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:
- set up a charitable fund to pay off distressed farmers’ inheritance bills;
- institute a chain of collectively owned farm shops in every market town to act as a mini supermarket for seasonal produce;
- demand boycotts of supermarkets and/or products where price fixing is taking place, robbing farmers;
- blockade factory farms and mass mechanised greenhouses owned by front companies for private equity firms;
- 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
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 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.
The British Government is dismantling our food supply