Within the early hours of the morning, 16-year-old Tom Lucas climbed into his 1970 Massey Ferguson tractor, known as in sick to school, and launched into an eight-hour journey to London—driving at simply 16 miles per hour.
The younger farmer from Cambridgeshire made the journey to hitch a whole bunch of farmers and their autos—tractors, farm vehicles, and even tanks—lining Whitehall in protest towards Labour’s deliberate inheritance tax reforms. The proposed adjustments would introduce a 20% tax on farms valued at greater than £1 million, a transfer that has sparked an unprecedented backlash from farmers and the broader meals business.
For Lucas, the prospect of his household shedding the 130-acre arable farm they’ve owned for a century is “absolutely awful.” He defined:
“If I want to take over our little family farm, then I’ll have to find quite a lot of money. What I would pay towards the inheritance tax is less than I’d turn over in a year. It would take us five years to pay that off, and you should be taking a wage out of it yourself.”
“I don’t know any farmers who take a wage themselves. They’re all just working for the love of it.”
Related considerations had been raised by Richard Shepherd, a dairy farmer from Cheshire, who attended the protest along with his mother and father and spouse. With an inheritance tax invoice of £1 million, he fears the lack of working capital will cripple their enterprise.
“The problem is that we’ll have to sell land to help pay that, and all of a sudden, we start losing the capital we need to produce milk and keep the farm running.”
His father, Ivan Shepherd, added that farmers “don’t take time off”, recalling how he had labored a number of hours on the farm earlier than heading to London for the protest.
The demonstration, organised by Save British Farming, follows months of mounting stress on the federal government. Supermarkets have backed the Nationwide Farmers’ Union (NFU) in calling for a reversal, and hundreds of farmers have marched in London for the reason that finances announcement in November.
Veteran farmer James Hardstaff, whose Nottinghamshire farm has been in his household for over 300 years, described the coverage as a “heritage tax” that would drive farms to promote land and cut back manufacturing.
“It would have big implications on our family. It’s going to be rough.”
Hardstaff, who nonetheless works previous retirement age, defined that rising prices have already made farming more and more unsustainable, and the proposed tax reforms would add additional monetary pressure.
Regardless of the protests, Labour has refused to reverse its place on the 20% inheritance tax. The coverage has drawn widespread criticism from farmers, supermarkets, and rural communities, with fears that it may undermine British agriculture and push many family-run farms out of enterprise.
As the federal government faces rising opposition from the farming sector, the protests spotlight a deepening divide between policymakers and the agricultural group, with many fearing that centuries-old farms may very well be misplaced within the coming years.
