Keir Starmer must get up — he is lacking one fact about farming | Politics | News | EUROtoday

Family farms sit on the coronary heart of Britain’s meals manufacturing, which together with drink makes up the biggest manufacturing sector within the UK, but unbelievably Labour has chosen to undermine their future safety with its “tractor tax” in its “spiteful” budget.

Three-quarters of food grown in this country is estimated to come from family farm businesses that will be directly hit by Labour’s new plan to apply inheritance tax to all farms worth more than £1million. This amounts to some 70,000 farms in total.

The Government may dispute that figure but the National Farmers’ Union has number-crunched the data directly from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The NFU is, quite rightly, up in arms over the threat to its members’ livelihoods. Farms that have belonged to families for generations now face being broken up to pay for death duties, further diminishing their capacity to generate the crops and animals that we need for our nation’s food security.

Yet once again in their greed for our tax money, Labour is discouraging home production in exchange for importing more goods from abroad. And there is a delicious irony to a decision to clock up unnecessary extra miles from a Government that is otherwise hellbent on implementing its disastrous net zero crusade.

It doesn’t help that Environment Secretary Steve Reed is a south London townie who thinks it’s fine to put the boot in while wearing £400 wellies gifted by Lord Alli. Clearly he doesn’t know the first thing about farmers or agriculture.

Reed has previously spoken of “the necessity to transition farming to a extra nature-positive mannequin of farming”. In actuality, this implies decreasing meals manufacturing as fields are both rewilded or stuffed with photo voltaic panels. Neither helps us produce home-grown meals, which absolutely is the easiest way to cut back our carbon emissions and guarantee increased requirements of manufacturing.

Labour should get up and realise it is a battle it can’t and shouldn’t win.

And the fightback has already began.

The Daily Express yesterday launched its campaign to Save Britain’s Family Farms in a wonderfully timed transfer providing the general public the possibility to again the agricultural communities that symbolize our nationwide character.

It follows the No Farmers No Food marketing campaign group, which has to this point attracted over 100,000 supporters. There are additionally plans for farmers to tackle Westminster in an illustration later this month on November 19.

Inventor and farmer Sir James Dyson sees Labour’s merciless tax as a part of a broader assault on Britain’s enterprise. Speaking this week he stated “Rachel Reeves is killing off established family businesses, and any incentive to start new ones, with her 20% Family Death Tax, levied each time a family business passes a generation.

He added: “The very fabric of our economy is being ripped apart. Think of the jobs for ‘working people’ that will be lost – or never created.”

Even US tech billionaire Elon Musk can see the deadly flaw in UK coverage. “We should leave the farmers alone,” he insists. “We [owe] farmers immense gratitude for making the food on our tables.”

The lie that Labour is just not levying taxes on “working people” has already been uncovered by the Office for Budget Responsibility, which estimates that 76% of the latest rise in employers’ National Insurance will likely be handed on to employees by decrease wages. That’s earlier than you issue within the increased costs farmers and different producers will likely be pressured to cost, including to cost inflation and making them much less aggressive with imports.

Labour’s unjust transfer reveals how ignorant Prime Minister Starmer and his socialist buddies are concerning the interconnectivity of the financial system and the way one enhance can unfold out throughout the entire system.

The basic drawback is that Labour is the get together of the insatiable public sector, devoted to whacking up taxes on personal enterprise to reward its gold-plated shoppers. Its deluded politicians can’t appear to fathom that it’s financial progress which generates taxes at the side of a enterprise pleasant surroundings.

It was dangerous sufficient beneath the Tories however Labour is solely doubling down on impoverishing our nation, hitting each farming and trade laborious with increased levies, extra regulation and costlier vitality simply after we have to be serving to all our core producers.

The new Conservative chief Kemi Badenoch should underline how vital it’s to let farmers and different companies get on with their important work.

Family farms are too vital to the well-being of our countryside to be sacrificed to the cash pit that’s Labour’s ever fatter authorities. Helping them helps us take care of ourselves in an ever more difficult world.