Anyone who has listened to Jeremy Clarkson or Kaleb Cooper recently will know that farming in the UK is already on the brink. Farmers work relentlessly, face razor-thin profit margins, and struggle to keep family farms running in a system rigged against them.
Then along comes Rachel Reeves and wipes away what little hope remained for these hard-working families. The pressures on UK farming are enormous. Between rising costs, burdensome regulations, and relentless bureaucratic hurdles, making any profit at all has become nearly impossible.
Inheritance tax (IHT), a critical factor in the continuity of family-owned farms, has become one of the last nails in the coffin. Yet Labour’s budget goes even further, launching a brutal attack on British agriculture and rural communities with changes that will devastate family-owned farms.
While family farms receive a limited concession, taxed at 20% after the £1 million allowance, this still isn’t enough to keep most farms viable once passed down to the next generation. Labour’s latest proposal, however, would drag even more farms into this tax trap.
Family farms make up roughly 98% of all farms in the UK, anchoring local economies, sustaining communities, and bolstering national food security. With Labour’s inheritance tax changes, these small farms are being squeezed out of existence. Rachel Reeves and her team don’t seem to grasp the unique nature of farming.
This land is not an “asset” in the way urban bureaucrats understand it; it’s the very foundation of farmers’ livelihoods and the continuity of food production. Yet Labour’s approach seems to be to tax and squeeze farmers as though they are luxury estate owners.
Labour claims this tax assault is necessary to curb the influence of wealthy investors buying up farmland as a tax shelter. But in reality, it’s small and mid-sized farms that will suffer, forced to sell off land or close entirely when they can’t afford the crippling tax hit.
It’s a simplistic, callous approach from a party that appears entirely clueless about the economic engine that family farms represent in the UK. With every farm that fails, we lose a part of our food sovereignty, moving closer to dependence on costly, often lower-quality imported goods, vulnerable to global price spikes and supply chain disruptions.
This is nothing short of an economic and cultural assault orchestrated by a Labour government with no grasp of reality. Reeves and her colleagues clearly assume that businesses can just absorb the hit.
They’re blind to the fact that family farms don’t operate with endless profit margins. The average farmer in the UK earns a fraction of what MPs like Reeves earn, yet Labour seems intent on wringing them dry to fuel their reckless spending agenda.
And what experience does Reeves, Keir Starmer, or any of the Labour frontbench have in actually running a business? None. They’ve never faced the brutal reality of making payroll or the hard choice of keeping the lights on in tough times.
They’re content to dream up budgets and taxes that fit neatly on paper but devastate people in real life. Under Labour’s tax raid, farmers across the country will be forced to sell off land that has been in their families for generations, closing down operations that have been the backbone of rural Britain.
The impact won’t just be felt by farmers. It will ripple across the entire local food chain, crushing small businesses, local suppliers, and the communities that depend on them.
Labour’s policies are not just misguided, they’re reckless and destructive. They reveal a profound disconnect between Westminster and the countryside, between policymakers who make their living from taxpayer funds and farmers who make their living from the land.
Britain deserves better than politicians who raid family farms with one hand while proclaiming their commitment to hard-working families with the other. For the sake of our rural communities, local economies, and the future of British farming, it’s time to stand against this grossly unfair budget. Are Farmers not Labour’s so-called working people?
Britain’s farmers are not cash cows for the Labour Party’s ideological whims — they’re the lifeblood of this nation. If Labour has its way, there won’t be much of that lifeblood left.
Richard Thomson was the Reform UK candidate for Braintree in the 2024 General Election.
