British farmers feed our country and ensure we have high-quality food on our tables. Tomorrow (Monday) they will bring their tractors to Westminster to protest against this Labour Government’s surprise death tax on British family farms and businesses.
Labour’s Family Farm Tax is a betrayal of rural communities and a clear example of a broken promise by Labour politicians. During the General Election campaign, the current Environment Secretary said that fears they would impose this tax were “lies” and “desperate nonsense”. It turns out his own words describe accurately Labour’s agricultural policies.
The Family Farm Tax is ideologically fuelled by urban Labour politicians who simply do not understand the countryside. This tax will see family farms sold off to pay for it, with no guarantee that the land will continue to be farmed for food production. This is why the next Conservative government will reverse it.
Labour’s Land Use Framework shows starkly that farmland will be used for net zero targets and development. They are setting targets to reduce farmed land by nearly one fifth whilst providing no details of how British food production will be maintained.
Rather like the Chancellor’s “No Growth Plan”, Defra Ministers are sitting in Whitehall apparently hoping the historical increases in agricultural productivity will be magically maintained, whilst refusing to admit that their plans are already causing families to retreat from investment and growing their businesses.
This message was made clear when I visited LAMMA, the UK’s largest agricultural machinery convention, last month. Revealingly, no government minister visited.
As one farmer said to me, “Why should my family invest in new machinery if it’s just going to be snatched by Rachel Reeves when I die?” Farmers are actively stopping investment such as in agricultural machinery, tractors and farm buildings which help them produce the high quality food of which we are so proud.
This should concern us all because the less food produced in the UK, the more our food basket costs and the more reliant we become on imported food. This is important as the world becomes more volatile. The war in Ukraine shows the impact that international events can have on international food prices and the cost of living.
This is why food security is national security. The British public understand this, and it is why they support farmers in their fight against the Family Farm Tax.
And whilst the Labour government plots to tax family farms with one hand, they are ready to pay more than the entire Defra budget to a foreign government to surrender the Chagos Islands, acting on dodgy advice from Labour lawyers.
Labour has prioritised this £9 billion surrender deal whilst taxing farmers for dying, slashing Winter Fuel Payments for vulnerable pensioners and hiking taxes on our rural businesses.
Labour is refusing to listen to farmers, the National Farmers’ Union, Tenant Farmers’ Association, Country Land and Business Association and all the major supermarkets about their death tax. Instead, ministers have repeatedly claimed they are all “confused”.
It is, in fact, the Chancellor who has got her numbers wrong. The Central Association of Agricultural Valuers (CAAV) estimate that up to five times more farms could be affected by this vindictive tax than she claims. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, the CBI Economics and even the Office for Budget Responsibility have also raised concerns about the Chancellor’s figures.
In short, Labour’s Family Farm Tax won’t raise the money Labour wants, but it will drive farms out of business.
Farmers and rural communities have shown that we will not be silenced. It’s why a petition to urge Labour to axe the Family Farm Tax has garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures and why the Express Crusade has been so powerful.
The countryside is fighting back, and Express readers have been part of this every step of the way.
If Labour can afford to give £9 billion to a foreign state, they can afford to scrap a tax that will annihilate our farming sector.
It is time for common sense to prevail.
It’s time for Labour to axe this tax before family farms are destroyed.
