THOUSANDS of farmers and their supporters have descended on Westminster to protest Labour’s inheritance tax raid on family farms.
The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) is holding a mass lobby of MPs with 1800 of its members and its Scottish branch has also sent down a contingent to London to join mass protests outside the UK Parliament.
They want the Government to scrap plans to impose inheritance tax on family farms – which have previously been exempt.
Farmers dispute the Government’s figures which say very few farmers will be affected by the changes which will see the agricultural relief on inheritance tax scrapped over the first £1 million on a farm’s worth.
Adrian Gleed (above, left), a 70-year-old farmer from Cirencester, Gloucester was among what the Metropolitan Police estimated to be a 10,000 strong crowd in Whitehall, just around the corner from Parliament on Tuesday morning.
The sheep farmer, who farms around 500 acres in the south west of England, told The National he and his family were “struggling”.
He said: “Last year, I earnt nothing, nothing at all, my tax bill was zero, that’s how bad it was.”
Andrew Timbrell, 61, also from Cirencester, said that neither he nor his son who helps run the arable farm took a wage from that work and instead drew income from their other businesses.
He said: “There is no money, spare cash in the farming business to take a wage off of it. And if you did, there would be no reinvestment in any machinery or sheds or even concrete or anything.”
Michael and Judith Tarver, both 70 and from Worcestershire were also at the Whitehall rally, which was attended by Reform leader Nigel Farage and TV personality turned farmer Jeremy Clarkson.
They said they worked a 640 acre arable farm and blasted the Government’s tax raid as “cruel”.
Judith (above, right), a grandmother of nine said the Government did not understand rural communities and said she and her husband had tried to live “carefully” to pass on the farm to their children.
She added: “It’s very alarming actually that the Government has so little knowledge of how the countryside works. They’re all from north London, I gather and they haven’t even tried to get their information together correctly.”
Michael said that after a bad harvest this year and the year before they had not drawn so little income from the farm from the past two years they had not earnt enough to meet the income tax threshold.
He added: “Ourselves and our daughter just draw about the bare minimum, no high living out of it.”
The NFU has claimed the Government has “miscalculated” the impact of the policy and said, by the union’s figures, 75% of farms would be affected, while Labour insist that only “only around 500 farms” would be affected.
Environment Secretary Steve Reed (above) said: “The vast majority of farmers will pay nothing more.”
Clarkson, best known as the former presenter of BBC’s Top Gear, has previously said that avoiding inheritance tax was the “critical thing” in his decision to purchase the Diddly Squat farm, an enterprise which is now the subject of a reality TV show.
