Meet Llewellyn (not his real name). Llewellyn was a farmer I met in my old job and the National Farm Research Unit. The job I used to pay bills when I was representing Woodbridge as an (unpaid) town councillor. I called farmers with surveys and hoped that they would be nice to me (sometimes they were…).
Llewellyn’s wife picked up. She, like him, was in her 80s, though she could barely speak a word of English. See the people in rural Gwynedd have performed the same job as their ancestors have in the same place since the late stone age. In fact, the farmers of Gwynedd are the people closest related to those that built stone henge – a fact proven by genetic analysis of skeletons. Not sharing my Anglo-Saxon heritage, Llewellyn’s wife was Welsh monolingual.
Thankfully for my job, Llewellyn was not.
He told me that he hadn’t been on a holiday for 25 years. The reason being was that Llewellyn annual income was £13,000 a year. Llewellyn’s land (the mountain the other side of Snowdon) was very expensive. Apparently, it could be sold for holiday homes for an enormous profit. The NFU has said that this makes 80-something Lewellyn fair game for Labour’s changes to inheritance tax. The government disputes this suggestion. Insisting that their own research was in all ways superior to the professionals and peer-reviewed organisations that state the contrary.
The situation is muddied by the Institute for Fiscal studies admitting two factors which spells potential doom for our agri-sector:
- ‘Nevertheless, in some cases will simply yield too little income (and the inheritor will have too few other resources) to pay the tax. The owners might choose, or be forced, to sell part or all of the farm.’
- ‘The exact number that will be affected is uncertain but government figures imply it will be significantly less than 500 estates per year…’
Labour insists that marking their own homework is a worth-while enterprise. I (and most farmers) disagree.
In a post-Brexit, post-truth world it is clear that facts and expert opinion no longer carry the weight in public discourse that they once did. In much the same way that the last government crusaded against doctors and health-care workers, this government has chosen farmers.
No less defensible (and arguably crueller) the “Bus Tax” will remove mobility and agency for thousands of rural working people.
It seems that many commenters on social media were to be believed believe that farming is enormously profitable. Most farmers hold a title, a castle and probably a butler. We’re all multi-millionaires, don’t you know?
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