Keir Starmer didn’t deliberately pick a half-a-billion fight with tax-dodging rich landowners and feather-bedded farmers, but now it is one he must win it.
Filling their tractors with cheap red diesel to drive into London and create gridlock tomorrow will be an angry protest from a sliver of the countryside that is usually shouting at folk to get off their land. Back in 2002, an estimated 400,000 cut from the same cloth clogged the capital in violent outbursts to defend fox hunting – and the cruel blood sport was, thankfully, still outlawed.
Prime Minister Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves are braced to stand firm in the belief that sympathy will ebb when the public understands this isn’t really about small family farms but about loaded investors buying land to avoid inheritance tax.
Labour MPs in rural areas are to be briefed on selling the benefits of better health and social care, schools, policing and bus services that will be delivered in the shires. Cheered on by hypocritical Tories who screwed farmers with Brexit – with trade deals favouring Australia and New Zealand, plus slashed grants – it could get ugly.
The concern in No10 is that the tractor brigade will try to repeat the 2000 fuel blockage of oil refineries. Tough emergency powers would be activated to allow tankers to keep replenishing petrol stations, I’m told.
And one senior Labour figure predicted motorists queuing for hours would quickly turn on greedy landowners. The question is, how quickly will voters appreciate how relatively few family farms will be involved – because an agricultural couple could leave up to £3million, not £1m, before half-price 20% tax is levied on the portion of bequests about that value.
These are extraordinarily generous terms, with other couples enjoying only the £1m limit then paying 40% in inheritance tax. Margaret Thatcher exempted landowners from inheritance tax in 1984 to reward followers in an era when inequality mushroomed and she smashed coal, steel, shipyard, car and print workers.
It feels an age ago rather than last year that Starmer wowed the National Farmers’ Union with a speech on why rural communities are in his DNA, how his first job was on a farm aged 14 picking stones from a field for 50p an hour on the Surrey-Kent border where he lived.
This isn’t an urban-rural battle. It’s about funding public services in rural areas by closing a tax loophole.
