Maybe things can’t only get better for Keir Starmer, as he is shamed with the latest polling just as the Labour conference begins
Maybe things can’t only get better for Keir Starmer, as he is shamed with the latest polling just as the Labour conference begins
I’m not even British (I’m Canadian) and I don’t like him. Why’d he go after family farmers with aggressive inheritance taxes? That seems like a political dead end. Absolute foolishness.
Farmers usually have a lot of money invested in capital equipment but their lifestyles are anything but lavish. They live a working class life but get taxed (on inheritance) like millionaires, preventing them from handing down the family farm through generations (and allowing wealthy corporate farming operations to consolidate them).
They often hide it, but the farmers I know are far from poor. Like a lot of us, they’re rich in illiquid assets but not in terms of cashflow. That’s my situation too, though I’m not a farmer, and I don’t whinge about it.
Inheritance tax is a tax on unearned wealth. There’s no reason to distinguish one asset from all others. Those inheriting almost invariably did nothing to earn it; it’s almost always an accident of birth that puts them in line for an inheritance. That, and the whims of some elderly person. A steeply progressive inheritance tax, with no exceptions besides spouses, would be ideal. And if you’re concerned about corporations grabbing all the arable land, regulate them to prevent any firm directly or indirectly owning more than, say, 10 hectares of land. A similar rule should apply to housing.
Providing for one’s own children, passing on family traditions and ways of working, preserving the spaces where childhood memories are created; these are among the most fundamental of human desires. Take those away and your society gives way to nihilism. You make an enemy of every parent in the country.
On the other hand, a strong society understands this at a cultural level and the preservation of family traditions is deeply rooted in the society. This is where you get family farms, family restaurants, family workshops and small businesses that last for hundreds of years and produce some of the best products life has to offer. Japan, France, Italy, and Spain are some examples of countries where this is the case.
As for arbitrary restrictions on corporations: ad-hoc solutions like that rarely work. People find ways of circumventing and undermining such efforts. Instead of one corporation, people will have hundreds, each with its 10 hectares of land.
The more regulations you create, the more you reward people with the money to hire accountants and lawyers to navigate them. On the other hand, traditional farmers and other small family businesses will simply give up trying to navigate the red tape and bail out.
If you want to tax unearned wealth, you should implement land value tax which taxes the increase in value of a piece of land, not inheritance. A child who grows up on a farm and helps with all of the farm tasks their parents do every day has earned their inheritance. A suburbanite who has watched their house go from $200k to $2m in 20 years has not.
If I’m a parent in the twilight of my life and I own a big farm or a factory or some other productive asset and I’m facing steep inheritance taxes do you think I’m going to just accept them? No. I’d rather sell off all the equipment, burn the factory to the ground, treat the family to lavish vacations and parties for the rest of my life, and have them inherit nothing. If there’s no future to plan for, then live like there’s no future.
Rich ass farmers paying tax? Not against that in the slightest
I prefer farmers being rich ass than bankers honestly. Farmers deserve to be rich, they rarely get a day off.
If they have that much wealth, they need to be taxed. If you’ve got knobheads like Clarkson supporting them, you just know they’re in the wrong.
I’m sure the animals would like a day off from being raped too.
Clarkson went into farming as a tax dodge.
What’s wrong with clarkson?
Right, because if (guy I don’t like) supports something, I’m obliged to hate it and fight against it!
This really tells me all I need to know about your politics. You’re not interested in making life better for anyone. You’re filled with bitterness and resentment and you just want to watch the world burn. You don’t see taxes as a tool to bring prosperity to more people. For you, taxes are a weapon to bludgeon your enemies with. Enemies you’ve never met that a man on the television taught you to hate.
My, what a lot of conclusions you just drew on zero evidence. Almost impressive.
I mean, jump on that one part rather than the actual argument.
Really tells me all I need to know about your politics.
So you support the consolidation of small family farms into large corporate farming operations. Interesting take.
If that’s how you want to infer it
Infering or not, that is what’s happening.
Huh? You’re pro rich people dodging tax?
Shit loads of multi-millionaires/billionaires were buying farmland as an asset so they didn’t have to pay inheritance taxes out on it, too.
It’s absolutely right that Labour started making them pay tax again (yes, again, they used to do it and family farms still thrived back before Thatcher gave a Tory-voting demographic a tax exception)
No, I’m pro-actual-farmer keeping their family farm in the family. People dodging taxes need to be taxed but catching real farmers in the crossfire is not good. It’s very bad.
It’ll still be in the family. They’ll just be paying some tax.
Not enough by a long shot, mind you, but some.
We had the more family run farms when we had the inheritance tax on them.
Evidence:
What a strange take. I definitely think that we should support farmers, but not by exempting them from inheritance taxes. We should incentivise the correct things - If they work the land give them subsidies.
If you don’t tax inheritance you’re creating a generational wealth hoarding. Let’s take Jeremy Clarkson for example - he openly stated that the reason he bought farmland was so that his children can inherit it tax free. If he didn’t have a farming tv show, he would lease that land to actual farmers.
It might be different in other parts of the world, but in the UK, that has relatively high population density, sitting on farm land for generations can be very very lucrative. Most of the richest pieces of real estate in this country were farmland a century or two ago.
My parents sold the farm, I think, largely, on accountant’s advice, to avoid the inheritance tax, or something.
So now I don’t have the farm I grew up presuming was to be mine (or other relatives’) one day, and instead see it get eaten up in consolidation by the rich, like all the other small farms around, merging.
This is not good.
Yay for sensible subsidies. Nay for tax ploys to feed agribusiness monopolies.
Sorry that your parents had to sell, but it sounds like you’re blaming the wrong people.
If the inheritance taxes are the reason his parents had to sell then it stands to reason that the people who introduced the inheritance taxes in parliament are to blame, no?
I don’t see how inheritance tax is to blame. You’d pay less on inheritance tax than paying income/capital gains tax on selling your land. I suspect other reasons were at play.
Inheritance taxes for real farmers (as opposed to people who just buy farmland to live in the country) are much higher because they include capital expenditures. Modern tractors, harvesters, ploughs, seed drills, sprayers, barns, equipment sheds, silos, fences, irrigation systems… all of this can add up to millions of pounds. Having to suddenly pay a large inheritance tax for a cash-strapped (high leverage) working farmer because their parent died could absolutely force the sale of everything.
Who do you think it sounds like I’m blaming?
I was not aware of playing the blame game at all.
How are you enjoying Mark Carney? The Governor of the Bank of England during (what I call) “a very British genocide”, (or what others call) “the fit-to-work scandal”, culling >130,000 of the disabled and poor in a decade. Seems to love being appointed, but could he be elected fairly? Carney, Starmer, same “big club”. They do these things to seize power, to maximally extract wealth, and to soft-kill. Because they were told to.