Farmer John Charlesworth has taken his own life in fear of the Government’s inheritance tax raid, his son has said. The Telegraph has more.
John Charlesworth, 78, was found dead at his 70-acre farm in Barnsley, Yorkshire, on Tuesday, 24 hours before the Budget.
His son Jonathan, 46, said the father-of-two ended his life after being “eaten away” at the prospect of his family losing the £2 million estate, which has been owned by the family since 1957, because of the Chancellor’s tax increase.
He told the Telegraph that hearing in advance of the Budget about Labour’s plans to end the practice of letting all farmers pass on estates without inheritance tax was the “final straw” for Mr. Charlesworth, who had been caring for his sick wife.
In a message to Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, he said: “I would tell them they’ve killed my Dad. He didn’t know the details but all the scaremongering around it beforehand frightened him to death.
“He was the most kind-hearted person you’d ever meet, my Dad. He wouldn’t take any nonsense. He would do anything for anybody, I don’t think anyone had a bad word to say about my Dad.
“The battles we had guided me for the future. You couldn’t ask for better really.”
Last week, Ms. Reeves used her Budget to place a 20% tax on agricultural property assets worth more than £1 million, instead of allowing them to be inherited tax-free.
Ms. Reeves said the move was taken to stop wealthy people from buying up agricultural land to avoid inheritance tax but it has led to fears that scores of ordinary farmers could be forced out of business.
Concerns have also been raised about the impact the policy will have on farmers’ mental health.
Speaking in the Commons on Friday, Richard Tice, the Reform U.K. Deputy Leader, shared concerns that “heads of farming families in their 80s and 90s are seriously considering committing suicide before this policy comes into place”.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Labour’s inheritance tax changes may mean more agricultural land becomes available for renewable energy projects across the U.K., renewable energy expert Gareth Phillips has said.
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I don’t blame him his whole way of life and everything that he expected for his family’s future is going going and gone very soon. You put all that work in and they piss on it. We have a tendency to try to dissuade people from suicide but the suicidal person can rightly ask, can you offer me any hope? The answer is no the future will be even worse. You either take it or you die.
I wept when I read that he’d been found dead. Reeves is billed as a thief, but it’s worse than that, she has blood on her hands. Gates of Hell will come in and buy up agricultural land if we don’t find a way to stop this WEF policy being carried out
I do wonder how many in the cabinet understand, fully, the destruction they are inflicting the country, in particular, Reeves and Miliband. I don’t need to wonder about Starmer: he isn’t connected to this world at all.
And what about the Tory Party?
Do we gave a Leader of the Opposition?
Do we have an opposition?
She come out against that at least, but I can’t support anyone that is a jab pusher.
Chris Whitty is also back on the war path as if it was still 2021, all fired-up about how necessary it is to protect vulnerable people from accidentally inhaling stuff that’s bad for them to save gazillions of lives — except that it’s not Corona this time, but smoking in pub beer gardens.
But surely, he’s not preaching The Science™ all over again, this just cannot be true for such an undisputed topic!
[He’s mainly pissed off by the fact that smoking in pub beer gardens is not going to be outlawed now, because Evil Vested Interests!!27 prevented that.]
Has anyone actually seen the “evidence” that is meant to show smoking being very harmful? I’m sure there’s some scientific papers based on animal studies and/or observational studies that claim to show this but, as we all know, studies can be made to produce whatever result the researches want them to produce.
“Smoking kills” might be a lie of the same magnitude as “climate crisis”, “covid vaccines are safe and effective” etc.
It’s basically decades of observational studies conducted by people looking for evidence of harms. Smoking kills is certainly a lie because nobody ever died as direct outcome of having a cigarette. The reality is more something like Based on the data we have collected, we conjecture that certain detrimental health effects in old age will occur more frequently for smokers than for non-smokers, who’ll statistically end up dying of something else more often.
It’s also noteworthy that absolutely numbers of completely absent from any of this. A usual claim is, for instance, Smoking doubles your risk of stroke!
which is a relative and not an absolute claim and really pretty meaningless without knowing how large the risk of stroke actually is.
I’m sick of the use of the term lives being saved. They are not being saved, NEWSFLASH we are all going to die eventually. Has anyone ever weighed up the reduced cost to the exchequer of people dying maybe prematurely from smoking related ailments eg pensions not continuing to be paid against the amount raised in duty on tobacco?
This has been done repeatedly in the past and the outcome was that smokers are a huge cashcow for the state as they both pay insane amounts of additional taxes and need a lot less medical and other support in old age due statistically dying earlier.
But that’s not the point. As evidenced by the dogged campaign against water vapour — “This is not risk free and contains nicotine!!!” — the point is that people who believe themselves to be especially vulnerable to bad air can see what they’re afraid of. That’s basically the chemtrails story under another name and with much better PR.
Things get even better when considering that the same people who think seeing others smoke tobacco will greatly endanger their health usually don’t have any problems with smoking weed despite common sense suggests strongly that the chemical results of burning either plant cannot really be much different from each other, considering that both certainly have much more in common genetically than what differentiates them.
That’s two deaths attributable to ‘Sir’ Kier Starmer.
RIP Peter Lynch
RIP John Charlesworth
” Ms. Reeves said the move was taken to stop wealthy people from buying up agricultural land to avoid inheritance tax but it has led to fears that scores of ordinary farmers could be forced out of business.”
Make no mistake, Reeves is lying. The move was entirely the direction of WEF towards the corporatisation and break up of UK agriculture. EU CAP policy has ensured that family farms might have a capital value of £2 -£5M but are unilkely to support more than £20-30k per year drawings. Hit that with an IHT grab of £200k – £1M and the enterprise fails and has to be liquidated. Here in Wales the socilaist government have been hitting farms with taking 20% out of production and inspired DEFRA ideas such as making farms ‘invest’ in new slurry pits that take out further productive land in the middle of fields the excuse being risk of pollution run-off.
You are absolutely right. There would have been other ways to deal with purchase of agricultural land for tax reasons.
Gates of Hell will come in and buy up agricultural land. What was he doing at number ten recently? What had he come to discuss with Farmer Harmer Starmer?
This inheritance tax on farm is the worse policy coming out of this budget, the second worst being the inheritance tax on pension savings.
i hope many of us will be there on the 19th of November to support the farming community. We need them, we need the countryside.
It is clear to me that the APR changes are prinarily to allow more agricultural land to be sold for housing and renewable energy. This is the only credible reason for the change. The tax revenues gained are negligible and not the main driver.
Famine is the goal.