The elite taking farmers’ fields
In her budget, delivered on 31st October 2024, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, increased inheritance tax, bringing people’s hard-earned pensions into the mix, and starting a land-grab on farms.
This is not ‘politics’, it’s prophecy!
What am I doing talking about politics? Well, let’s have one thing straight. The Lord is God of all. He demands obedience to his ways from rulers. They can’t just bring in any old law. From Proverbs chapter twenty-one:
Prov 21:3 To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the LORD than sacrifice. (KJV)
So this isn’t politics. This is prophecy. It’s exposing injustice and unrighteousness, exactly as did the prophets of old, who are the example we are told to follow.
What does scripture say about inheritance tax? It’s condemned. Here’s the prophet Micah pronouncing woe on the leaders of his age and every age:
Micah 2:1 Woe to them that devise iniquity, and work evil upon their beds! when the morning is light, they practise it, because it is in the power of their hand.
Micah 2:2 And they covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage.
Death tax is under what authority?
We have grown so used to inheritance tax in this country we never question if it is of God or of the devil. So let us ask a very basic question:
If you have worked all your life, paid taxes on your income, what gives the state any authority under heaven to come back for another slice when you die? It’s oppressing a man and his heritage, exactly what the man of God, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, condemned.
Inheritance tax in the UK is a fairly modern invention. You can trace its history back to probate and succession duties introduced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to pay for wars.
But inheritance tax itself was brought in by chancellor Nigel Lawson only in 1986. Today, when an estate reaches the threshold, which today is easier to do than ever, its rate stands at 40%. Zero percent would be biblical.
Mr Lawson, and every chancellor since, recognised that agricultural land needed exemption. The reason is that farm land is valued out of all proportion to what anyone can make by actually working it. So agricultural property may be passed on down the generations free of inheritance tax.
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Farmers will have to sell land to pay
Under the proposal from Ms Reeves, the first £1,000,000 of value will be exempt, then 20% rather than forty percent will be imposed on the rest. The same death tax is going to apply to property in all family businesses.
The Telegraph reports Rachel Reeves saying she ‘can’t afford to let farmers die tax-free’. There’s no appeal to any possible morality of the decision. The money raised will be less than £500m, only enough to run the NHS for a day and a bit. But the effects of family firms will be catastrophic.
The average size of a farm in England is 220 acres. They are larger in Scotland, smaller in Wales and Northern Ireland. Assuming £10,000 per acre, and adding in the buildings, the value of that average English farm could reach £2.5m.
So, subtracting Rachel’s threshold, £1.5m will be taxable at 20%. The family will be forced to pay £300,000. Their disposable income after all their expenses of feed, vets, repairs and machinery might only amount to fifty thousand.
That’s a lot less than the £74,000 Rachel Reeves and her husband receive in rent from their two houses which they currently let out, by the way. They are sitting pretty. The farming family on the other hand won’t be able to pay the inheritance tax. They will have to sell all or part of the land.
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Who stands to benefit? And who loses?
Now who did Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves entertain in Downing Street a couple of weeks ago, on 17th October? Step forward Bill Gates and the Chief Executive Officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one Mark Suzman. And who is now the biggest owner of farmland in the United States? It’s Bill Gates.
Micah 2:2 And they covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage.
You will feel the effects. Food prices will rise. Our food security will be further imperilled. There could even be shortages. The word of God promises an obedient nation:
Deut 11:15 And I will send grass in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full.
But we are a rebellious nation, whose leaders do not care about food security for ordinary people. So he won’t.
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No-one left to speak for me
Strange, isn’t it, these days, we feel we have to impress upon you the effect of this inheritance tax imposition on you and your lifestyle, rather than just say: ‘Guys, this is unjust, isn’t it?’
What was it German pastor Martin Niemöller said?
Running through a list of groups of whom he was not a member, communists, trade unionists, he finished with: ‘Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.’
Farmers begin protests
Last weekend (16/11/2024) farmers led by North Wales activist and hill farmer Gareth Wyn Jones turned up on their tractors to protest at the Welsh Labour Party conference in Llandudno. Despite senior figures claiming they ready to talk to the farmers, no-one came out of the conference to do so.
The Independent reports Mr Jones accused Keir Starmer of ‘fleeing like a rat back to London’ when the Prime Minister was spirited out of a rear door into his car.
Meanwhile, farming minister Daniel Zeichner MP (Cambridge) urged farmers to ‘look calmly’ at the government’s plans and insisted ‘the vast majority will be fine’. Claims that thousands of families would be affected were ‘extraordinary’, he said.
That has not gone down well. Even the moderate National Farmers Union (NFU), described his announcement as a ‘miscalculation… which demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of how farming is shaped and managed’.
According to the Telegraph, Labour peer Baroness Mallalieu said the party had become too ‘urban’ to understand the impact of its tax raid on farmers.
As we went to press, more militant farmers were determined to descend on London and Cardiff on Tuesday 19th November. Attendees were expected to include Jeremy Clarkson and Kaleb Cooper, the stars of Clarkson’s Farm.
Declaration of interest: Judy and I farm a small-holding in West Wales. It would be worth less than the threshold, but we still intend to stand with our fellow-farmers. We don’t have a tractor. But our old MG estate identifies as a tractor.
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