More than 20 London bus routes incorporate Whitehall, a central thoroughfare which also happens to connect most of the major offices of the British State. Should this mean that Whitehall is considered to be a piece of ‘key national infrastructure’ and that blocking it would constitute an offence under Section 7 of the Public Order Act 2023? How about the ULEZ bill for all those tractors grunting about Westminster in recent months? Interestingly, neither of these things has been an issue, which suggests that these sorts of events might just be to someone’s advantage. There is an increasingly strong case for suggesting that having farmers revving their engines on the Downing Street doorstep is precisely what the Government and the food cartels want.
Tractors in Westminster before protest became synonymous with inheritance tax.
Given his connections to organisations such as the World Economic Forum, the Fabian Society, and C40 Cities, among so many others, can it really be ascribed to coincidence that Sadiq Khan thought to exclude the country’s thirstiest diesel guzzlers from his grandest scam? Since the misleadingly named Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) came into effect in 2019, an exemption for ‘vehicles designed and built for mainly off-road use, but which may use the road for limited purposes’ has been in place, and this includes ‘agricultural and forestry tractors’. Lo, the streets of Westminster have played host to a magnificent tonnage of horsepower, and police have done nothing to clear the highways. These protests have been enabled, of that there can be no doubt: but why?
In the Autumn Budget of 2024, the Labour Government stated that it was to set about ‘making the inheritance tax system fairer’. The budget document explains that this can be done ‘by applying inheritance tax to unspent pensions pots and restricting the generosity of agricultural property relief and business property relief for the wealthiest estates’. As is his habit, the devil is to be found lurking in the detail, and when the Government says the ‘wealthiest estates’, they really mean almost everyone with an agricultural holding. In taking the heat for making what appears to be an unnecessary and vindictive decision, the Government has skilfully drawn fire from many other legitimate targets. One might have expected the public response to be an awakening to the general iniquity of inheritance tax itself, but a form of collective amnesia has set in, instead. How was this done?
A masterstroke of distraction.
The few that took the time to read the entirety of the HM Treasury document will have been tripping over all kinds of doublespeak. None more so than in the sentence used to describe the previous change to agricultural property relief. In 1992, the then-Conservative Government did away with all inheritance tax for farms and small businesses. Last year, the Chancellor announced that she would be reducing this benefit ‘to help protect family farms and businesses’. Not simply did she say the relief would be halved (after the first £1 million), but that it would do so in April 2026, giving farmers and small business owners very little time to react to it or plan around it. At the time of writing, it is the case that a gift will incur no inheritance tax if the giver survives for another seven years, with the rate tapering in between. Bearing in mind that Daniel Zeichner, current Minister of State at DEFRA, said out loud that the Treasury hopes to recoup just £500m each year from the change, the lack of warning is unsportsmanlike, to say the least. Statistically, farmers are old, and a significant percentage of those holding land of a value over the threshold would be expected to die before October 2031 (seven years after the budget announcement). If this goes through, it will be ruinous for some, which may well have been the reason for the initial change in the 90s.
To put the sums in perspective, the funds allocated to the NHS for the financial year 2025/2026 are £192bn, which means that the health service will suck up in a day more than farmers can be stung for over the course of an entire year. Total revenue for all UK supermarkets through 2024 is on a par with the gargantuan spend on the health service, and there is more symmetry to this than just arithmetic. If the NHS is to be regarded as the sales division for the pharmaceutical industry, then the supermarkets must take the credit for the spadework, in degrading the human form to such an extent that people are minded to go in search of ‘cures’ for their dis-ease.
In drawing this out a little further, it is possible to see a larger cycle at work. The dependency upon supermarkets, for consumers and producers alike, drives ever-more industrialised farming practices, with ever-more unwelcome inputs. The chemical and pharmaceutical battering taken by what is inaccurately referred to as ‘food’ on the supermarket shelves means that it is not just bad for human health, but it denudes the ground expected to continue producing it. Enter the climate change narrative.
After the destruction of carbon dioxide’s reputation, and the corruption of any understanding of its critical value to all life, there has seemed to be no limit to what ‘climate change’ could take the blame for. It is no coincidence, then, that the first purpose for which the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs may give financial assistance is for ‘managing land or water in a way that protects or improves the environment’. As is the eventual fate of all campaigns of sincerity, the environmental movement has, by and large, been subverted to become synonymous with ‘climate’ concern. This means that species decline, pestilence, crop failure, disappearing topsoil, disease and so much else is put down to supposed changes in weather patterns.
Labour’s wind of Change?
The incredibly wet winter of 2023/2024 was the perfect time for Steve Barclay, the Conservatives’ man for spoiling the landscape, to release a raft of ‘environmental land management’ schemes. In other words, ways to force landowners to swallow the lie that these instruments would enable enhanced ‘nature recovery’ and enhanced ‘food security’. This is not to say that these two things are mutually exclusive. Far from it. There is absolutely no reason why farming may not be to the benefit of nature, the environment, human health and soil health, whilst turning a profit, too. It just requires no engagement with Government or supermarkets. Labour’s Plan for Change is a carbon copy of the previous Government’s script; even the new Environment Secretary is called Steve. In January of 2025, Steve Reed made a ‘cast iron commitment to food security’ and spoke about diversification, by which he meant covering yet more land in solar panel and wind turbines (which—at the time of writing—do nothing when it is dark and windless):
Grow nothing and be dependent.
In introducing the words ‘food security’ to an increasing range of documents, speeches, and press releases, the various agriculture ministries of the four nations of the United Kingdom are keen to convey the impression that this is a state they are bound to pursue. Not so, and herein lies a critical misapprehension. When any of the administrations suggest to farmers and to the wider population that they are working for their benefit, this is disingenuous in the extreme. In just three pieces of legislation on the entire statute book do the words ‘food security’ appear, and in none before 2016.
The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016 contains a couple of passing references to the ‘Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests’, which is a United Nations creation and, as suggested by the word ‘voluntary’, there is nothing binding to be found here. In the more recent Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Act 2024, the Scottish Government is committed to laying a report on food security before Parliament, but only every three years. In Section 3 of this act, which sets out the ‘matters to be considered’ before creating slaves of landowners, food security limps over the line in seventh place. Even then, the wording is hardly bullet-proof, as they merely need to consider ‘the need for sustainable food systems and supply chains in delivering food security’.
Similarly, the Agriculture Act 2020 commits the Westminster Government to produce a triennial report on food security, though there is no suggestion anything need be done if the report turns out to be a terrible read. In fact, south of the border, the Secretary of State is only bound to ‘have regard to the need to encourage the production of food by producers in England and its production by them in an environmentally sustainable way’ when ‘framing any financial assistance scheme’.
In drawing out rather more passages of legislation than you may have hoped to encounter, the point to be made is that nowhere, at all, is it written that any Government is obliged to preserve, protect or improve the nation’s food security. The best that can be said is that food security should be a consideration when leading farmers by the nose. As shown in the table reproduced from a 2006 DEFRA document on food security, the UK has not been self-sufficient since the Victorians were running the show. Several things have changed, dramatically, since then. Cold-chain logistics, the agrichemical industry and food processing have completely changed what we even mean by food security. How would a 19th century housewife have responded to the suggestion that the UK did not have enough of its own food at a time when more than two-thirds of the adult population are overweight, and half of those are obese?
‘Self-sufficiency’ as described by DEFRA in 2006.
In creating the illusion of the pursuit of food security, the Government holds aloft a banner around which farmers and consumers may be made to feel that they can coalesce. Really, though, what is happening is the establishment of an ever-greater reliance on subsidy and, this time, subsidy for not producing food. As a direct result of Barclay’s amendments to the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) in early 2024, the uncropped arable area in England increased by 107% in that same year, as farmers decided to take the cash, rather than the risk which comes with the production of food. That is equal to 581,000 hectares going out of production. Never mind nature recovery; farmers are seeing any chance of running a viable business disappearing over the horizon.
This is set alongside what Guy Singh Watson—founder of the very successful organic farm Riverford—has described as ‘farmwashing’. Farmwashing is the practice used by supermarkets, to attempt to convince the shopper that they are supporting British enterprise, by stocking products from British farms. Many of the items labelled with Union Flags, or with the names of British-sounding farms are, in fact, a charade. A huge quantity of these things is imported from places with very different regulations on animal welfare and the use of chemical crop treatments. This is patently unfair and unhealthy but protesting about this has been all but drowned out.
As highlighted year on year by the Groceries Code Adjudicator’s Annual Report, the supermarkets treat farmers with a contempt eclipsed only by that of the Government. Rank opportunism would be how to describe the way in which these organisations have cashed in on the inheritance tax furore. Joining the same queue is the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) which have attempted to assume control of the issue. The NFU may boast over 46,000 members, but the last census reported over 467,000 people working in agriculture.
A message to get behind.
This is a point well made by one of the groups set up to join the fray, Farmers to Action. They suggest—rightly—that inheritance tax should not be paid, by anyone, but their campaign is holed below the waterline. The image shown confirms, beyond all reasonable doubt, a complete failure to understand who is on which side. Tesco is joined by all the supermarkets in declaring, publicly, that they back a campaign to scrap the proposed change to agricultural property relief. What have they to lose?
Rank opportunism.
A comment beneath a piece on the latest round of farmers’ protests likened the behaviour to ‘whining at the enemy’. Whether there is duty to be paid at the point of death is neither here nor there if connivance between Government and the food industry means that holding the title to a piece of land is virtually the only thing the landowner is in control of. Without a robust and conclusive rejection of the Climate Science™ and a conscious move away from supermarket control, any apparent victory via protest would be both pyrrhic and ephemeral. There is growing public demand for meaningful interaction with farmers, in order that business relationships can be struck at the local level. Taking the first steps, even away from an abusive relationship, are always the hardest. Nature is more resilient than we are allowed to believe, and this resilience needs to be emulated up and down the land, in the way we approach the undoing of the great corporate destruction of the past generations.
