Why do Labour hate farmers so much?

 "A city like Ankh-Morpork was only two meals away from chaos at the best of times". 

Patrician Havelock Vetinari [Terry Prachett]

You wouldn't normally expect a fictional book to be a source of wisdom but it's become clear to me that civilisation is an illusion - pretty much like money is an illusion.  I often ponder what great mind,  thousands of years ago, managed to convince barbarians to trust each other and stop killing each other and create civilisation.  Without farming, I'm pretty sure that would not have happened. But equally farming is based on land which generally stays in the same place - it's a pretty risky concept to stop being a nomad and invest effort cultivating a spot of land when marauding barbarians can come and steal your food or worse kill you. How civilisation "came to be" clearly was a delicate puzzle.

Remove a reliable source of food from the equation and things break down pretty quickly.  The first sign that we are going to have snow and there's panic buying - people stripping shop shelves like locusts.

Modern society is very much detached from food production.  Most of us haven't got a clue what's involved in food production or how it reached us.  However the majority are 100% dependent upon these hidden strangers who want to feed us. There's a social contract - we pay money to get food and the strangers get money in return.  This is abstraction in action. I believe abstraction is evil. Dragons lie in the land of abstraction.

However that cornerstone of civilisation is being eroded.  Farmers can't make money.  Labour is envious of their land and wants to steal it off them using Inheritance Tax. Maybe Starmer wants to control food production and centralise it like Mao Zedong (which didnt go well by the way - between 15 - 50 million people died from famine between 1959-1961), or maybe Starmer wants the land to put solar panels on or maybe build homes for his immigrant mates?  Who knows what his plan is. 

Whatever the reason -  it will make the UK more dependent upon the generosity of foreign countries to keep supplying us with food.  Given how unstable the world is, that's not something I would have faith in.

The Inheritance Tax will allegedly only raise £520 Million in taxes. I suspect it will be a lot more since what farm estate is worth £1M?  A milking shed costs  £1M... 

Back in February Starmer promised he would allow the Farmers to Eat some of his £5 BILLION cake to make up for the £500 Million inheritance tax bill.  I suspect this was little more than lies.

Why has Russia attacked Ukraine?  Certainly one reason is Ukraine is one of the few countries in the world that is largely self sufficient in food - it's a large farming country. Russia is a major manufacturer of fertilisers. You get the idea.

Britain has not been able to feed itself since the Industrial Revolution.  The population is too large for the food potential of the land mass.  During the second world war, there was huge focus on growing food on just about every available spot of land. Yet without the USA, Britain would have starved to death. Food rationing continued long after the war until 1954.

So why does Labour hate farmers and the countryside so much ?  Have they got a secret supply chain of food? 

So the latest news of Labour's policies on animal welfare standards sound good but are clearly poorly thought through.

No mention of cruel Halal slaughtering of animals where animals are not stunned and bleed to death.

There is mention of electric shock collars being out-lawed.  These are GPS collars for sheep, cattle etc which when the animal strays outside an area receive an electric shock - just like an electric fence but without the need for a fence.  

There is mention of changes to farming practices like cages etc which food we import from Spain, Denmark, even France don't have to follow.  This will increase costs for our cash strapped farmers whilst competitors are not burdened with the costs so can under cut our farmers.  It seems like Labour really does hate Farmers.  

Maybe Starmer watched Mr Benn as a child and had a bad experience being dressed up as a farmer? 

I struggle to see how an animal receiving an electric shock is worse than bleeding to death in the slaughter house.

I would strongly recommend watching Clarkson's Farm.  It's shocking how difficult farming is, yet makes so little money. 

Imagine this.  Clarkson turns up to do a pitch at Dragons Den.

Hi Dragons.  I'm hear to pitch my new idea for food production. It's called a farm.  So here's the financials.  I'm looking for an initial capital investment of £5M  and an annual operational cash injection of £500k.  If things go well I can return a profit of £50k  and maybe as much as £65k per year.

The Dragons murmur and then ask.  How firm is the £65k? What can go wrong?

Well. All I need is the right amount of rainfall at the right time.  No surprises like fertiliser prices going through the roof. Actually sunshine is pretty important - the weather will affect the yield.  No changes to fuel duty for diesel for my tractor.  Actually the tractor needs to be reliable and not go wrong. Ideally my crop needs to be great and everyone else's terrible to get the best price.  

Dragons>  How much will the profit be if things go wrong?

Well potentially zero.

Dragons> What?  Do you mean zero profit or do you mean we lose the £500k and zero profit.

Well potentiallly the £500k could be lost.,,,,

Dragons> I'm out.

So what can we do to help farmers from this government that hates them?

Sadly the late Queen is dead. As Britain's most famous farmer before Clarkson took top spot, I'm pretty sure she would have slung Starmer into prison for treason but sadly Charlie Boy does not have the same balls as his mother.

So what else can we do?

Much like pubs banning Labour MPs, I'm in favour of farmers refusing to supply their products to any Labour MPs.  Let's see whether the Labour party is also "only two meals away from chaos". They will soon learn that their "civilised cozy Westminster lives" are little more than a fragile illusion made possible by farmers.

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Well in the few hours since I wrote this post Starmer has increased the IHT threshold to £2.5M. A slightly more positive move however £2.5M is still not much in the scheme of farming. 

The average UK farm is 200 acres.  250 acres of good quality arable will cost you £2.7 Million. That ignores farm houses, barns, tractor, farming plant and other assets. Assume you get 2.7 tonnes per acre and wheat prices are £185/tonne then that's revenue of £124k. 

Seed will cost you around £18,000.  Fertiliser will cost you £3,000. Then there's diesel. Combine rental. Grain stores. Trailers. Tractors. Wages. Weed killer.

Let's say you get 50% of the revenue in a good year so a potential profit of around £65k.

You're not covering finance costs for the £2.7M which are likely to be in the £100k per year range.  There's simply not enough margin in farming.......

Allegedly the Inheritance Tax, with a £1M threshold,  was only going to affect 375 estates in the UK and with the change will only affect 175 farms.  I assume that means per year. So it was going to raise £520 Million per year in tax. The taxation rate is 20%. So the value of these estates would be £2.6Billion which means the average farm value falling into the IHT was £8M (£7M + £1M threshold). Hmmm that is nothing like £1M. In fact it's nothing like £2.5M either. So the governments own numbers show the threshold should be £8M not £1M.

So with the revised £2.5M threshold, the number of farms affected would be 175 and the tax revenue raised would reduce from £520M to £300M. So repeating the calculation means the threshold should now be £10M  (£7.5M + £2.5M threshold) not £2.5M. Still makes zero sense what the government are saying.

There are 209,000 farms in the UK. There are 35 million acres of farmland in the UK. So the straight allocation is 170 acres per farm.   With farmland prices around £10k per acres, then even the smallest farms would be in excess of £1M...

Let's try another approach and use the Pareto principle. 20% of farms account for 80% of the land. This would give 41,800 farms with an average of 670 acres and 167,200 farms with 42 acres. At £10k per acre then the small farm's land only would be £420k and(say £1M with capital items and a farm house). A large farm would be £6.7Million (probably £8M with capital items and a farm house).

The argument was only the biggest farms would fall into the IHT trap.  People like James Dyson and Andrew Lloyd Weber who have bought farmland but do not farm it (personally) were the original targets of this tax.  Clarkson may have originally bought his farm to avoid Inheritance Tax but there's irrefutable evidence that now he definitely farms the land.

The number of farms/farmers has been steadily declining over the last decade. This in itself should be a worrying sign.  If the rich are buying up farms and are stupid enough to carry on farming them we should be encouraging them not punishing them.

Labour's numbers simply don't stack up. Virtually every farmer would fall into the IHT trap when it was £1M. Some now won't with it being £2.5M.  Given governments' habit of never changing hard coded numbers and this is a specific non index linked number, it won't be long (maybe 10 years) before this affects every farmer ie the £2.5M will be a fixed number for the next 50 years.  At least most farmers now have time to migrate their farm into a trust or company allowing them to "Carry on and keep farming".  

However I feel sorry for the family of the farmers who have committed suicide in the meantime in order to meet the April IHT tax deadline.

Labour must have thought farmers were stupid to fall for this. Turns out farmers are not stupid.

This is a policy of pure spite.  Labour hate farmers.