. They are loved. They are respected. And they are increasingly locally supported because their produce trumps the plastic that pile-high-sell-low supermarkets tend to stock.

The farmers will fight. They must. Some are. Some march. Some write letters and post tweets. The quieter farmers will simply work harder, longer, with less – until they cannot. So far the fight has been civil and gentlemanly, as farmers are. But even a pin-striped gentleman can snap and find another use for his umbrella.

The fight is there for the farmers to win and they hold many cards.

But this is not just their fight.

If the farms go, the food goes. If the food goes, the country goes. It is that simple.

The land does not change. But men do. And not always for the better.

Stand with the farmers. While there is still time.

Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024).

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