Explained: How UK Inheritance Tax is part of the War on Food

The British government’s inheritance tax reforms aren’t about class warfare or filling the “black hole” in the country’s budget, they are about taking vital land off small and medium-sized family farms and handing it to mega-corporations.

It’s yet another piece of the Great Reset agenda, specifically the war on food.

A quick course for non-Brits who don’t know how our country works (and, indeed, the substantial number of Brits who have recently demonstrated they don’t know how their own country works):

Since 1984 working farms have been 100% exempt from paying inheritance tax under the “agricultural property relief” (APR) system.

The justification for this was that working farms are needed to produce the food we all eat, and since British farming families are generally asset-rich but cash-poor, charging inheritance tax on farmland might negatively impact farm output.

Keir Starmer’s government has just announced that, as of April 2026, they are scrapping the APR scheme.

This means anyone inheriting a working farm will now have to pay up to 20% of the value of the assets in tax, and since farmers operate on fine margins that will likely mean selling of parcels of land to raise money. Some farmers may be forced to sell all the land at once, since piece-meal buyers may be hard to find.

As you can imagine, the farmers are not happy about this. Nor is anyone who understands the potential implications.

This is being billed in the press as old-fashioned left vs right politics, the narrative is that the country needs revenue and that “greedy hoarding farmers aren’t paying their fair share”.

But, in my view, this is a lie.

Or at best a distortion. A noisy public debate that obfuscates the real intention of the policy.

I don’t think ghis has anything to do with raising taxes. I think this is about the land.

They know this policy will force medium-sized family-run farms to sell – in fact, they are banking on it.

Take a look at  Will Hutton’s column in The Guardian…

Farmers have hoarded land for too long. Inheritance tax will bring new life to rural Britain

Hard to see this as anything but  an admission of the real policy here.

And then we have former  Blair aide John McTernan landing himself in hot water when he told an interviewer Starmer’s government should “do to farmers what Thatcher did to miners”, claiming “farming is an industry we can do without”. Labour officials were quick to disavow the comments, but you can’t help but think it was a “quiet part loud” moment.

As usual, it is the journalists and twitterati carrying the bag for tyranny, making bitter, snarky social media posts about “millionaire farmers” or rambling on about farmers deserving to lose their business because they voted for Brexit.

Yes, seriously:

“It does beg the question whether farmers are simply reaping what they sowed.”@Matthew_Wright would have more sympathy for farmers complaining about inheritance tax if the majority of them hadn’t made the country “£100 billion a year worse off” by voting for Brexit. pic.twitter.com/9ot55mYT8L

— LBC (@LBC) November 17, 2024

Just as with Covid and “climate change”, the powers-that-shouldn’t-be are safely relying on the “educated middle class” to not understand anything at all about the way the world really works.

I imagine the self-labelled leftists think the sold-off farmland is going to be snatched up by the state and run for the common good or something equally delusional.

In his article, Hutton even argues this will energise “young farmers”:

Young farmers, now increasingly crowded out of the market, will get a chance to buy land: there is the prospect of a levelling off, even a fall, in farm rents. New life and ideas will be brought to the rural economy as innovative, energetic farmers enter the market – and production even increases.

As if the country is full of aspiring independent farmers with nothing but a hoe, a dream and a few million pounds to spend on land.

It is a fantasy.

Common sense tells you any land farmers are forced to sell will be bought up by corporate giants who can afford to pay over market price (We’ve seen the same thing with the housing market in the US).

Big Farmer conglomerates that want to plant green deserts of monocultures for making vegan protein alternatives because meat and dairy are bad for the environment. And that’s very much the best-case scenario. At least that’s still food production, of a sort.

Alternatively, it will be bought up by energy suppliers who then lease the land at extortionate rates back to local councils to build solar panels and/or wind turbines that don’t work in the name of saving the planet.

Or maybe it will be bought by “climate-friendly” NGOs or billionaire philanthropists who accept massive “grants” from the government to “conserve the environment” by just letting prime farmland lie fallow.

We know all this happens, they’ve been doing it for years.

The British government started paying “lump sums to farmers who wanted to leave the industry” in 2022.

Farmers were served “compulsory purchase orders” to make space to build high-speed rail links.

The “Environmental Land Management” scheme pays farmers to “rewild” fields.

Farmland is being flooded to create salt marshes, earmarked for cultivated forests and solar panels in the name of combatting (entirely imaginary) climate change.

This isn’t just a British issue. It is a global one.

In 2023 the EU “reformed” its Common Agricultural Policy to award subsidies based on sustainability rather than productivity, at the same time they are securing trade deals with South America to import food rather than grow their own (French farmers are protesting this). Denmark is going “rewild” 15% of its farmable land to “lower fertiliser usage”. Like the UK, the US has both federal and state programs that pay farmers not to farm.

It goes on and on. It’s a simple system:

• Make small or medium-sized farms financially non-viable
• Force families to sell their land.
• Have Mega-Corps buy it up

In short, the endgame is total corporate control over the land and the food supply. The inheritance tax changes are just the UK government adding more pressure on farmers to accelerate this process.

Once that goal is achieved they take the narrative anywhere they want it to go. They can engineer food shortages and price increases, then they can say those shortages show “how badly we need food reform” and start instituting climate-friendly rationing and meat bans and forcing people to eat bugs and lab-grown goo.

They’ve got the land, they’ve got the food, so they can say – and do – whatever they want.

All the while food prices will go up, family farms and organic products will begin to disappear, and idiotic self-styled “communists” on Twitter will smile smugly and think they won one for the little guy.

The farmers are planning a large protest for November 19th. I would urge anybody who requires food to live give them some moral support.

Their rallying cry is “No Farmers, No Food!”. Unfortunately for them, that is very much the point.