UK farmers plan to protest at Parliament over a tax hike they say will ruin family farms

[November 19, 2024]  By JILL LAWLESS

LONDON (AP) — With banners, bullhorns, toy tractors and an angry message, British farmers are descending on Parliament on Tuesday to protest a hike in inheritance tax that they say will deal a “hammer blow” to struggling family farms.

U.K. farmers are rarely as militant as their European neighbors, and Britain has not seen large-scale protests like those that have snarled cities in France and other European countries. Now, though, farmers say they will step up their action if the government doesn’t listen.

“Everyone’s mad,” said Olly Harrison, co-organizer of a protest that aims to flood the street outside Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office with farmers. He said many famers “want to take to the streets and block roads and go full French.”

Organizers have urged protesters not to bring farm machinery into central London on Tuesday. Instead, children on toy tractors will lead a march around Parliament Square after a rally addressed by speakers including former “Top Gear” TV host and celebrity farmer Jeremy Clarkson. Another 1,800 farmers plan to hold a “mass lobby” of lawmakers nearby, organized by the National Farmers’ Union.

Volatile weather exacerbated by climate change, global instability and the upheaval caused by Britain’s 2020 departure from the European Union have all added to the burden on U.K. farmers. Many feel the Labour Party government’s tax change, part of an effort to raise billions of pounds to fund public services, is the last straw.

“Four out of the last five years, we’ve lost money,” said Harrison, who grows cereal crops on his family farm near Liverpool in northwest England. “The only thing that’s kept me going is doing it for my kids. And maybe a little bit of appreciation on the land allows you to keep borrowing, to keep going. But now that’s just disappeared overnight.”

The flashpoint is the government’s decision in its budget last month to scrap a tax break dating from the 1990s that exempts agricultural property from inheritance tax. From April 2026, farms worth more than 1 million pounds ($1.3 million) face a 20% tax when the owner dies and they are passed on to the next generation. That is half the 40% inheritance tax rate levied on other land and property in the U.K.

Starmer’s center-left government says the “vast majority” of farms – about 75% -- will not be affected, and various loopholes mean that a farming couple can pass on an estate worth up to 3 million pounds ($3.9 million) to their children free of tax.

Supporters of the tax say it will recoup money from wealthy people who have bought up agricultural land as an investment, driving up the cost of farmland in the process.

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer visits Airbus in Broughton, North Wales, Friday Nov. 15, 2024. (Danny Lawson/Pool via AP)

“It’s become the most effective way for the super-rich to avoid paying their inheritance tax,” Environment Secretary Steve Reed wrote in the Daily Telegraph, adding that high land prices were “robbing young farmers of the dream of owning their own farm.”

But the famers’ union says more than 60% of working farms could face a tax hit. And while farms may be worth a lot on paper, profits are often small. Government figures show that income for most types of farms fell in the year to the end of February 2024, in some cases by more than 70%. Average farm income ranged from about 17,000 pounds ($21,000) for grazing livestock farms to 143,000 pounds ($180,000) for specialist poultry farms.

The last decade has been turbulent for British farmers. Many farmers backed Brexit as a chance to get out of the EU’s complex and much-criticized Common Agricultural Policy. Since then, the U.K. has brought in changes such as paying farmers to restore nature and promote biodiversity, as well as for producing food.

Some farmers have welcomed those moves, but many feel goodwill was squandered through missteps by successive governments, a failure of subsidies to keep up with inflation and new trade deals with countries including Australia and New Zealand that have opened the door to cheap imports.

National Farmers’ Union Deputy President David Exwood said the tax hike was “the final straw in a succession of tough choices and difficult situations that farmers have had to deal with.”

The government has “completely blown their trust with the industry,” he said.

The government insists it will not reconsider the inheritance tax, and its political opponents see an opportunity. The main opposition Conservative Party – which was in government for 14 years until July -- and the hard-right populist party Reform U.K. are both championing the farmers. Some far-right groups also have backed Tuesday’s protest, though the organizers are not affiliated with them.

Harrison says the demonstration is intended as “a show of unity to the government” and an attempt to inform the public “that farmers are food producers, not tax-dodging millionaires.”

“It’s every single sector, whether you’re a landowner or a tenant, whether you’re beef, dairy, milk, cereals, veg, lettuce -- you name it, everyone has had a hammer blow from this," he said.

“Every farmer is losing.”

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