Telly thread

I'm sure you're right but the only person I've heard of from the 4 names you mention is Clarkson.

Never had the time to watch Clarkson's farm or the grand tour. I think it might be something I watch alone as I come home from working silly hours only to watch maybe one show a night and we have to agree on what. The joys of marriage. Wifey wanted to watch Euphoria which was admittedly excellent for the first two seasons. I quickly realised that this iteration was a money grab as most of the cast had become bigger than what they were. It really was awful. Utter slop. It couldn't decide what it wanted. Whether it be a Tarantino noir or a precationary tale of adulthood being just as difficult for people who never really solved their issues. Terrible terrible stuff. I also believe it was because the first two seasons were following the original Israeli vibe and like the Game Of Thrones numpties couldn't do anything original when the source material had run out.

Furious is much better. Does it have Jeffrey Epstein vibes. It certainly does but it is very well done when it could have descended into melodrama. Emmy Rossum who was in the 'Merican version of Shameless is excellent. She is also playing a pretty fucked up character that doesn't distract from the main story. In this case sort of enhances it. Unusual for a thriller where it needs to be laser focused. Task on HBO did a great job with complicated characters. This does it better. Recommended. And yeah there really are some pretty angry women out there. I work with some of them. (clients).

Comedies are harder to come by but like Rooster on HBO from the makers of shrinking and Scrubs. Widow's bay seems like a lot of fun and Adults on FX is silly but not annoying. Ted Lasso is a mixed bag. Seems to be riddled with Cliches now which is a shame. The first episode was horrendous. The second was better because of the new female characters. The jury is out...

Chicago: All over the place.

Wasn’t that fuss about inheritances? So less about taxing the wealth of farmers and more about taxing people who just got a free farm.

Yes probably. Better that farms get sold to big corporations, ideally overseas so we get money flowing into the country.

But I would think the aim should be to stop descendants inheriting and then selling effectively tax free - what they have done now is say up to £5m can be tax free - which to be honest removes some of the issue - but doesn't solve the problem they were looking at.

Especially as larger farms only get taxed at 20% so half the rate of other (non business assets) so still a good deal

If I was rich and facing a large IHT bill, I would buy farmland and enter a farming agreement.

Dan Niedle is very good on this - but a few better options

1) A tapered APR relief - if they sell within x years - IHT/CGT is payable on the market value with no cost uplift

2) The institution of a life time limit on holdover relief - when I talk to farmers even they think that is ridiculous and just leads to land prices increasing

3) Possibly the ending of rebasing - e.g. when you die you get £5m free of IHT and you ALSO get the cost increased to market value at the date of death

To my mind all should be done to encourage farmers to farm the land - food security, rural employment etc, but once you stop, those benefits should be immediately withdrawn.

Your sensible suggestions are missing the point; farmers are rich and wealthy and need to be taxed as a punishment for that.

I’d like to see a system that reduced land prices and encouraged small parcels of land to come onto the market at reasonable costs, so folk from non farming backgrounds could become landowning farmers. There’s currently a ridiculously high barrier to entry into farming. Something around IHT might have this impact.

I think limiting holdover relief would have a big impact on land values

If you want farming to be a fun and fluffy lifestyle choice then this is great. If you want farming the produce enough food for all the people who want it, then this is an awful plan. Yes.. corporations are big and evil and do many harms.. but industrial farming is how the world gets fed because MegaGlobalMurderCorp gets fifty times the yield of ‘folk from non-farming backgrounds’.

I’m all for people doing lifestyle farming.. but they probably shouldn’t be given a structural advantage that pushes out those who actually know how to feed us.

Hmmm. Not many MegaGlobalMurderCorp farms around here. Sure it's different in parts of US and Aus, also in the Fens/East Anglia in the UK. Average UK farm size is around 200 acres. And I'm not advocating farming in lefty sandals either. There will be lots and lots of young people with progressive tech-driven ideas who at present have no chance of putting those plans into action because of the high entry barriers and the conservative nature of many farmers.

As for feeding the nation, vast swathes of the countryside around me are not being farmed. No animals, no crops, so I guess it's uneconomic maybe due to imports? That needs looking at too if we want food security.

Actually the majority of farmers around the world are subsistence farming feeding local people, and small farms produce around a third of the global food supply using around a quarter of the global farming land.

Anyway, industrial farming also poisons the waterways, erodes the soil, destroys biodiversity, burns fossil fuels, entraps farmers into buying external inputs rather than being self-sufficient, cripples them with debt, and on and on.

Like most issues right now we're stifled by knowing everything is broken but not wanting to let go of old assumptions (and comforts), but we're likely to need to move to much smaller scale, mixed farming, far more legume crops in place of monoculture cereals, and many more hands on the land than in the offices. Like most things that are coming it's not an easy sell, so mostly avoided.

Which is why people would rather watch Clarkson dodging taxes than dig into the detail of a genuinely sustainable farming future (and why his "reach" is meaningless, or worse).

Globally, maybe.. I don’t think the good people of the UK are ready to switch to the diet that those subsistence farms produce. I don’t mind being schooled on the data here but the idea that small farms are much more productive than large ones doesn’t pass the sniff test unless those stats are hiding a lot about the massive discrepancy between the productivity of crop farming vs livestock farming. Which is a thing.. but, again, I don’t think the UK is willing to go Vegan so that more people can play farmer.

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Yeah. And then all the food passes through the absolute cunts that run all the supermarkets… but those systems are essential for the diets of highly developed nations so getting rid of them is going to cause quite the fuss. We can go for it though.. I’m already vegetarian and I’ve got some acres on which Rhubarb apparently just fucking LOVES growing whether I want it to or not.