Labour’s 1.5m homes will be dominated by private equity firms charging huge rents

by James Wright  23 February 2025
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2025/02/23/labour-build-to-rent/

The Labour Party’s pledge to build 1.5m new homes over this parliament risks being dominated by private equity in the Build to Rent sector, Common Wealth has warned in a new report.

Indeed, chancellor Rachel Reeves has tied herself to fiscal rules to embed the neoliberal market throughout government planning. In her budget, she pledged money for the Build to Rent sector in order to ‘crowd in’ private investment, rather than treating homes as necessary shelter provided publicly and mandated as affordable to all.

Private equity in real estate – The Build to Rent scandal

Build to Rent properties in the UK have increased to 20% of all new builds in recent years – and 27% in London, the thinktank states. Investors know that renting out essentials is a guaranteed way to make the most money.

That is, you get regular, passive income on resources people automatically need while retaining ownership of the ‘asset’ itself. Investors can then use the ‘product’ as collateral or eventually sell it.

At the same time, housing is a risk free investment for the government to make through public ownership, which can be organised on the basis of need and affordability.

Another way the current system is far from adequate is inherited wealth. Common Wealth notes that that in 2023 the majority of first time house buyers (57%) received financial assistance from their parents. The lottery of birthright should surely not prevail over the fact that housing is is a commonality.

Nonetheless, the thinktank further points out that between the onset of the financial crash in 2008 and 2023 the global real estate ‘assets’ under the management of “institutional investors” increased by around 450% from $385bn to $1.7trn.

Related: Would private equity building 1.5m UK homes bring down British house prices?

Rachel Reeves: making the situation even worse

In the UK, overseas investors believe the housing market system to be staying. In absolute terms, UK real estate was the largest housing market for foreign investment in the first quarter of 2024.

Private investors want to maximise their profits at every avenue. Common Wealth points out this is at odds with providing affordable and social housing. The thinktank notes that when asset managers Blackstone bought up and renovated homes in Stockholm, rents increased by a whopping 43%.

The report further shows that a “structural undersupply” of housing leads to year on year rent rises.

Instead of tackling the issue, Reeves seems intent on making the situation worse and diverting more resources away from public housing and towards private investment.

Rewilding row after National Trust ploughs over ‘irreplaceable’ waxcap fungi

Botanists said the work had destroyed a habitat that had taken decades to form

Environment Correspondent Olivia Rudgard – 20 April 2021
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/environment/2021/04/20/rewilding-row-national-trust-ploughs-irreplaceable-waxcap-fungi/

The grassland, now ploughed-over

The National Trust’s attempt to rewild a meadow in Cumbria has backfired after ploughing destroyed “irreplaceable” waxcap mushrooms.

Botanists accused the charity of “cowboy conservation” after the grassland near Cockermouth in the north west of the Lake District was ploughed over in an attempt to create a wildflower meadow.

Waxcaps are brightly-coloured mushrooms which grow on undisturbed ground, but they are increasingly under threat from intensive farming.

Rob Dixon, a botanist and conservation ecologist, who first noticed the incident and had spotted the fungi there in the autumn, said he had reported it to Natural England as a possible breach of regulations limiting changes to rural land. The government agency is investigating.

“There’s so much guidance out there about meadow restoration and grassland restoration, and this just flies in the face of all of it,” he said.

“The only term I can come up with that’s adequate is a sort of cowboy conservation. Obviously no clue about what they’re doing whatsoever.”

On Twitter the National Trust’s North Lakes ranger team defended the change, stating that the soil had “low nutrient value”.

“It is part of a planned work to create ~3 acres of hay meadow, providing a rich and varied habitat for hundreds of species,” the tweet said.

Waxcap mushrooms only grow on grasslands that have been left undisturbed for long periods, making them an indicator of ancient, nutrient-poor land that has not been used for farming.

Adding nutrients to soil in the form of fertiliser is often done by farmers looking to use it for crops, but nutrient-poor land is ecologically valuable because of the native plants and fungi it can support. Once ploughed away the fungi is unlikely to recover, experts said.

TWEET THE NATIONAL TRUST DELETED:
Thank you for sharing this with us. We’re working closely with the farmer at Shepherds Field on the Dunthwaite estate to manage the land in a sustainable, nature-friendly way. The area of land pictured which has been sub-soiled had low nutrient value
— NT North Lakes (@NTNorthLakes) April 20, 2021

Botanist Joshua Styles, founder of the North-West Rare Plant Initiative, said: “Waxcap grasslands take decades to establish. And grasslands that waxcaps grow in are really low-nutrient and unimproved.

“The National Trust has done away with this incredibly important habitat that’s taken decades and decades and decades to establish.”
As well as waxcaps, such grasslands can also be home to native plants such as sheep’s fescue, heath bedstraw, small cudweed and heath cudweed, now endangered in England.

An anonymous National Trust spokesman said: “We are aware of concerns over a field that has been ploughed near Bassenthwaite Lake, Cumbria, and we are currently looking into how this may have happened.

“The National Trust is committed to nature friendly farming and work alongside tenants to tackle the biodiversity crisis while ensuring land delivers for nature and farmers.”

A Natural England spokesperson, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “We are aware of reports and are investigating possible damage to semi-natural grassland near the River Derwent.
“We are unable to comment further at this stage.”

The National Trust was the target of a backlash on social media for turning over the soil in the field on its Dunthwaite estate, close to the Lakes Distillery between Bassenthwaite and Isel.

Farmer and author James Rebanks: ‘I hate the word rewilding – it’s been weaponised’

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/06/james-rebanks-interview-farmer-author-defra/

Ahead of the publication of his third book, he talks about turning down Defra, his fears for UK farming and a life-changing trip to Norway

It has been a hectic few months for farmer and author James Rebanks, what with his family’s farm in the Lake District to tend, as well as a much-anticipated new book, the follow up to his prize-winning best-sellers The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral. To add to the pressure, over the summer he received an invitation from the new government asking him to sit on the board of directors of the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the ministry responsible for the nation’s agriculture.

No wonder, then, that when we meet on his farm, tucked away in a vibrantly green Cumbrian valley in Gowbarrow Fell, 1,100 feet up in the hills between Keswick and Penrith, 50-year-old Rebanks is running rather than walking as he shows me its 500 acres where they keep Herdwick sheep and Galloway cows.

“I turned Defra down,” he says. “Mostly because of my fundamental problems with Defra about budget.”

For much of our time together, the straight-talking, personable Rebanks is all smiles and jokes. At school, he recalls, before he left at 16 with just two GCSEs, “I was rough round the edges, and only good at making people laugh.”

But when he talks about farm budgets he is deadly serious. It is a measure of just how deep he believes the crisis in farming to be.

With Brexit, the £2.4 billion in subsidies based on acreage paid to British farmers by the EU under the old Common Agricultural Policy are in the process of being replaced by Defra with a system that instead rewards good environmental stewardship. Rebanks wholeheartedly approves of the direction of travel, “but we haven’t delivered on the new deal and farmers can’t go on living on air”.

They are telling him, he reports, that because of delays, shelf-loads of bureaucracy and general “ineptitude”, the ministry is effectively standing by while their old-style subsidy payments are tapered off, without giving farmers access to the promised new funding for nature that is meant to replace them.

“Some farmers have lost as much as 38 per cent of their income. They can’t get on the new scheme unless they have a Natural England adviser prepared to treat them seriously enough to process their application and there aren’t enough advisers,” he says.

In such a chaotic situation, he has been one of the lucky ones. His money has come through, but overall he labels the transformation as a “tragedy”. “There are literally hundreds and thousands of farmers wanting to do amazing things for nature on their land who are being turned away,” he says.

To add insult to injury, in his eyes, Defra recently announced a £358 million underspend in the agricultural budget over the last three years. “That sounds to anyone not in farming as if farmers don’t want that money, aren’t trying to claim it. That is not at all what is happening.”

His refusal of the Defra offer is beginning to make more sense. In his own case he can point out around the farm how the new funds are being used: to put back hedgerows to reverse an alarming drop in bio-diversity in the countryside; to restore rivers to their old meandering courses to reduce the risk of flooding in towns and cities downstream; and to replant lost species like betony in his pastures that “do remarkable things for degraded soil”. But far too many farmers are not able to get on with the job that needs doing and which they want to do because of a logjam at the top.

That should matter to all of us, he insists. “Insufficient capacity in Defra means we are not buying enough of the nature that we need. We are miles away from doing what we need to do to mend rural Britain.”

It quickly becomes clear, as Rebanks races ahead, that he is as passionate about the acres he farms – he stands in a line of “dog-and-stick” Cumbrian Hill farmers stretching back 600 years – as he is about just how vital such family farms are. “We need more small farmers but at the moment we are losing them.”

Economics are driving them to the wall at the same time science is suggesting they are crucial to our collective future. “The best farming, the evidence shows, is quite human-intensive, less mechanical, less mono-cultural vast fields of one thing. Our diet and our landscape need much more of a patchwork.”

Rebanks grew up on his farm, working as soon as he could walk alongside his father and his grandfather (the heroes of his first two books). That has given him a profound respect for tradition that sits sometimes awkwardly alongside his belief that farming has to adapt to the crisis in nature and to climate change.
Many of the improvements he is making on the farm fit broadly under the banner of rewilding. “I don’t like the word rewilding and the permutations of it. If rewilding means, do we need more nature in our landscape, I absolutely own it.”

Other uses, though, annoy him. “My problem is the word is weaponised and then you have rewilders saying: ‘Your farm takes up too much room, James, that’s space we want for the wild.’ I get it, but I’m not going anywhere, and neither can I because I have to pay my bills.”

He continues: “What really bugs me about rewilding is when it simply becomes greenwashing. If you are a government not following through on your promises to transform 70 to 80 per cent of the countryside to make it better, you do some token rewilding bits here and there, flagship projects you can take people round.”

Farming can be a fraught business. “There are,” Rebanks reflects, trying to be more diplomatic, “people on both sides of this debate playing culture wars, and I am in the middle.” And, he adds, getting caught in the crossfire, because of the public profile his books and numerous public appearances have given him (which, of course, is why Defra wants him on board).
“I believe in compromise, but the current situation leads to grumpy farmers who no longer trust government or environmentalists, and a whole new breed of rabble rousers who know exactly how to play to their own tribe,” he says.

Rebanks is sometimes referred to as “Britain’s best-known farmer”, but surely that crown belongs to Jeremy Clarkson? “He is massively helpful,” Rebanks says, “whether you like him or not. I’m not a petrol head but he’s got people seeing how insane the economics of farming are. I’ve had more non-farmers approach me to talk about farming because of Clarkson’s Farm than anything else that has happened in the last 15 years.”

The sins Rebanks attributes to Defra happened under Conservative ministers. Does he think the incoming Labour team might do better?

He has just come back, he tells me, from attending a fringe meeting at this autumn’s Labour party conference. “I’ve never done anything like that before in my life. I’ve never been to anything political.” He is not even a member of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU).
Yet the farming minister, Daniel Zeichner, who has also been praised in these pages earlier this year by Tom Bradshaw, current president of the NFU, has visited the Rebanks’ farm not once but twice.

“He’s saying the right things. I’m absolutely confident he believes in a compromise between farming and nature, but I am not absolutely confident that he is going to in an argument with the Treasury on the right amount of money so we have the nature we need.”

If he doesn’t in Rachel Reeves’ forthcoming budget, what will be the consequence? “Instead of a gain of nature as has been planned, I think we are going to have a loss of nature. If you short change the spend, we all lose. It is very simple,” says Rebanks.
His passion for restoring nature is what took him to Norway for his new book, The Place of Tides, to a remote, uninhabited rocky island on the edge of the coastal shelf in the Vega archipelago, a Unesco World Heritage Site. He spent 10 weeks there working alongside two elderly women, Anna and Ingrid. Each spring they are single-handedly reviving a long-standing tradition of protecting nesting eider ducks, and harvesting their feathers once they leave their nests for duvets.

It feels like a bit of a departure from the very English setting and subject matter of his two previous books. “I went there,” he explains, “to get away from people, from history, to step out of all the stuff that worries me in the world.”
The trip also came four years after the death of his father, Tom, from cancer. Their relationship hadn’t always been easy, especially in his late teens when he left school and they were working side by side on the farm.

“At the time it was getting a bit desperate financially, he was getting a bit nasty, I was getting a bit uppity. There were some nasty fights.”

It was only in retrospect, he says, that he realised that taking himself off to a remote Norwegian island was a form of grieving. “In the years before I went there, I’d lost my dad, my aunties and all that older generation that anchored me, but on the island I found myself with people who were like them.”

He remembers shaking Anna’s hand for the first time. “I got a chill. Her hands felt like my grandmother’s hands, boney, sinewy, working-class hands. She was my people. She didn’t give a toss about my books.”

He makes it sound as though he had reached a crisis point in his life, yet inside his Cumbrian farmhouse, an old barn that he has been able to extend with the significant royalties from his books to better accommodate his growing family of four, Molly, Bea, Isaac and Tom, aged from seven to 18, the atmosphere is unmistakably one of warmth and love and life.

His two sons are just home from school, his mother-in-law is helping with the school-run, while Bea, who works on the farm and wants to follow in his footsteps, pops in and out. Missing is Rebanks’ wife, Helen, who in 2023 published her own book, The Farmer’s Wife, which followed her husband’s into the best-sellers’ charts.

Helen’s book, The Farmer’s Wife, has been adapted into a stage play Credit: Joanne Coates

Are they setting themselves up to become the real-life Phil and Jill Archer for the nation? He smiles. “I’ve only ever listened to The Archers for half an episode. That was enough”.

His wife is currently on a trip to London to see a stage dramatisation of her book. Will there be similar adaptations of his books? “I must have been asked about 20 times to be in a documentary about my life and I’ve turned them all down. I don’t like being recognised any more than I am.”

Helen came from another farming family and grew up close by. “She was the swotty, academic farmer’s daughter, determined to get out of the small town we had gone to school in. We met when I was 21 and she was 17.”

He credits her with awakening ambition in him after a misspent, “rough-round-the-edges” youth, encouraging him to go to night school to get his A-levels, and landing a place at Magdalen College, Oxford, to read history.

“I didn’t like it,” he recalls of his university days. “I had a vague, chippy and I now realise completely pointless hatred of whoever ‘them’ was, as if everyone at Oxford was one thing and I had to beat them. I could have enjoyed it more.”

It didn’t stop him getting a double first. His initial plan had been to use Oxford as a stepping stone to get a job that would pay him enough to save the farm.
Instead, he returned after graduating to work on the farm, but it had given him the courage in his spare time to attempt to realise an ambition to write that he had developed while reading his way through the novels on his “obsessively bookish” mother’s shelves. It is a habit he still makes time to indulge in, having just finished the Booker Prize shortlist (Percival Everett’s James is his top tip).

The Place of Tides, marks quite a shift in his writing, more novel than memoir, realised in rhythmic, poetic language. But it is familiar territory, namely his struggle to balance the timeless with the timely, tradition with the changes that need to be made for a changing future.
He first caught a glimpse of Anna on a 2012 visit to Norway. To make ends meet he had taken on some consultancy work on sustainability for Unesco. “I got 40 minutes off the coast, looked back at this panorama of mountains and rocks and sea and thought: ‘This might be the best place I’ve ever, ever been.’”

It’s quite a compliment for someone who believes his farm in the Lake District is the place he always wants to live. But something else caught his eye that day.
“These quiet, unheralded women were working out there with the eider ducks and I was curious. I remember thinking at the time: ‘I wonder if anyone else has written about this?’”

The challenge of finding a subject for his third book revived the memory. “I was probably a little bit dazed and confused after the first two books,” he concedes. “All sorts of weird things come out of success.” His second book, English Pastoral, won the Wainwright Prize for nature writing and was – like his debut, The Shepherd’s Life, translated into more than a dozen languages.

With his family’s blessing, he returned to spend the duck season with Anna and Ingrid. Anna comes from a long line of men and women who have done this work, stretching all the way back to a great, great grandfather in 1852. Nowadays, though, the tradition is teetering on the edge of extinction.
“I went there to get away from my worries about the future, but it was there. The sea is broken [by overfishing that has decimated the local fishing industry]. The people are getting old…”

From his trip to Norway he has brought back a variety of things. “It was the first time I had spent time in a place dominated by women, with women’s rules. I had to really think about that, embarrassingly, for the first time in my life.”

And on the farm? “I came back determined to mend home as Anna was determined to mend her island and its ecosystem. On the farm, we had been doing our bit, but we have definitely gone up a gear.”

He believes they are doing “the best farming we have ever done. We might now be one of the most progressive farms in Britain on transforming our soil. We have 15 worms per spade-full, when our neighbours have four. We need more worms in the soil.”

Not, he adds, that the day-to-day headaches of hill-farming ever go away.
“One of the biggest problems for anyone who farms around here is dogs off-lead that attack sheep. If we walk up the fell now where my sheep are, I can guarantee that there will be at least three people walking with their dogs off-lead, despite the signs telling them not to. They have an amazing sense of entitlement.”

What does he do when he catches them? “I give them a stern telling off. My dad would have said their dogs should be shot.”

Another medium-term cloud on the horizon is one that hovers over many family farms – succession. How will he sort it out with four children?
He shakes his head. “I haven’t got a clue what the perfect succession looks like when the capital value of land is wildly higher than its agricultural value because it is a tax dodge for corporates and pension funds.”

I can’t help thinking that whatever his reservations, accepting a seat round the Defra table would enable this articulate and thoughtful man at least a chance to impact on government policy in such matters. But then he has been burnt once already. In 2018 he resigned shortly after joining a Defra panel set up by then Secretary of State, Michael Gove, after environmentalists complained it had too many farmers on it.

Isn’t he actually both – farmer and environmentalist? “Yes,” he replies with a laugh. “And I need to show that there is a place for farmers like me in the environment of the future, and that we can deliver multiple things from the same piece of land.”

The Place of Tides by James Rebanks is published by Allen Lane on October 17 at £22.

Conservationists said field of rare flowers was ‘latest victim of overly simple approach to climate change’

Helena Horton – 19 February 2020

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/19/nestle-forced-apologise-rip-trees-planted-part-eco-drive-destroyed

Nestlé has apologised and ripped up saplings planted in an eco drive at one of its partner farms after the planting destroyed a meadow filled with rare wild flowers.

This was once a meadow filled with rare wild flowers, but is now full of plastic-encased saplings Credit: Wild Lakeland

Planting trees has become a popular way for farms and companies to carbon offset as businesses are urged to move towards being “net zero”, or carbon neutral.

But the dairy farm in Cumbria has been criticised by conservation charities after digging up a meadow that had been filled with Butterfly Orchids, Betony, Scabious, Restharrow and Harebell to make way for plastic-covered saplings.

Local conservation ecologist Rob Dixon, who noticed that trees had been planted in the meadow at Gateshaw Mill Farm, told The Telegraph: “Wildflower rich grasslands are a increasingly rare and extremely valuable habitat that rely on active management, such as livestock grazing, to keep them diverse and healthy.

“Tree planting is highly unsuitable on areas of wild flower rich grassland as the change in management and eventual shade will lead to the extinction of the wild flowers at expense of a few coarse, shade-tolerant plant species.

“There will be a huge knock-on effect on the bees, butterflies and vast array of wildlife that is dependent on the habitat.”

What the meadow looked like in full bloom

Conservation charity Plantlife said the practice of planting woodlands was widespread and businesses needed to exercise caution when doing it.

Dr Trevor Dines, the organisation’s botanical specialist, said: “This ancient Cumbrian grassland, with its abundance of rare flowers, has become the latest victim of an overly simple approach to climate change. In the understandable rush to plant trees, we risk sacrificing some of our most wildlife-rich habitats.”

While popular opinion suggests planting trees is one of the best ways to save the planet, meadows can actually store more carbon.

Dr Dines called this “plant blindness”, explaining: “Grassland soils have the highest carbon stock of any habitat in Britain and – with around 70-100 species of plants growing in a single field, and three million individual flowers per hectare in summer – are unrivalled crucibles of biodiversity.

“This is a classic case of plant blindness – it’s just a grassy field, right? Within the next two to three years, the orchids, betony and harebells will disappear from this corner of Cumbria as the canopy closes over and the sunlight recedes.

“Species-rich meadows and grasslands now occupy just one per cent of our land area. The terrible irony is that the inevitable disappearance of the flowers, insects and other dependent wildlife has been done in the name of the environment.”

Dr Dines added that ancient meadows needed the same level of protection as ancient woodland.

A spokeswoman for Nestlé said the farm would be removing the trees and trying to restore the meadow.

“As part of our partnership with First Milk, Nestlé’s milk supplier, we support a long running sustainability programme to empower and support Cumbrian dairy farmers to play a vital role in the sustainable stewardship of agricultural land,” she said.

“The programme of landscape management, of which tree planting is just one element, also looks to improve watercourse management, enhance biodiversity, improve soil quality, increase climate change resilience and reduce carbon emissions.

“We were alerted to the tree planting at Gateshaw Mill recently, which was carried out with the best intentions. We are working with the farm, the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Woodland Trust to rectify the mistake and restore the meadow without any lasting damage being caused.”

Tenth of farmland to be axed for net zero

Solar farms, tree planting and wildlife habitats to replace food production as Labour deals fresh blow to rural life

Farmland currently used for food production will be turned over to other uses

The average US/European worker has less vacation time than a medieval peasant, and they had security of tenure

“The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.”

Lynn Parramore | Reuters | Business Insider | 29 August, 2013

Life for the medieval peasant was certainly no picnic. His life was shadowed by fear of famine, disease and bursts of warfare. His diet and personal hygiene left much to be desired.

But despite his reputation as a miserable wretch, you might envy him one thing: his vacations.

Ploughing and harvesting were backbreaking toil, but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off.

The Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays. Weddings, wakes, and births might mean a week off quaffing ale to celebrate, and when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, the peasant expected time off for entertainment. There were labour-free Sundays, and when the ploughing and harvesting seasons were over, the peasant got time to rest, too.

In fact, economist Juliet Shor found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year. As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually.

A history of dwindling vacation days

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way: John Maynard Keynes, one of the founders of modern economics, made a famous prediction that by 2030, advanced societies would be wealthy enough that leisure time, rather than work, would characterize national lifestyles. So far, that forecast is not looking good.

What happened? Some cite the victory of the modern eight-hour a day, 40-hour working week over the punishing 70 or 80 hours a 19th century worker spent toiling as proof that we’re moving in the right direction.

But Americans have long since kissed the 40-hour working week goodbye, and Shor’s examination of work patterns reveals that the 19th century was an aberration in the history of human labour. When workers fought for the eight-hour working day, they weren’t trying to get something radical and new, but rather to restore what their ancestors had enjoyed before industrial capitalists and the electric light bulb came on the scene.

Go back 200, 300, or 400 years and you find that most people did not work very long hours at all. In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze.

“The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed,” notes Shor. “Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.”

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and the US is the only advanced country with no national vacation policy whatsoever.

Many American workers must keep on working through public holidays, and vacation days often go unused. Even when we finally carve out a holiday, many of us answer emails and “check in” whether we’re camping with the kids or trying to kick back on the beach.

Some blame the American worker for not taking what is her due. But in a period of consistently high unemployment, job insecurity and weak labour unions, employees may feel no choice but to accept the conditions set by the culture and the individual employer.

In a world of “at will” employment, where the work contract can be terminated at any time, it’s not easy to raise objections.

It’s true that the New Deal brought back some of the conditions that farm workers and artisans from the Middle Ages took for granted, but since the 1980s things have gone steadily downhill. With secure long-term employment slipping away, people jump from job to job, so seniority no longer offers the benefits of additional days off. The rising trend of hourly and part-time work, stoked by the Great Recession, means that for many, the idea of a guaranteed vacation is a dim memory.

The consequences of constantly working

Ironically, this cult of endless toil doesn’t really help the bottom line.

Study after study shows that overworking reduces productivity. On the other hand, performance increases after a vacation, and workers come back with restored energy and focus. The longer the vacation, the more relaxed and energised people feel upon returning to the office.

Economic crises give austerity-minded politicians excuses to talk of decreasing time off, increasing the retirement age and cutting into social insurance programs and safety nets that were supposed to allow us a fate better than working until we drop. In Europe, where workers average 25 to 30 days off per year, politicians like French President Francois Hollande and former Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras have sent signals that the culture of longer vacations is coming to an end.

But the belief that shorter vacations bring economic gains doesn’t appear to add up.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) the Greeks, who face a horrible economy, work more hours than any other Europeans. In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity.

Beyond burnout, vanishing vacations make our relationships with families and friends suffer. Our health is deteriorating: depression and higher risk of death are among the outcomes for our no-vacation nation. Some forward-thinking people have tried to reverse this trend, like progressive economist Robert Reich, who has argued in favour of a mandatory three weeks off for all American workers. Congressman Alan Grayson proposed the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, but alas, the bill didn’t even make it to the floor of Congress.

Speaking of Congress, its members seem to be the only people in America getting as much down time as the medieval peasant. In recent years, they’ve gotten upward of 239 days in vacation time.

Read the original article on Reuters.

Not content with making millions landless in the 18th century through enclosure, a new Treasury unit is now stealing Britain’s remaining family farmland, for Blackrock

Five suggestions to Save British Farming:

1. set up a charitable fund to pay off distressed farmers’ inheritance bills;
2. institute a chain of collectively owned farm shops in every market town to act as a mini supermarket for seasonal produce;
3. demand boycotts of supermarkets and/or products where price fixing is taking place, robbing farmers;
4. blockade factory farms and mass mechanised greenhouses owned by front companies for private equity firms;
5. set up a direct action group to occupy and obstruct individuals and businesses which are destroying UK family farming.

How’s that for a start. Please email me or add your own suggestions in the comments at the bottom.

Simon Fairlie’s Land Magazine follows the Socialist Workers Party and George Monbiot , dancing to the World Economic Forum’s global finance capitalism tune

STROUD: 02Jan24: Tony Gosling takes a look at UK Green ‘social justice’ campaigns’ extraordinary distancing themselves from farming’s grassroots, and unwitting sucking up to a Swiss-based oligopoly who want corporations to rule the world

BlackRock has this week been holding a series of board meetings in London — for the first time in 10 years — in what the government described as a “vote of confidence” in the UK. Around half the board stayed for the Downing Street meeting.

Fink has previously given his support to Labour, saying in October 2023 that Starmer had brought a “measurement of hope” to UK politics and demonstrated “great strength” in taking the party to the centre ground.

He said after the Number 10 meeting that he was “very proud of BlackRock’s long-standing UK presence”. The company has nearly 4,000 employees in the UK with offices in London, Edinburgh and — from next year — Birmingham.

The company, which has $11.5tn in assets under management globally, manages the retirement savings of more than 13m people in the UK, including pension funds for British Airways, Rolls-Royce and Royal Mail.

2022 to 2024 were a terrible year for The Land Magazine. The two founding editors were evicted from their home at Monkton Wyld near Lyme Regis. Simon Fairlie through the kangaroo courts in the Autumn of 2024 while Gill Barron was bullied out of the same rural community the year before.

The screaming irony now is the four individuals who hoofed Simon out of Monkton Wylde as residents and trustees simply walked away from their roles and the community … just a couple of weeks after Simon drove his last van-load of belongings away from his, and the magazine’s beautiful old home.

But Gill and Simon did considerably better than ‘One Man and his Dogger’ Robin Page, author, journalist, national advocate for wildlife-friendly farming who was evicted in 2021 from the eight-figure valued Countryside Restoration Trust he founded and built up over decades. He died 18 months later, of cancer, and a broken heart.

Simon Fairlie founded The Land Magazine in 1996 which began, after The Land Is Ours successful six-month long Guinness occupation in Wandsworth. As ‘Land Essays’, the ‘long read’ version of The Land Is Ours newsletter, it was always, as now, an occasional publication but in the last decade or so it has failed to address the contradictions in the ‘zero carbon’ agenda, such as new forest burning power stations, soaring living costs and more recently the supermarket and energy price-fixing assault on Britain’s family farms.

In the 2020s, sadly, my contributions, even to the Land Mag’s. letters page, have been spiked. The editorial has turned decidedly anti-livestock, anti game-hunting or poaching, backing the WEF’s discredited Rewilding’ programme (now Robin’s CRT is conveniently out of the way) promoted by George Monbiot’s partner, Rebecca Wrigley. Keeping it, top-down and where possible foundation funded, in the Davos family.

No Charmer: Starmer The Farmer Harmer

November and December 2024 saw two unprecedented family farmer protests at Westminster with around 10,000 turning out to a lobby called by the NFU in November and 6-700 tractors filling Whitehall, as the DEFRA select committee asked why the Treasury hadn’t just ended business rollover relief where millionaires were using farmland as a tax dodge, in the run-up to Christmas.

Taking farms off families is against everything social justice or environmental campaigners believe in. Yet in the 2025 Land Magazine [see below] Simon argues that the demise of small farms since 1984 is because there hasn’t been inheritance tax on larger farms. One wonders if he actually talks to or knows any farmers, who will tell him that a whole raft of price and ever-changing ‘variety’ policies and punitive penalties, imposed by supermarkets, have been cutting deep into margins right across farming ever since Thatcherism.

Families, and the secure tenure, such as freehold and copyhold, they have passed down, have been the bedrock of national food security since hunter-gatherers began to establish farming in England 6,000 years ago. It was the increasing surpluses these families produced, as they honed their craft over countless generations, that allowed for towns to grow and civilisation to flourish.

Ideally smallholdings and market gardens should be viable but that’s not been the case roughly since the 1970s, again since Thatcher and the supermarkets took over. You could argue today’s bigger farms, over 750 acres say, should be taxed, over 1000 definitely … but not ONLY if they are in individual ownership. Families who intend to pass their land or homes on to their children are ALWAYS the best stewards of the land.

The EEC and EU’s CAP subsidies were weighted towards rewarding massive landowners, the Royal family and their immediate underlings, Dukes and Duchesses, typically being granted the biggest ‘welfare payments’ which ensure their position on the Sunday Times rich list,

Taking it off families starts to sound like the son of the Nazi nuclear bomb scientist Klaus Schwab’s ‘You will own nothing, and be happy’ brigade again. The big institutional and feudal landowners, including Crown Estate, Duchys of Cornwall & Lancaster, Church of England, Ministry of Defence, Forestry England, Duke of Westminster etc etc all have their land in trust or Ltd companies so will avoid the tax these family farmers have to pay.

Rachel Reeves is not John McDonnell. When Jeremy Corbyn was bounced out of winning the 2017 General Election by Labour party apparatchiks and the London media, a new finance capitalism friendly Labour party under the iron grip of Starmer and Reeves arrived.

The good old 2003 illegal war party, with Blair and Campbell major figures behind the scenes, was approved fit to govern, by good King Charles and the City of London. When the high priest of finance capitalism Blackrock’s Larry Fink was schmoozed by Reeves and Starmer Downing Street in November 2024.

The prime minister responded by outlining his plan to overhaul British regulators, streamline regulatory approval processes and make the regulatory framework more consistent, the people added.

He told the executives that a new unit in the UK Treasury would be set up to co-ordinate this work across government, according to officials at the meeting.

The Family Farm Tax is part of a much wider post-war attack by global finance capitalism, which accelerated under Thatcher,  on people who work land they own, to feed us. Added to skyrocketing energy prices, ridiculous supermarket demands, etc, all brought about through fascist price-fixing, land put on the market to pay the tax or just to escape the ridiculous hours and negative margins, benefits…? Those who finance: solar farms, giant automated planting/harvesting greenhouses, factory farmers, industrial agriculture, carbon offset firms, those clear-cutting forestry as a biofuel. The list goes on and on as far as a speculator with pound signs in their eyes can dream.

Prof. Michael Hudson explains Finance Capitalism

As the source of all wealth the dying capitalist empire has given up trying to compete with China in manufacturing anything, its risk taking adventurous acolyte firms are looking for new profit centres amongst the dying Western countries they’ve ravaged. They are actively seeking out pastures new, of every and any sort, including clearcutting ancient forests to feed into power stations as documented by Jeff Gibb and Michael Moore in Planet of the Humans (2020).

But more importantly we are witnessing the beginning of a further wave of enclosure.  This time, land is not being stolen from peasants by large farmers. Its beginning the move from private, into corporate hands. And The Land Magazine, and Land Workers Alliance, along with traditional left-wing workers groups such as the SWP are cheering it on. ‘You see those farmers all vote Tory’. ‘Why shouldn’t they pay inheritance tax just like everyone else’.

Simon Fairlie has become George Monbiot lite. Simon still clings to that cruel anti-vegan trope, meat-eating, and is therefore not 4th Reich WEF extremist enough for the Guardian. Which, while everything is done to keep Simon on side, remains the George Monbiot domain.

Nevertheless… I’m not here to sell you anything, I’m the sort of editor who will invite all sides to the dinner table. So, over to Simon…

The “Family Farm Tax”, might there be up-sides?

By Simon Fairlie, December 2024

In the Spring of 1920 Sir Nicholas Bacon of Raveningham Hall in Norfolk wrote to the tenants farming his land:

It has unfortunately become necessary for me to follow the course already pursued by many landowners — that is, of selling a considerable portion of my estate . . . Heavy war taxation, the great increase of Death Duties of last year’s budget, the increased cost of living, and the growing up of my family, for whom provision must be made, compel this step. I can only hope that many of my tenants may be able to purchase their farms, and so not leave their homes.

The four years that followed the First World War witnessed an unprecedented shift in landownership, something akin to land reform. “England is changing hands,” The Times observed. To counteract inheritance tax and other expenses, large numbers of aristocratic farming estates were sold off. No one knows exactly how many acres, and claims that “a quarter of England changed hands” may be exaggerated. What is known is that:

owner-occupation increased from 10.9 percent of the cultivated area of England and Wales in 1914, to 36 per cent of the cultivated area in 1927 . . . roughly one quarter of the cultivated area changed from being tenanted land to being land owned by the farmers.

Many of Britain’s independent family farms owe their existence to increased death duties, first introduced by the Liberal Lord Harcourt in 1894 and reinforced by Lloyd George twenty- five years later. It is somewhat ironic then, that many of these farmers are now vociferously opposed to parallel increases in Inheritance Tax, made in the Labour Government’s Autumn Budget. Agricultural property inheritance tax relief has been removed, theoretically from all farms valued at over £1 million, though after allowances for spouses etc this is more likely to equate to £3 million. The Government states that some three quarters of all farms will be unaffected, but nonetheless the National Farmers’ Union has dubbed the move “the Family Farm Tax”. Its President, Tom Bradshaw claims to have

heard about distressed elderly parents who are having to apologise to their children in tears for something that isn’t their fault, telling them they’re sorry because they feel they’re now a burden on the family.

Besides the need to plug the much vaunted £22 billion budget shortfall, some of the thinking behind the new Labour Government’s assault on Inheritance Tax relief can be traced to the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty and others, who have noted that rising wealth inequality is fuelled by the flow of inheritances from one generation to the next. The ratio of personal wealth to national income is rising and over the last 20 years the value of property and land has increased far faster than wages or inflation.

Nowhere is this tendency more noticeable than in the farming sector which is inherently dependent on land and property. A 200 acre farm worth in the region of million, might yield an annual net income of only £25,000, just one percent or even nothing at all other than the available subsidies. In such cases the real profit lies in the increasing value of the property, and many farm-owners are simultaneously underpaid workers and fat capitalists. Under these frankly bonkers economic conditions, failing farmers throw in the towel and cash in, while successful ones engross their holdings, leading to the consolidation of assets that is endemic to unregulated capitalism. As farms get bigger and economies of scale increase, the margins dictated by the supermarkets decline and another cohort of farms finds it impossible to make ends meet, and so it continues.

The National Farmers’ Union, which is at heart a landowners’ union, knows only too well how to exploit this schizoid role, posing to the public as the defender of the hard-pressed food producer, while advocating policies that benefit the engrossing landowner, and that is precisely what it is doing in respect of the “Family Farm Tax”. Since 1984 the regime of exemption from Inheritance Tax has accompanied the loss of around half of the farms under 100 hectares in England and Wales and an increase in those over 200 hectares. To claim that removing the exemption for the largest farms will threaten family farms is brazen hypocrisy.

How much impact this measure will actually have is hard to say, but if it goes any way towards breaking up large holdings, and releasing land onto the market that is cheaper and more accessible to new entrants, that is very much to be welcomed. The total area of land currently coming onto the market

around 150,000 acres in 2023 is less than a quarter of the area traded in 1950, and an even smaller proportion of the area that changed hands in 1920.

Only one caveat has been voiced by the Tenant Farmers’ Association, representing farmers whose hard work boosts the largest landowners’ incomes, and who may find the land they rent sold to pay off Inheritance Tax. Its Chief Executive, George Dunn has written:

“The £1 million tax-free exemption may help small owner occupiers, but it will not help small tenant farmers on large estates, particularly those occupying under insecure Farm Business Tenancies. The Chancellor of the Exchequer must think again. The 2026 legislation must include a provision to exempt land let for 10 or more years. Without this provision, we could see the loss of many small family farms”.

Alternatively some of the money raised could be used to help fund any such tenants who wished to buy the property.

Simon Fairlie is founder, now co-editor of TheLandMagazine.org.uk and the printed mag with Mike Hannis (Kingshill), Gill Barron and SM Parsons

SOURCES

J.Beckett and M.Turner “End of the Old Order? FML Thompson, the Land Question, and the Burden of Ownership in England” AgHR 55,11.

Anthony B Atkinson, “Wealth and Inheritance in Britain from 1896 to the Present”, LSE OnLine, 2018.

Fami statistics from DEFRA and Savils.

Billionaire Guy Hands’ property firm sells military homes to MoD for £6bn

Terra Firma’s sale of 36,000 properties ends legal fight with government over recent housing reforms

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/dec/17/guy-hands-property-military-homes-mod-terra-firma

Tue 17 Dec 2024

A property company linked to Guy Hands has agreed to sell 36,000 military homes to the UK’s Ministry of Defence for almost £6bn, signalling an end to a long-running battle between the billionaire and the government.

Annington will hand over its 999-year lease on the 36,347 homes, known as the Married Quarters Estate, to the MoD and receive £5.99bn in return – almost twice as much as Hands’ private equity company Terra Firma paid for Annington more than a decade ago, but less than the £8bn the homes were valued at last year.

The sale ends court proceedings brought by Annington over planned housing reforms. In September, the company took a legal fight with the UK government to the European court of human rights over fears it could lose significant sums as a result of the new Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act. It also launched a challenge in the high court on the same grounds.

In 1996, under the then defence secretary, Michael Portillo, the Conservative government sold 57,400 houses used by military service men and women and their families to Annington for £1.7bn – making the company the biggest residential property owner in England and Wales.

The MoD rented back the homes on a 200-year lease at a discount but also agreed to pay for their maintenance and refurbishment.

Annington refurbished and sold nearly 20,000 homes.

In 2012, Terra Firma bought Annington from the Japanese investment bank Nomura Holdings for £3.2bn. Hands, one of Britain’s highest-profile private equity investors, launched Terra Firma in 2002 and has since made more than £15bn in investments, including the record company EMI, Tilia Homes and Welcome Hotels.

In January 2022, the MoD said it was hoping to take back full ownership of the homes through enfranchisement rules under existing leasehold legislation.

The MoD said the deal brought back military housing into public hands and ended a “huge annual rental bill” to save about £230m a year.

John Healey, the defence secretary, said: “There is still a lot of work to do to deliver the homes our military families deserve, and these problems will not be fixed overnight. But this is a decisive break with the failed approach of the past and a major step forward on that journey.”

Ian Rylatt, the Annington chief executive, said the sale represented a new chapter for the estate and “ends a costly and distracting legal dispute, allowing everyone to move forward”.

Accommodation for service personnel and their families is “shocking”, as issues with damp and mould persist, according to a report from the Commons defence committee published last week.

It found that two-thirds of the homes for service families “need extensive refurbishment or rebuilding” along with a third of the homes rented by individuals. The family homes are part of the Annington portfolio, but the government is responsible for their maintenance.

Last year, the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, which is responsible for maintaining and servicing military accommodation, was given £400m to tackle mould, damp and other problems.

The report found that its contracts resulted in “poor contractor performance, poor quality of maintenance and repair work, and a poor lived experience for many serving personnel and their families”.

The MoD will transfer 159 homes worth £55m to Annington within 12 months as part of a pre-existing agreement.

Contracts were exchanged in relation to the £5.99bn sale on Monday and the deal is expected to close on 9 January. The sale proceeds will be used to pay down Annington’s debt, with another portion distributed to shareholders, including UK pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.

The firm, which has 1,600 other rental properties, also plans to reinvest in the UK property market.

MPs Why didn’t Treasury abolish business rollover relief, rather than put inheritance tax on farmers?

Jeremy Moody, secretary and adviser at Central Association for Agricultural Valuers, added that the tax changes would not discourage companies from snapping-up farmland, adding: “It is only individuals who die.”

Over half of farmers who gain from tax loophole have ‘no involvement in farming in any way’
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/over-half-farmers-who-gain-34294829

Hundreds of farmers in tractors descended on Westminster to protest, while MPs heard less than half of estates claiming agricultural relief made any income from farming in five years

Farmers in tractors staged another protest over the government’s inheritance tax changes – despite fresh claims large landowners are the big winners from current rules.

Hundreds descended on London, with go-slow demonstrations on dual carriageways in a number of other places. It marked a second day of action in the wake of Rachel Reeves’s Budget announcement that farms worth more than £1million will pay 20% inheritance tax from 2026.

Farmers called the change “another kick in the teeth”, while some backed cutting off food supplies in the new year as “wake up call”.

It came as MPs scrutinising the shake-up heard more than half those claiming a lucrative tax break to avoid death duties have “no involvement in farming in any way”.

The 20% inheritance tax rate – half that for everyone else – replaces two types of relief worth up to 100%.

Dr Arun Advani, director of Centre for the Analysis of Taxation, told the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee: “Less than half of the estates who are claiming agricultural relief have any income from farming anywhere in the five years before death.”

About 44% of the claims are from people you would think of as farmers.”

The others, he said, are “a mix of people who own a house and some pony paddocks or who own land and let it out to a lot of people but are not involved in any farming in any way.”

The Mirror revealed this month how a quarter of all England’s farmland belongs to just 2,500 owners. The highly respected Institute for Fiscal Studies says those paying more tax under the changes would be heavily concentrated among large wealthy landowners.

But Dr Advani warned, at 20%, the inheritance tax rate still made it attractive for the wealthy to buy up agricultural land, pushing up prices for genuine smaller family farmers who want to work the land themselves.

Jeremy Moody, secretary and adviser at Central Association for Agricultural Valuers, added that the tax changes would not discourage companies from snapping-up farmland, adding: “It is only individuals who die.”Tom Bradshaw, president of the National Farmers’ Union, claimed Ms Reeves had refused to meet.

War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural LandView of the wheat field during the harvesting season near Krasne village, Ukraine

February 21, 2023

https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/war-theft-takeover-ukraine-agricultural-land

War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land exposes the financial interests and the dynamics at play leading to further concentration of land and finance.

The total amount of land controlled by oligarchs, corrupt individuals, and large agribusinesses is over nine million hectares — exceeding 28 percent of Ukraine’s arable land. The largest landholders are a mix of Ukrainian oligarchs and foreign interests — mostly European and North American as well as the sovereign fund of Saudi Arabia. Prominent US pension funds, foundations, and university endowments are invested through NCH Capital, a US-based private equity fund.

Several agribusinesses, still largely controlled by oligarchs, have opened up to Western banks and investment funds — including prominent ones such as Kopernik, BNP, or Vanguard — who now control part of their shares. Most of the large landholders are substantially indebted to Western funds and institutions, notably the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank.Western financing to Ukraine in recent years has been tied to a drastic structural adjustment program that has required austerity and privatization measures, including the creation of a land market for the sale of agricultural land. President Zelenskyy put the land reform into law in 2020 against the will of the vast majority of the population who feared it would exacerbate corruption and reinforce control by powerful interests in the agricultural sector. Findings of the report concur with these concerns. While large landholders are securing massive financing from Western financial institutions, Ukrainian farmers — essential for ensuring domestic food supply — receive virtually no support. With the land market in place, amidst high economic stress and war, this difference of treatment will lead to more land consolidation by large agribusinesses.

The report also sounds the alarm that Ukraine’s crippling debt is being used as a leverage by the financial institutions to drive post-war reconstruction towards further privatization and liberalization reforms in several sectors, including agriculture.

War And Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land

by Frédéric Mousseau and Eve Devillers. For The Oakland Institute, PO Box 18978 Oakland, CA 94619 USA

February 21, 2023

https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/war-theft-takeover-ukraine-agricultural-land

The war in Ukraine has been at the center stage of foreign policy and media reports since February 2022. Little attention, however, has been given to a major issue, which is at the core of the conflict – who controls the agricultural land in the country known as the “breadbasket of Europe?”This report addresses this gap – identifying the interests controlling Ukraine’s agricultural land and presenting an analysis of the dynamics at play around land tenure in the country. This includes the highly controversial land reform that took place in 2021 as part of the structural adjustment program initiated under the auspices of Western financial institutions, after the installation of a pro-European Union (EU) government following the Maidan Revolution in 2014.

With 33 million hectares of arable land, Ukraine has large swaths of the most fertile farmland in the world. 1 Misguided privatization and corrupt governance since the early 1990s have concentrated land in the hands of a new oligarchic class. Around 4.3 million hectares are under large-scale agri- culture, with the bulk, three million hectares, in the hands of just a dozen large agribusiness firms.

In addition, according to the government, about five million hectares – the size of two Crimea – have been “stolen” by private interests from the state of Ukraine. The total amount of land controlled by oligarchs, corrupt individuals, and large agribusinesses is thus over nine million hectares, exceeding 28 percent of the country’s arable land. The rest is used by over eight million Ukrainian farmers.

The largest landholders are a mix of oligarchs and a variety of foreign interests – mostly European and North American, including a US-based private equity fund and the sovereign fund of Saudi Arabia. All but one of the ten largest landholding firms are registered overseas, mainly in tax havens such as Cyprus or Luxembourg. Even when run and still largely controlled by an oligarch founder, a number of firms have gone public with Western banks and investment funds now controlling a significant amount of their shares.

The report identifies many prominent investors, including Vanguard Group, Kopernik Global Investors, BNP Asset Management Holding, Goldman Sachs-owned NN Investment Partners Holdings, and Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. A number of large US pension funds, foundations, and university endowments are also invested in Ukrainian land through NCH Capital – a US-based private equity fund, which is the fifth largest landholder in the country.

Most of these firms are substantially indebted to Western financial institutions, in particular the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the European Investment Bank (EIB), and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – the private sector arm of the World Bank. Together, these institutions have been major lenders to Ukrainian agribusinesses, with close to US$1.7 billion lent to just six of Ukraine’s largest landholding firms in recent years. Other key lenders are a mix of mainly European and North American financial institutions, both public and private. Not only does this debt gives creditors financial stakes in the operation of the agribusinesses, but also confers a significant level of leverage over them. This was evidenced by the debt restructuring of UkrLandFarming, one of Ukraine’s largest landholders, which involved creditors including the Export-Import agencies of the US, Canada, and Denmark, among others, and led to important organizational changes including layoffs of thousands of workers.

This international financing directly benefits oligarchs, several of whom face accusations of fraud and corrupt dealings, as well as the foreign funds and firms associated as shareholders or creditors. Meanwhile, Ukrainian farmers have had to operate with limited amounts of land and financing, and many are now on the verge of poverty. Data shows that these farmers receive virtually no support compared to agribusinesses and oligarchs.

The Partial Credit Guarantee Fund established by the World Bank to support small farmers is only US$5.4 million, a negligible amount compared to the billions channeled to large agribusinesses.

In recent years, Western countries and institutions have provided massive military and economic assistance to Ukraine, which became the top recipient of US foreign aid – marking the first time since the Marshall Plan that a European country holds this top spot.

As of December 2022, less than one year into the war, the US has allocated over US$113 billion to Ukraine, including US$65 billion of military aid, 8 which is more than the entire budget of the State Department and USAID globally (US$58 billion).

The report details how Western aid has been conditioned to a drastic structural adjustment program, which includes austerity measures, cuts in social safety nets, and the privatization of key sectors of the economy. A central condition has been the creation of a land market, put into law in 2020 under President Zelenskyy, despite opposition from a majority of Ukrainians fearing that it will exacerbate corruption in the agricultural sector and reinforce its control by powerful interests.

The findings of the report validate this concern, showing that the creation of a land market will likely further increase the amount of agricultural land in the hands of oligarchs and large agribusiness firms. The latter have already started expanding their access to land. Kernel has announced plans to increase its land bank to 700,000 hectares – up from 506,000 hectares in 2021.

Similarly, MHP, which currently controls 360,000 hectares of land, seeks to expand its holdings to 550,000 hectares. MHP is also reportedly circumventing restrictions on the purchase of land by asking its employees to buy land and lease it to the company.

Additionally, by supporting large agribusinesses, international financial institutions are in effect subsidizing the concentration of land and an industrial model of agriculture based on the intensive use of synthetic inputs, fossil fuels, and large-scale monocropping – long shown to be environmentally and socially destructive.

By contrast, small scale farmers in Ukraine demonstrate resilience and a great potential for leading the expansion of a different production model based on agroecology, environmental sustainability, and the production of healthy food. It is Ukraine’s small and medium-sized farmers who guarantee the country’s food security whereas large agribusinesses are geared towards export markets.

In December 2022, a coalition of farmers, academics, and NGOs called on the Ukrainian government to suspend the 2020 land reform law and all market transactions of land during the war and post- war period, “in order to guarantee the national security and preservation of territorial integrity of the country in wartime and post-war reconstruction period.”

As explained by Prof. Olena Borodina of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU), “Today, thousands of rural boys and girls, farmers, are fighting and dying in the war. They have lost everything. The processes of free land sale and purchase are increasingly liberalized and advertised. This really threatens the rights of Ukrainians to their land, for which they give their lives.”

At a time of tremendous suffering and displacement, wherein countless lives have been lost and massive financial resources spent for the control of Ukraine, this report raises major concerns about the future of land and food production in the country, which is likely to become more consolidated and controlled by oligarchs and foreign interests.

These concerns are exacerbated by Ukraine’s staggering and growing foreign debt, contracted at the expense of the population’s living conditions as a result of the measures required under the structural adjustment program. Ukraine is now the world’s third-largest debtor to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) 17 and its crippling debt burden will likely result in additional pressure from its creditors, bondholders, and international financial institutions on how post-war reconstruction – estimated to cost US$750 billion – should happen.

These powerful actors have already been explicit that they will use their leverage to further privatize the country’s public sector and liberalize its agriculture.

The end of the war should be the moment and opportunity for just the opposite, i.e. the redesign of an economic model no longer dominated by oligarchy and corruption, but where land and resources are controlled by and benefit all Ukrainians. This could form the basis for the transformation of the agricultural sector to make it more democratic and environmentally and socially sustainable. International policy and financial support should be geared towards this transformation, to benefit people and farmers rather than oligarchs and foreign financial interests.

This 50 page report continues here…

https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/war-theft-takeover-ukraine-agricultural-land

https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/takeover-ukraine-agricultural-land.pdf

Here’s PM Starmer’s NFU 2023 speech which has got so many farmers fuming. By imposing inheritance tax in the October budget his promises to support family farms and stabilise the market for food… all broken

NFU23: Sir Keir explains his vision for British farming
Opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer made Labour’s pitch for the farming vote with a keynote speech that included pledges on national food resilience, rural services, and, notably, on the food bought by schools, hospitals, prisons and Whitehall departments.
“The next Labour government will commit to this – 50% of all food purchased by the public sector will be food produced locally and sustainably,” Sir Keir told NFU23 delegates.
“That is £1.2 billion of public money spent on quality food that is genuinely better for peoples’ health.
“And 50% is just the minimum. We will do everything to go beyond it.
“We’re committed to reforming public procurement. And seasonal, sustainable, British-grown food is a key part of it.”

i recommend watching these guys…..

also…..Oli at Farming Explained……Leicestershire

Agricultural Property Relief. A look at Agricultural Property Relief and a discussion of the potential effects of the new tax on farms levied by the Labour Party, with reference to David Lloyd George’s Death Duties as levied to fund his welfare reforms.

Oli also reviews the WWII Labour party’s plans to nationalise land…

Land Nationalisation. Scientist Daniel Hall proposed a reshaping of the British countryside for the twentieth century. Along with his friend, economist C S Orwin, Hall followed in the footsteps of earlier writers on scientific agricuture in demanding a British landscape designed only for agricultural efficiency. State ownership of the land would be necessary for the changes to land holdings and attendant infrastructure to be brought into being.

and Harry Metcalf…..Harry’s Farm

Big changes in the 2024 Budget have led to real anger on UK family farms. What’s going on?

In last week’s Budget, the new Labour Government introduced revised tax rates for Inheritance Tax. From April 2026, the 100% Agricultural Property relief will only be on the first £1,000,000, after that the rate will be 20%. This video explains why this is going to be so damaging to UK family farms.