Here is the News.

I started to, honestly, got maybe 7 paragraphs in then had to go make dinner. His analysis seems sensible and suggestions too.

In case you hadn't noticed the way we have fucked the planet is starting to deal with that.

Will the kids of the super wealthy sell, though? Or will they hold the asset and just take the income from renting it out? They’re the kids of the super wealthy, after all. Maybe the cash out if the land gets zoned for development… by which time the IHT is a rounding error anyway. Otherwise why not just wait the ten years?

Generally I am all for people being able to defer things like IHT (or land tax, my fave bane of the ‘cash poor’ millionaires) but not if it’s on the never-never or it times-out. That’s just another loophole waiting to be exploited. ‘Oh ok, here’s £20m for a ten year rental of your farm plus an option to buy for 50p at the end’.

Well, to be honest the current way doesn't stop that anyway. A 1,000 year lease on a peppercorn rent, then the land is worthless anyway for IHT.

But it may well stop the people who buy 50 to 100 acres.

Is the answer to this not something to do with price of their food, spending more collectively on our food, and buying more locally, moving away from supermarkets towards localised production and sales? The first line above suggests so.

Where do the 12m or so that live in London get their local food from in this model?

Actually I've missed the point haven't I, thats how the population gets back to levels that the local model can cope with.

The rest of the UK? I mean, for me, you cockney bastards can grow your own food, but anything has to be better than flying it halfway round the world.

I thought so but I think the consensus is "naaar, fuck um."

Having a trade deal with your nearest neighbours makes more sense than one with Aussie and NZ, you'd think.

The doing away with supermarkets suggested everyone was popping to good old Farmer Giles down the road to get half a dozen eggs and a pint of milk.

I agree flying stuff around isn't great. Can the collective Farmer Giles's actually produce enough food to feed our population? I've no idea if it's feasible.

So your point is that farmers are earning barely enough to get by, so they should be exempt from inheritance tax?

Yeah, but if you do it before death then the proceeds are subject to IHT, right?

What proceeds? And you could do it into trust