The BBC has been accused of bias after Sir Keir Starmer claimed the broadcaster supports the Government’s inheirtance tax raid on farmers.
Asked about the 10,000-strong protest in London yesterday during a press conference in Rio, where he is attended the G20 summit, Sir Keir insisted that “the vast majority” of farmers would be unaffected.
He added: “All of you can check out what that means in terms of the impact. I think the BBC has already done it,” he said.
“It means the vast majority of farms are unaffected by this, and I think it’s just important we keep making that clear.”
The BBC Verify unit reported earlier this month that, in 2021-22, just 462 inherited farms were worth more than £1 million – the new cap on agricultural property relief (APR) – out of the 209,000 farm holdings in the UK.
The article also cited the claim that 70,000 farms will be affected but added that “it is not necessarily the right number to use”.
In a video released on Tuesday, BBC Verify stated that “70,000 is almost certainly an overestimate”. It stated that the “true share of farms affected going forward is likely to be much closer to the Treasury estimates”.
Stuart Andrew, the shadow culture secretary and Conservative MP for Daventry, said: “The job of BBC Verify is to do exactly that, but they’ve failed on their own terms.
“The Government is refusing to say how many family farms are subject to their tax raid, only offering partial and out of date statistics which fail to account for the full scale of their reforms.
“The taxpayers pay for the BBC to be independent and free from bias, not for them to regurgitate Labour lines. This matter should be immediately looked into and corrected.”
Greg Smith, the Conservative MP for Mid Buckinghamshire and the shadow minister for transport, said: “This is absolute nonsense from BBC Verify, who have clearly fallen for Labour’s false narrative by including hobby farms and non-food producing smallholdings in the numbers.
“The message I am getting from my farmers is clear as day. They own small, modest family farms and see this policy as the biggest threat they have ever encountered.”
It comes as Jeremy Clarkson accused Derbyshire of forming her ideas in the same “sixth-form debating society” as the Chancellor.
The journalist had opened the interview by asking Mr Clarkson why he was at the rally. When he replied that he was supporting farmers, she countered: “So it’s not about you, it’s not about your farm and the fact that you bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax?”
Derbyshire was referring to a 2021 interview in which the star of Clarkson’s Farm said he had bought his 1,000-acre Diddly Squat farm in the Cotswolds mainly because there were no death duties on land.
A BBC spokesman said: “We’ve covered different points of view on this story and given an impartial, factual analysis of the numbers involved.”
