Can you explain this a bit? What's their situation?
25 Apr 2023
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I do wonder how sentient people are sometimes. But that's for another thread. Am I going to have to explain the difference between some, most, and all, to you now? Can you see how thick you have to be, or pretend to be, to have any traction in the argument?
Not all of them voted fascist this time, and they'd been so pant wetting bad in government, that you had to be really deep in the rabbit hole not to see it. But their Russian paymasters will be heartened that they have fatally holed the country below the water, and yet still a heavy percentage voted for their fascism*. You'll all be back next time having bought the barrage of propaganda that labour have done nothing, and they are all the same.
* Obviously that's how it starts. Ultimately the voting bit will be dispensed with. See Putin's sham elections.
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Genuinely interested in how big their farms are.
The balance has to be found between family farmers and extreme landowners and I don't have the knowledge really of where that balance sits. There appears to be around 20 Dukes who have owned ridiculous estates basically since William the Bastard handed out land to his mercenary invasion force, go after them and the people like Clarkson, Dyson and Bamford who bought land to avoid tax, and use the break up to empower small farmers who we will need to feed the country in a very different way to the last 50 years. There is a good piece on Unherd by James Rebanks, who seems to understand both the farming traditions and the need to evolve.
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I think a reform is right, at the moment landowners who rent out their land for farming or share farm qualify. It should only be for actual farmers.
Also there could be some sort of tapering of relief down to zero.
I think a sensible approach would be on acreage, which may differ depending on the type of farm and location (e.g. more for hill farmers?). Others would know better than me the size of a sustainable farm, 300 or 400 acres?
At the moment Giles who has a country house and rents out 60 acres to the local farmer gets relief, but the farmer actually farming 250 acres probably won't. That is patently ridiculous.
The measure imposed is too blunt.
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Like many other forms of tax unfortunately.
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As soon as you start introducing exceptions and allowances, you also introduce loopholes.
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60% of farms in England are below 123 acres so it's smaller than you think.
But, 20 dukes own over a million acres between them and have done for hundreds of years without ever paying tax on it.
Over half a million acres of land in England is dedicated to shooting grouse (much more in Scotland).
Guy Shrubshole is very good on this stuff.
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I wouldn't think anything that small is a viable working farm (I suppose pig and chicken intensive farms maybe). I would guess at least twice that size.
They sound more like small holdings and hobby farms (people with big houses and land) who would be ok with the £1m anyway.
On top of the farm size you have the equipment, livestock, crops.
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But part of the point of these conversations is that large, industrialised, intensive farming is not viable in a post fossil fuel world and has overseen massive destruction of nature and wildlife while it has been operating, so we need to move to models where small farms worked by considerably more human hands (and animal legs) are viable.
