After the Farmers' Demonstration in London
A Diversion from the Series on our Current Political Mess
On Tuesday November 19th there was a demonstration in London organised by the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) to protest against the Inheritance Tax soon to be levied on British family farms which I wrote about recently in The Wicked Witch of Westminster. The Daily Telegraph reported quite extensively on it the next day. In the aftermath of the protest, our communist Prime Minister claimed that the BBC backed him over the Inheritance Tax (IHT) raid. Well, it would, wouldn't it, that’s the nature of the beast. Quite how he thinks this influences anyone's thinking on the matter is beyond me; the BBC lost its right to think and speak for the nation quite some time ago, if it ever even had it.
This contrasts starkly with MSM non-reporting of other marches and demonstrations by the good people of Britain that have occurred over the last four years, doesn't it? Having a suspicious mind these days, it makes me wonder if the Telegraph might have been told to give this more publicity than other demonstrations in order to lodge it in the public’s mind for a few days? The demonstration was very orderly; the farmers got to bring a few tractors to Whitehall; toddlers got to pedal toy tractors around and a few prominent individuals spoke to the crowd, including the new leader of the Conservative Party, Olukemi "Kemi" Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch née Adegoke.
The whole thing was very measured and controlled and polite. The NFU had clearly been co-operating with the authorities to keep it that way.
Could this be a psy-op? I think it could well be and here’s why .
Let’s consider that what is being done. It all revolves arpound Agricultural Property Relief (APR) which is going to be restricted to £1m of a farm inheritance. IHT is then payable at 20% on everything above that figure. The inheritor then has up to 10 years to pay in instalments with no interest charged. If a farm is jointly owned by two people, they each have a £1 million APR exemption. You can then add to this £325k for the normal IHT threshold for each and the Residence Nil-Rate band of £175k for each which will be aplied to the farmhouse. That means the tax-free element of a farm inheritance is potentially as much as £3m. It will vary, of course, between individual families and their farms.
How many family farms are there in Britain? I have heard the figure of 75,000 bandied around. It is reported that 15,000 to 20,000 people were at the demonstration. Not a bad turn-out all things considered but who knows what the real number was? One fifth to one quarter of the number of farms and, of course, not all the demonstrators would have been farmers.
Now compare and contrast with the IHT raid on private pensions. Private pension funds will be pulled into estates from April 2027. The rate of tax is 40% and it must be paid in one instalment before probate is granted on a will. How many individual private pension funds are there? Well, I don't know, but I'll put money on it being far more than the number of family farms in the country. It’s entirely possible that some farmers will have private pension plans too that they have been paying into all their working lives so they will be hit twice.
Self Invested Private Pensions (SIPPs) are a financial arrangement that many independent business people and professionals use to fund their retirements. They are also increasingly used by corporate employees where the old final salary schemes have been closed and new defined contribution schemes have replaced them. Some employees have even opted out of final salary schemes and taken the transfer value of their pension to open a SIPP because of the greater freedom and flexibility they offer as well the possibility of passing on the residual fund to offspring tax free.
Private pensions, therefore, have been seen as a suitable vehicle for IHT planning. People with large funds manage their withdrawals so that they preserve the capital value of the fund in order to pass it on to children. A well-invested fund will attract interest and dividends and, because of the market value of the individual investments, it is entirely possible that the fund may increase in value each year by more than the sum withdrawn as a pension.
This has effectively made them inter-generational pensions and that’s why Reaves hates them.
Middle class families with houses worth around one million pounds and a pension fund of about one million pounds are not unusual. Whereas their beneficiaries would pay nothing in IHT on such assets now, after April 2027 they will be relieved of £400k in immediate IHT. Until Reaves has a go at the Residence Nil-Rate Band, that is, as she is bound to do. It will be either that or Capital Gains Tax (CGT) on house sales. Or both. Left-wing ‘think tanks’ such as the Fabian Society have not been slow to float such ideas since Labour came to power.
This is the real target. If things hot up, Reaves can offer to scrap the farmers' IHT in order to look as if she does care, really, and she has 'listened' but, she will retain the the pension tax raid. It crushes middle class wealth, you see, and it slashes the value of a heritable pension fund in a generation or two. A £1 million fund would be reduced to £360,000 when it has been passed on twice and been subjected to two slices of 40% tax. That means the potential pension drawable would be reduced from £40,000 - £50,000 per year to £14,500 - £18,000.
They really do hate the idea of people having an asset that has the potential to make them financially independent. It sticks out a mile. This measure is fully in line with Marxist ideology.
It is significant that while the new Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, has said she will reverse the farmers' IHT if her party is re-elected, she has said nothing so far about the pension tax raid. It makes one suspect that the so-called “conservatives” are in on this. Oh, how we are played by the Uni-party.
But there is another side to this, the main side, and there was a faction at the demonstration who know it. There was a tractor with a large sign on the front - ‘The Final Straw’. This, for some farmers, was about a lot more than IHT on their land. It was about the endless regulation, restrictions and ‘salami-slicing’ that has been making it ever more difficult for them to make a decent living from their farms. It is about the control of the big supermarkets which are driving farmers’ profit margins down to the point of invisibility. Why were farmers being paid to ‘re-wild’ productive land? Why were farmers being offered cash to retire? Why were farmers being offered huge sums to cover land with solar panels - money that comes from the subsidies we all pay for on our energy bills. All the while our population continues to rise due to unwanted mass migration. This faction were not slow to link it all to the Great Reset. They are right. Katie Hopkins has explained it very well in this short podcast. She was there.
This IHT raid on family farms is the latest stage of our communist masters’ plan of attack on farmers world-wide. We see it in the USA where Bill Gates is now the biggest owner of farm-land, we have seen it in the Netherlands, in France and in Germany. It will force large numbers of farmers to sell at least a part of their farms and the people waiting to buy the land are not intent on farming it in any traditional way.
The prominent figure of Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber said it, and he would know. He is a very wealthy man with a substantial estate in the shadow of Watership Down in North-West Hampshire; he knows who the people are who are waiting with funds at the ready.
The NFU has been too polite, too deferential to government and many farmers know it. The anger is real. Are they about to drop their natural British reserve and become a ‘little more French’? I for one hope so, for they need to and soon. I will back them to the hilt.
For those readers wondering if I have mis-spelt Reaves’ name, I have not. It is deliberate. To reave is a Middle-English verb. Look it up.