Given the outraged reaction of British farmers to the Starmer/Reeves ‘farmer harmer’ tax, some people might wonder why this new tax was ever introduced. After all, it will be collected quite slowly as it will be paid over 10 years after a farmer dies. Moreover, it will raise very little money as, like all new taxes, it will generate considerably less revenue than planned as it will lead to a change in behaviour as farmers consult tax consultants to find ways of avoiding the new tax.
In Britain, we’ve had several taxes which have come and gone due the inevitability that they change people’s behaviour. There was Henry VIII’s Beard Tax, reputedly introduced in 1535. Avoidance was easy – you just shaved off your beard. In 1662, Charles II brought in an early type of poll tax, the Hearth Tax. It was considered too difficult to count how many people lived in each house, so instead the tax was based on the number of chimneys per property. The result was that enterprising citizens started combining several fireplaces into a single chimney. A few hundred people are thought to have died in the ensuing fires. In 1696, William III brought in a Window Tax, which led many householders to brick up some of their windows. 1795 saw the introduction of a tax on wigs and wig powder. Result: wigs became less fashionable. And around 1800 the Government started a Hat Tax. Each hat had to have a stamp sewn into it to show that it was legal. The penalty for forging these stamps was death, which might give some people odd ideas about how to deal with today’s large tech companies which avoid many taxes.
There are several possible explanations for the ‘farmer harmer’ tax. These are not mutually exclusive. So some or all may be true at the same time.
On a basic level, some people might see this as a typically vindictive Labour assault on a group Labour feels have traditionally voted Conservative and therefore there are no votes to be lost by penalising this group. In fact, just as Stalin demonised the ‘kulaks’ for allegedly causing food shortages by hoarding grain, Labour may be hoping that its mostly inner-city electorate will cheer its farmer-bashing when supposedly greedy millionaire farmers are landed with new taxes on their supposed ‘massive wealth’.
A further explanation is that the ‘farmer harmer’ tax may force many smaller farmers out of business. Given the low financial returns on most British farms, many farmers are asset rich but cash poor. This may mean that there will be few buyers able to afford to buy the farms which the ‘farmer harmer’ tax forces inheritors to sell. This would allow the Labour Government, possibly using the vehicle of the Government-owned Great British Energy, to pick up these farms at knock-down prices and convert them from what Labour seems to see as ‘useless’ food production to much more useful (in Ed Miliband’s eyes) wind and solar farms.
While on the subject of Miliband’s wind and solar farms, it might be worth mentioning that the head of one of Germany’s largest electricity companies once remarked that trying to get energy from solar power in Northern Europe was like trying to grow pineapples in Alaska. Ooops, silly me. I’ve just given Ed Miliband another unhinged idea. Looking at the amount of fossil fuel used to transport pineapples from South America or wherever they’re gown, Miliband could claim he’s saving the planet by squandering billions of our money subsidising pineapple farms in, say, the north of Scotland, thus creating thousand of supposedly ‘well-paid and highly skilled green jobs’ on British pineapple farms to replace the hundreds of thousands of real, well-paid, highly-skilled jobs in the Scottish offshore oil and gas industry which he is intent on destroying.
Anyway, back to the ‘farmer harmer’ tax.
There is a third, rather more sinister possible reason for our Government’s enthusiasm for this tax. In July 2024, the think tank Demos published a report titled ‘The Future of Inheritance Tax in Britain‘. On its home page Demos describes itself as follows:
Demos is an independent think-tank set up to improve the breadth and quality of political and policy debate. It encourages radical thinking and solutions to the long-term problems facing the U.K. and other advanced industrial societies.
A LSE review of think tanks concludes that Demos is a: “Think tank focused on power and politics – historically Left-leaning, but independent of any political party.”
A key issue covered in the Demos report is the number of exemptions from inheritance tax in the U.K. The report notes: “The U.K. is unusual in offering 100% relief for owned businesses and agricultural property, and not counting most private pensions for inheritance tax purposes.” If you’ve looked at Rachel Reeves’s changes to inheritance taxes, in particular those concerning SIPPs and inheritance tax on agricultural land, you might detect more than coincidental similarities to the recommendations of the Demos report.
The main sponsor of the Demos report is the ludicrously vowel-less abrdn asset management firm through its abrdn Financial Fairness Trust operation. Abrdn manages at least £506 billion of U.K. and global assets. In 2015, abrdn bought the multi-billion dollar U.S.-based FLAG Capital. FLAG stands for ‘Forest, Land and Agriculture’. In a 2018 report abrdn seems to express frustration at the difficulty in acquiring farmland due to so much being owned by families:
Given the family ties involved in the farmland sector, there may be multiple interests (not just financial) that could potentially create challenges in the ownership shift to purely financial owners.
“Purely financial owners” are, of course, companies like abrdn.
Abrdn is one of the biggest real estate owners in the U.K. and, in its December 2023 annual financial report, cites its ownership of nearly £76 billion of real estate assets and its intention on growing this area of its business.
It has been repeatedly reported that Microsoft’s billionaire founder and fêted philanthropist Bill Gates is the largest private owner of agricultural land in the U.S. Forbes tells us:
After years of reports that he was purchasing agricultural land in places like Florida and Washington, the Land Report revealed that Gates, who has a net worth of nearly $121 billion according to Forbes, has built up a massive farmland portfolio spanning 18 states. His largest holdings are in Louisiana (69,071 acres), Arkansas (47,927 acres) and Nebraska (20,588 acres). Additionally, he has a stake in 25,750 acres of transitional land on the west side of Phoenix, Arizona, which is being developed as a new suburb.
What seems to be becoming clear is that there is a rush by the rich and by financial institutions to buy up farmland. And in Britain, the close similarities between the abrdn-sponsored Demos inheritance tax report and some of the changes in Rachel Reeves’s budget might lead some people to suspect that the ‘farmer harmer’ inheritance tax changes will conveniently help companies like abrdn overcome the hurdle of family ownership of land.
Quite why the rich and financial institutions are so intent on grabbing agricultural land, I don’t know. But if you think that it’s due to an altruistic desire to provide us with cheap, high-quality food, then a Nigerian prince and I have a wonderful investment scheme to sell you.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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The scepticism on vaccine death numbers from Toby Young has become almost vanishingly small.
The only way you can compare deaths for vaccines with Covid to get a risk/benefit metric is with the same standards for vaccines as for deaths attributed to Covid.
How many deaths occur within 28 days of a Covid vaccine? The government have flat out refused to provide this data, saying that all vaccine related deaths are recorded under the MHRA’s Yellow Card system. Furthermore, there is no way of knowing what the effects of this experimental treatment are at least until the clinical trials have concluded.
The resistance to this incoming tyranny is starting to look infinitesimally small.
https://dailyexpose.co.uk/2021/03/30/f-o-i-request-shows-2207-died-within-28-days-of-having-the-covid-vaccine-in-scotland-during-february/
F.O.I Request shows 2,207 died within 28 days of having the Covid Vaccine in Scotland during February
It’s not quite correct WRT just during Feb… But I think it IS over 500 a month dying WITH experimental COVID jab in just Scotland alone..
I took that FOI to mean since the beginning of vaccination. I then went to the governments coronavirus website
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
and from there used 9th December as the start of vaccination and found that approximately 3,300 had died in Scotland within 28 days of a positve test over the same period. This was a while ago I did this though so may require double checking.
The above link was sent in reply to a comment I made earlier in the week.
Others looked and it seemed the timeframe (just one month) was off but the numbers weren’t
I’m guessing we still need the numbers for dying without COVID and without being jabbed.
Thanks for posting the Daily Expose article, I was going to do so myself. I posted it yesterday as well.
I want to add the caveat again that there is no way of verifying if that document is real or not. The only way to be certain would be to submit a FOI request yourself.
I don’t know if Daily Expose is a reputable website either, so we need to be careful with things like this before making any claims.
With that said:
Extrapolating the quoted Scottish numbers across the whole of the UK would give 25,524 deaths.
63,182,000 – UK population
5,463,300 – Scottish population
Death rate in Scotland for the entire population = 0.00040397 (2,207/5,463,300)
0.00040397*63,182,000 = 25,524
If anyone has a better way of doing it, let me know.
The problem with this is the age breakdown.
This is an issue that gets rapidly bigger the younger people get so using an all-age average isn’t going to be that accurate.
I agree, it’s a mess.
Also, I feel extremely bad even talking about this. I hope no-one thinks I’m ever being callous. This BS is breaking my heart, which is why I’m doing all I can to warn people.
But it’s not just deaths. As Sucharit Bhakdi has pointed out – less severe outcomes can also be associated with a thrombosi(e)s.
Govt .Yellow Card Vaccine deaths and Adverse Reactions can be found in The Light newspaper monthly.
The best alternative is to avoid a jab.
Yup: that’s my strategy!
The more newspaper headlines containing the words Vaccine and Risk the better.
It just gets worse doesn’t it ?
I mean we’ve gone from complete denial that there was any risk to the vaccines – to admitting that there maybe a tiny risk – to now offering a completely different vaccine to under 40’s because of a potential risk of blood clots from the previous vaccine that was being given to all the over 40’s.
Anyone out there still eager to roll-up there sleeves for this vaccine must be completely insane. I wouldn’t take an asprin from these people if it was offered to me nevermind an experimental jab that appears to have so many question marks hanging over it.
Nobody has started on the more “normal” thrombosis associated with all the spike protein producing vaccines yet. Obviously COVID can also cause these….but it’s quite hard to catch COVID right now. You can’t avoid them in the vaccines though.
“I wouldn’t take an asprin from these people”
In the end – detail apart – this is the sane position, given the stack of reasons not to trust the political and financial issues involved and the sheer lies that have been told.
I mean – buying ‘guaranteed’ snake oil from the producers who have been given immunity against harms on the recommendation of a PR firm that has spent billions on shares in it?
You’d have to be mad.
To Toby: I think they meant when they say the risks outweigh the benefits in the under 40s is that VIPIT is more likely (death or not….even if not death, a debilitating stroke that leaves you long term disabled aged under 40 has to be included as a major harm) than a healthy under 40 dying of COVID.
Of course, healthy doesn’t mean low risk. The obese are at far greater risk, so the younger, slimmer and fitter you are, the greater the relative risk of the vaccine. If you are a fit 40, 50 or 60 something, the vaccine may still not make any sense.
And then of course there are all the other risks of the vaccine, that nobody mentions. The people spending a week or more in bed. That’s not normal! And that’s at the mild end of the spectrum.
Its not just deaths. You don’t want to end up in hospital for a vaccine you don’t really need even if it doesn’t kill you.
“This might not kill you but you might need 2 weeks in hospital to fix it” isn’t appealing.
The 2 people i know of that have had clotting issues weren’t killed. One ended up in hospital for tests, the other was there over a week until it resolved.
And all of this for a vaccine thats far less effective than the others.
“resolved” – If you’ve small blood clots in the brain, do they not invariably do irreparable damage? Perhaps the impact is not readily discernable, but you’re less of the person you were, and the specific damage may take its toll years later.
Wrong. The Az and JJ vaccines may have an immediate effect because of their delivery system. But in the medium and longer term the mRNA vaccines are far more pernicious. The immune system can eventually identify the problem with the AZ and JJ vaccines. But the gel surrounding the mRNA vaccines disguises the effect and the problem may well appear much later in say the brain before the immune system attacks with potentially deadly consequences.
Yes and people will probably end up on lifelong medication for problems they didn’t have before taking the vaccine.
If I was still under 40 I’d be demanding my freedom, not an alternative jab.
My group of sheep (friends) are in the 40 bracket, boy will they be glad they took the AZ poison these last two weeks….
That’s OK; I’m in my 60s and I have a great alternative to AZ – nada!
Me too – absolutely no chance of me having any of the so-called vaccines.
The more I read the more I disagree with them.
Why anyone who is otherwise healthy wish to have these is beyond my comprehension.
i agree. What is also baffling is how little it’s mentioned that the Jabz are being rolled out in spring and summer for a winter seasonal disease!
Could this be the amazing reason why they are so ‘effective’.?
Funny that this news didn’t come out just before “Super Thursday”, when it might have slightly flattened the wave of “vaccine” “success” Boris’s party was riding.
Funny too, that the bad news is being broken on results day, when so many people are distracted by the theatre of party politics.
What an excellent opportunity to ‘help’ those in a particular populous country where the media say there is a crisis by giving them all the dodgy AZ jabs that would have been given to under 40s… and when I say giving, I mean not challenging them to fulfil the UK’s order and agreeing that they can keep the stuff for themselves…
‘If we assume that at least a half of the 35 million Britons who’ve been inoculated got an AZ jab…’ – Why don’t you look it up? It’s 22.6M AZ jabs (twice the amount of Pfizer). There are a ‘reported’ 49 blood clots biut it’s not just blood clots when calculating risk vs. reward of the vaccines. There’s anaphylaxis, Bell’s Palsy, blindness, Guillain-Barre Syndrome and capillary leak syndrome to consider. The Yellow Card currently shows 1102 deaths immediately following vaccination – that’s 6.3/day for AZ and 2.6/day for Pfizer (longer rollout). There were 9,942 (with multiple AEs) single Yellow Card reports in the week April 21-29th alone – which represents only 0.3-0.6% of reporting. For a 0-19 year old, the chances of dying of COVID is 0.00015%. Chances of dying from the vaccine – 0.2%. While the true number of deaths from vaccines (and this won’t include those who developed and died ‘from’ COVID as a result of a weakened immune system following the vaccine – which will go down as COVID deaths) won’t be known until it’s too late for the majority – anyone can look at the ONS and Yellow Card data and judge for themselves. What you will find is that the death toll from COVID for a healthy under 65 year old for the whole of 2020 (Eng & Wales) was 1,549 – once you factor in the 33% over reporting and the under reporting of the Yellow Card, only the highly innumerate would conclude that the rewards of a vaccine outweigh the risks. A healthy under 65 year old is statistically more likely to die from the vaccine than COVID.