• 19 Nov 2024, 3:17 p.m.

    It will be good for the farming sector, if it returns more affordable land to actual farming. It will be bad for the tax free inheritance sector. Swings and roundabouts, as with any tax change. What is clear is that what we are currently doing, doesn't work for any sector. Except for the inherited wealth and privilege sector.

  • 19 Nov 2024, 3:24 p.m.

    Lets look back in 10 years and see what has happened to the price of farmland, farming is massively capital intensive so I can't see that many new entrants (other than corporate consolidators) but I am often wrong.

    Actually if you are massively wealthy you may consider a 20% tax rate on death as not too bad - it is the not massively wealthy who actually want to farm who will be impacted in my view.

  • 19 Nov 2024, 3:47 p.m.

    It may still go up. But if you take investment value for inheritance planning out of the potential uses, it well be less than it otherwise would be. Supply and demand. As I say, recent farm land purchasers are less than 50% for actual farming.

    This is clearly not the only challenge that farming faces, and retaining investment land for a crop of houses remains a pertinent one.

    I don't imagine there is one magic wand that solves all problems. I'm not quite sure that equalising IHT on investment land for inherited wealth is the big social demon that it's currently being presented as. I agree that much more needs to be done.

    Farming is not going to be sustainable while big business is allowed to import low priced goods in competition, while not being properly taxed, and having the advantage of having their wage costs subsidised. Particularly having lost Farming subsidies. How is that fair, or supporting Britain.... Of which we are all so proud?

  • 19 Nov 2024, 5:15 p.m.

    Of course govt comms is bad on this sort of thing,because it gets filtered by the media who are, globally, in the pocket of the entrenched wealthy. Same thing just happened in the US and last year in NZ. The 50K march on Wellington yesterday, with a petition signed by 200K people (in a country of 5M), is being downplayed by domestic news, who support the thinktank-backed side of the argument which divides and undermines protections.

  • 19 Nov 2024, 7:34 p.m.

    How very amusing. Still, I assume we're all in agreement British agriculture has got the hero it deserves.

  • 19 Nov 2024, 7:45 p.m.

    Farage, Clarkson, Tice or Tricky?

  • 20 Nov 2024, 1:27 p.m.

    Just taken delivery of a bottle of booze, part of somebody's birthday present. Due to a necessary 'age verification process', the courier refused to hand it over until I told him my date of birth, obviously not trusting the evidence of his own eyes.

  • 20 Nov 2024, 1:28 p.m.

    Despite the bad comms, there seems to be an under current of the general populace picking up the nuance of it all and being a bit "fuck the landed gentry" about it. Which was unexpected.
    And I have heard it said that perhaps this might encourage innovation in a stagnant industry.
    And "They" voted for Brexit so fuck em.
    I have no idea what percentage of them voted for Brexit

  • 20 Nov 2024, 1:33 p.m.

    Quite a lot of them put out "Vote Tory" boards in their fields, even at the last election. Ergo they are anti-british, and deserve all they* get. Preferably demonised and starved out, like wot the tories dish out on others.

    * Even where 'they' might be me. There are always casualties in war.

  • 20 Nov 2024, 1:35 p.m.

    The farmers around here, and there are a lot of them, drive fabulous cars, build incredibly beautiful houses, dress in only the finest of country gear. They're living the high life. It is likely they only take a salary of £12k, peasants, but the farm does provide tax free lifestyles.

  • 20 Nov 2024, 3:17 p.m.

    A caller to LBC yesterday evening said that he'd taken a train into London King's Cross first thing that morning. The front two carriages were apparently first-class and he said as he stepped on to the platform (from a puntastic 'cattle class' section of a the train) that around 100 people alighted from there.

    Caller said it was clear they were farmers down for the protest given how they were dressed, but also due to the fact several were holding large placards.

    I'm not sure that if you're travelling to London to take part in a poverty-pleading demonstration, that arriving in posh seats on the train costing three or four times the standard price is a well thought-through look.

  • 20 Nov 2024, 3:29 p.m.

    Fucking riff-raff. Protesting themselves. What's the point even having a butler/batman? Don't know what the country is coming to, don't you know.....

  • 20 Nov 2024, 3:43 p.m.

    Have any of you cunts actually ever met a farmer? You seem to have got agriculture confused with Downton Abbey.

  • 20 Nov 2024, 3:44 p.m.

    There was a girl with a plum in her mouth enjoying the attention the BBC were giving her yesterday. Lots of waffle about how unfair it all was and then said she wouldn’t be farming anyway as she wanted a 9-5 job. I mean I’m sure she’s upset she might have to pay a bit of inheritance tax but I’m not massively convinced it was worth prime time on national radio.

  • 20 Nov 2024, 4:35 p.m.

    One of them was probably Shady stowing away in the wrong carriage having bought an advance cheap livestock class ticket 6 months ago.

    The scoundrel.