Keir today gone tomorrow – our British Farmers” read the sign emblazoned across a tractor as farmers laid a wreath in Whitehall this week for every farm that’ll die due to Labour’s farm tax. Even staunch Labour supporters are beginning to distance themselves from this

policy. The once-supportive Labour tax expert Dan Neidle has changed his position, saying on closer inspection this tax penalises regular farmers and will not clamp down on the wealthy who buy land to avoid tax.

Yet Keir ploughs on regardless. He doesn’t seem to care that his policy will destroy the lives and livelihoods of generations of farmers up and down the country, force them out of their family homes and collapse their businesses.

He doesn’t even seem to care that the Government’s figures about the number of farms affected are wildly at odds with the National Farmers’ Union, tax experts and the Central Association of Agricultural Valuers, who incidentally have worked out that up to 75,000 individual owners of farming businesses could be affected over the coming generation, even before inflation, which is the equivalent of five times the Government’s figure of 500 farms affected in 2026-27.

Anyone else would have run the figures again, checked out all the discrepancies, but not this bunch of socialist ideologues running the country. So hellbent are they on squeezing money out of people, they haven’t even properly checked if it is there to squeeze in the first place. A typical arable farm of 200 acres owned by an individual with an expected annual profit of £27,300 would face an inheritance tax bill of £370,000! So if the cost was spread over 10 years it would cost 136 per cent of their profit.

In fact a tax inspector explained to me that Labour will probably find a rise in the numbers of individuals seeking to acquire farmland of up to £1million to limit their inheritance tax liability, resulting in a reduction in the amount of tax the Treasury can expect to generate from this – as well as an increase in land prices.

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The financial sector will enter the land market with some investing up to £1m into farmland and becoming the new owners but with no idea about farming.

In short, the policy doesn’t make financial sense (nothing new there from Labour’s bungled Budget).

It fails to protect our food security and will destroy the nature of our countryside. That’s because this tax policy is more sinister and more socialist than anyone dare believe – it is about forcing people off their land.

This isn’t merely a Labour Government, it’s a hardcore socialist one and Starmer is the most left-wing prime minister this country has had – no wonder he was sitting so comfortably in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet.

However, with public support firmly on the farmers’ side, “Farmer Harmer Starmer” may come to find out that he has bitten off more than he can chew this time.