02/02/2026
From Jeremy Clarkson today;
Starmer’s inheritance tax will still kill farming.
The tax will ruin everything that makes Britain beautiful.
The Chinese will arrive, buy everything and turn our green and pleasant bits into a 20-million-acre pig factory
I know it's a bleak way to start your day, but at some point in the next couple of months it stands to reason that at least one of Britain’s 100,000 farmers is going to be told by his doctor that he has a terminal disease.
So he will have a decision to make. If he elects to have treatment and survives past April — when Labour’s new inheritance tax rules come into force — he will not be able to pass his farm on to his children. If he decides to die before then, by which I mean he chooses to hasten the inevitable and take his own life, he will.
This is not a theoretical problem.
Right now, all across Britain, actual people have been forced by class envy and bitterness to make this decision.
There should be an outcry. And yet incredibly, while Starmer recently backed down on the numbers involved, raising the threshold from £1 million to £2.5 million, half the farmers who would have had to pay inheritance tax under the £1 million arrangement will still have to pay it anyway.
And everyone seems to be satisfied with that. The story has gone away.
Which means Starmer has somehow managed to win the PR battle.
I think I see why.
The Labourites and their pink-haired supporters have a simple slogan they trot out when the subject of inheritance is raised. “Farmers must pay their taxes like everyone else.” That’s easy to understand, and even gets traction among normal people whose hair is not pink.
Farmers have tried to respond with a simple retort of their own:“No farmers. No food.”
But we all sort of know that it’s not really true. You could lose every farmer in Britain and the supermarket shelves would still be full.
It’s just that everything would have been imported.
What they mean is “No British farmers. No British food.”
But no one really cares.
Certainly not Starmer, whose quinoa is flown here every day from South America.
And his supporters aren’t bothered either because their carbon-neutral kale come from a peace collective in Bhutan. British food? What even is that? Meat? Eugh. Bread? That’s got gluten in it. Cue the vomit emoji.
I’m afraid there is no simple way of explaining why the inheritance tax on farms is still so unfair and wrong. It takes a while to outline the problems.
And I hope you have the patience now to read on because I’m going to try.
First of all, when your parents die, you sell their house and that’s OK because you are an accountant or a plumber or a teacher and you have your own house.
You then pay whatever tax is due on the money you receive from the sale and spend whatever’s left on a nice holiday in the Maldives.
That’s why you are sympathetic to the argument that farmers should pay inheritance tax as well. Because what’s the big deal?
It’s this.
A farmer’s child starts to work on the family farm, quite literally from the moment he can walk (I’m saying “he” for conciseness but I mean he or she).
He is up at dawn, milking the cows, feeding the sheep and greasing the ni***es on the tractor. He may want to sit by the fire playing with an iPad, but he cannot. Being born on a working farm is like being born into the royal family. Some do manage to leave, but there’s always a huge fuss. Most just accept their fate and get on the train to Carlisle to open a new disabled ramp at the civic centre. It is their calling.
So, as the weeks and the months roll by, the farmer teaches his kid all about their farm, in the same way that his father had taught him. And as time goes by, the kid develops an encyclopedic knowledge about what grows where and what doesn’t. He will come to know every square inch of the farm.
One day, of course, his dad will die, and if the farm is medium-sized, thanks to the Labourites, he will have to pay inheritance tax.
And the only way he’ll be able to afford to do that is sell a portion of the farm.
Which would make it completely unviable. I have a thousand acres at Diddly Squat and even a farm that big does not make money.
If I had to sell a third of it to pay Rachel Reeves, it would stop breaking even and make a loss.
So the farmer’s kid has no choice. He has to sell the whole lot. Which means all the generational knowledge about that piece of ground is lost.
No one will ever be able to farm it as well ever again. So, you see, the question of inheritance is not the same for farmers as it is for you.
You can sell your parents’ house when they die and someone else will be able to live in it. They will be able to operate the doors and the windows. They know how a house works. But you can’t just sell a farm to someone and expect them to have the first clue about how it should be run. I know this better than most.
And who exactly is going to buy it? It sure as hell isn’t going to be a farmer. They don’t have the money to buy land these days. It could be a hedge fund type, but what do they do with the fields? Get a contractor in to farm them? Ha. Good luck with that. The big contractor businesses are firing clients and pulling out of arable farming in great swathes of the country because there’s just no money in it any more.
Maybe, then, the farm will be sold to a developer who’ll put houses on it, or industrial units or wind turbines or solar panels. This would make Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband very happy for sure, but is it what you want the countryside to become? Even worse, the same thing that’s happened across America could happen here. The Chinese arrive, buy everything and turn Britain’s green and pleasant bits into a 20-million-acre pig factory.
The inheritance tax on farms is going to ruin everything that makes Britain beautiful.
And then there’s the question of the poor farmer. What’s he supposed to do?
All he’s done, ever since he was three, is farm.
Kaleb, who helps me at Diddly Squat, only ever went to school to sell his teachers the eggs from his hens. And then he used some of the profits to help pay the fines the local education authority imposed on his mum for his truancy. The rest he used to buy a pig. And eventually a tractor.
As a result he has never heard of Fleetwood Mac or Neil Armstrong. In a general knowledge quiz he’d be beaten by one of his cows. If he couldn’t farm he’d be completely stuck.
And what is the point of stopping farmers farming? We are all extremely lucky that we have an army of them who are willing to be unpaid custodians of the countryside.
And who are willing to work for pennies to keep us fed. This system couldn’t be invented in a meeting or on a spreadsheet. It has evolved over hundreds of years and we should be grateful for it, not peppering social media with posts saying “Farmers should pay tax like everyone else”.
Oh yes.
The tax.
It’ll wipe out farming, and all the industries that go with it, destroy the countryside, cause any number of su***des and raise just £300 million a year for the Treasury.
Which is about enough to fund the NHS for one afternoon.
