By Tom Costello
News has been dominated in recent months by farmers’ protests in Westminster, which have challenged the government’s new changes to inheritance tax. Labour’s proposed reform, which from April 2025 would mean the introduction of inheritance tax on land worth more than £1 million, has been presented by the government as a matter of asking those with the ‘broadest shoulders’ to pay up. They have also pointed to the exemption which still applies to farms with land value below the £1 million threshold.
The main tone on these marches has clearly been set by the right. Kemi Badenoch has used the issue to try and claw back credibility for the Tories. Meanwhile the well- known stockbroker Farage has donned green wellies and a tweed jacket to play farmer for the day, marshalling his five wretched Reform MPs onto the marches.
Many of the figures leading these marches are right-wing millionaires who want to keep exploiting loopholes which allow them to keep hold of their obscene wealth. Another grifter cosplaying as a ‘farmer’, the TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson, has used his profile on the protests to spout his anti-net zero, climate denying politics.
Nobody should have any sympathy with these ultra-rich opportunists, who only see in the marches a chance to pass on enormous landed estates to family members without paying a penny in inheritance tax. However, mixed in with this are the genuine grievances and fears of smaller farmers, many of whom face an uncertain future. For some farmers, while they might be labelled ‘millionaires’, this is often only the case on paper. For many, their official wealth is solely in the land they own. As the saying goes, these smaller farmers remain ‘asset rich, but cash poor’.
While many small farmers have been attracted to these protests, in reality, there is a fundamental difference between their interests and those of the big landowners and agribusiness giants. It is the big landlords who routinely buy up land not simply for tax purposes, but as a form of speculation – acquiring it with the intention of hiking up prices. This in turn often has devastating effects on many tenant farmers, making them pay exorbitant rents on top of the massive debts. Many smaller farmers are victims of capitalism.
So rather than dismissing rural communities as being full of hopeless right-wingers, the workers’ movement and left should instead make a class appeal to the small, tenant farmers and rural workers. Unions should use their resources to recruit and organise agricultural labourers, many of whom are migrant workers on infamously poor wages. The cost of transition towards net zero must not sit on the shoulders of ordinary people, and we should instead target the polluting agribusiness giants and their class interests.
A socialist government would seize hold of the giant estates which dominate at least half of all rural land, along with the banks and supermarkets, bringing them into democratic public ownership. Rather than charging exorbitant prices for profit, it would institute a socialist plan for agriculture, allowing for an improvement in the livelihood of small farmers and workers, while tackling the climate crisis created by the capitalist elite.
