Why should farmers be exempt from inheritance tax that applies to everyone else? It’s a method of wealth redistribution, not just income distribution, it’s actually quite socialist, and one of the only such measures in our system.
Millionaire farmers driving around in their tractors protesting that when they die, their wealth shouldn’t be redistributed to any degree is pathetic.
Why should farmers be exempt from inheritance tax that applies to everyone else?
In theory, the problem is one of compounding assets. If you have a family farm with multiple inheriting children and the farm has to be sold to pay off the inheritence tax debt, who buys them? Inevitably, bigger industrial agriculture firms. So more and more plots are aggregated within a smaller and smaller number of privately owned farming companies.
In practice, this has already happened decades prior (centuries prior, if you look at the history of land ownership in Ireland). The people buying up small plots of land aren’t pioneering farmer entrepreneurs. They’re people explicitly looking to dodge taxes by converting their accumulated wealth into an untaxable asset. So you’re not seeing small farmers shielded from consolidation thanks to inheritance taxes. You’re seeing celebrities and mega-millionaires shielding cash assets behind an accounting trick.
Millionaire farmers driving around in their tractors protesting that when they die, their wealth shouldn’t be redistributed to any degree is pathetic.
Wealth in the UK isn’t being redistributed, its being aggregated. The prior and current governments have gone all in on private equity as a cure for sluggish growth. This is purely Rich Guy on Rich Guy violence.
If you genuinely care about protecting the assets of the working class, you need less middling Starmerism and more radical Maoism.
The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
- Michael Parenti
They’re people explicitly looking to dodge taxes by converting their accumulated wealth into an untaxable asset. So you’re not seeing small farmers shielded from consolidation thanks to inheritance taxes. You’re seeing celebrities and mega-millionaires shielding cash assets behind an accounting trick.
This is exactly what the policy is aiming to address. Even if it doesn’t fix the consolidation of farmland by big companies, I don’t see how addressing this loophole is a bad thing, especially when you describe the drawback to it as having already happened anyway
I don’t see how addressing this loophole is a bad thing
I think it is a lot of political noise over what is incidental to a country that exists largely as a tax haven and tool of investor expropriation. Do it. Don’t do it. You’re still a country predicated on money laundering for oligarchs abroad.
I’m not about to pick fights with good legislation over it not immediately solving the entire problem
I’ve yet to see any actual quality legislation coming out of a British government in my lifetime.
Tax breaks for the farmers working the fields, or tax breaks for the international corporations and land speculators that own nearly all the fields?
Good. Farmers need to be taxed and regulated like all other industries. Unchecked water usage has led to the most inefficient water methods and they don’t pay household rates for water. Little oversight in how pesticides are used so the farmer pays for a helicopter to swoop and spray the area, regardless of the need for pesticides on the entire field with down wind effects for anyone living in the path of the aerosol poisons.
Farmers need to change with the times and start farming like they have satellite pictures and basic math available to them.
