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I assume the lefties are up in arms

Police have imposed a tractor ban on farmers planning a mass protest over the Chancellor’s inheritance tax raid.

Protesters have been warned they face arrest if they use vehicles to block roads in central London next Tuesday.

Thousands are set to invade Westminster over the changes announced by Rachel Reeves in last month’s Budget, which prevent all farms from being passed on without inheritance tax.

Criminal charges for mere peaceful protest? Doesn’t that prove we’re living under a fascist dikktatorship?

27 thoughts on “I assume the lefties are up in arms”

  1. Doesn’t this come under the same stuff as Extinction Rebellion and those twats who block the roads with their bodies and glue?
    Disruption of infrastructure, etc?

    Of course, if a load of farmers just happen to be driving their road legal tractors slowly in the same area at the same time, there’s not much plod can do.

  2. Mmm…. If I remember the law on this, any stationary vehicle on the public highway can be deemed by police as “causing an obstruction”. That’s been the case for decades. It’s an entirely sensible “catch all” law to let the police deal with someone whose vehicle is doing exactly that without them having to dig around for another specific offence. So, for instance, you can’t arbitrarily park to block someone’s entrance & leave them having to go to to court to get a restraining order to prevent you. You can’t refuse to move a vehicle if it’s hampering emergency services.
    But it is one the police generally use with discretion. They will charge the individual if they’ve done the above & refused to move it. But they mightn’t with organised protests etc. All about PR, isn’t?
    For moving vehicles, pretty anything they don’t like can be described as “driving without due care & attention”. There’s no necessity to show risk to anyone. I believe people have been done for that one driving very slowly to block traffic.
    So with the tractors, if it was BLM or Pride, they probably wouldn’t but…

  3. The farmers will find this is one of those protests that the Left won’t tolerate – ‘wrong sort of protestor’ and we can’t have that.

  4. BIS,

    “So with the tractors, if it was BLM or Pride, they probably wouldn’t but…”

    That’s my only issue here. I object to people having a protest and fucking everyone else’s day up. Even if it’s people I have some general support for.

    Do the farmers think this is somehow going to get reversed? Go ask the average man on the street, or even regular business owners what they think of farmers getting a special IHT exemption. Why should a farm get it and not a factory? A protest works where you’re going to highlight something that will get public sympathy and this won’t.

    But the truth is, there’s plenty of channels to raise something without going out on a march. How many marches have ever succeeded since WW2?

  5. Wonder what the reaction would be if the farmers protest against Kulakisation was to have the cast of Clarksons farm with their vehicles sponsored by Drumpf, Farage in attendance on a 1950″s Fordson, all with Elon Musks starlinked drones flying live news voverage above.

  6. It’s pretty academic really as has been shown elsewhere. What are the flatties to do? 1) Arrest the tractor drivers; 2) Get the tractors towed/driven away; 3) Park them securely in “Nightingale” tractor pounds etc. etc.

    All it would take is 50 tractors or so utterly to swamp the Met and create greater chaos if they weren’t allowed to process peacefully.

  7. Most farmers are only ‘rich” because of Timmys bete noire- the TCPA.
    If one were to cancel that, the notional value of most UK farmland would collapse.
    This would cure some of the problem of average UK 200 acre farm being at the extremes of cash flow poverty in relation to its alleged value.

  8. So you can drive a tractor but not park it in the street? OK, plenty of room to manoeuvre there. Attach a trailer to the tractor and fill it with the most foul smelling manure and just drive it around trafalgar square endlessly and stink the place out. Tourists and other visitors will soon vacate the area causing businesses to lose custom.

    Have about 200 tractors each with a trailer filled with the finest smelling shit and see what happens.

    The only other point to make is whether or not farmers can work around the IHT by placing their farms inside LLC or trusts. A trust would be good as when the farmer dies the ownership does not change, merely the beneficiaries of the trust. Perhaps a few enterprising lawyers will do a roaring trade in this area and overtime the IHT raid on the farmers will fizzle out to nothing.

  9. I do think this is pointless, but I’d enjoy seeing if the words matter. Since the trainee murderers and terrorists are allowed to march through London every weekend demanding genocide I wonder if the farmers called trundling their tractors down Tottenham Court Road at 1.5 mph a Pro Tractor march whether Plod would serve them tea and biscuits? Or am I getting my marches mixed up?
    Anyway, TTK the Trainee Dictator would probably lock them all up anyway, just to pass Part 1 of the Dictator Exams…

  10. Salamander, perhaps you’ve never been near some of our diversity contributors’ marches. Filing a trailer up with shit would just make them feel right at home…

  11. “ask the … regular business owners what they think of farmers getting a special IHT exemption”

    The businessmen already get Business Property Relief, much like the farmers’ Agricultural Property Relief, and likewise now capped at a million£.

    “farmers can work around the IHT by placing their farms inside … trusts”: the man-in-the-pub’s belief in the magical ability of trusts to let you avoid taxes seems impervious to facts.

  12. If you want to know what Liebour really think about agriculture in the UK: “The farmers want to go on the streets – we can do to them what Margaret Thatcher did to the miners… That’s an industry we could do without.”
    Ex Liebour adviser John McTernan
    GB News / Guido.

    And what are the odds that TTK watched Turdeau in Chinada deal with his protesting truckers home grown terrorists and took notes for future reference?

  13. I’m torn…I disapprove of disruptive protests and I don’t see a need to exclude farmers from that.

    On the other hand, if they do go ahead I would want them to be granted the same indulgence as all the Just-Stop-Gaza-Extinction-Oil-Blah-Blah nonsense.

  14. OK, so a trust needs to 6% capital value every ten years. So a farm worth £3 million would need to find £180,000 every ten years (ignoring inflation – need to keep the maths simple for the purposes of this reply). That is £18,000 a year. It really depends on how profitable the farm is.

    But…..

    You only have to pay it every ten years. So it is not £18K a year if you put money in a bank account paying interest. if you are getting 5% interest compound then then you would need to pay £14310 a year for it accumulate to £180K at year 10.

    The main issue I see here other than ensuring you have enough profit to set aside for this (complicated by the fact that the £14K would be taxed income) is that the capital value of the trust could change over time, making it a moving target.

    Perhaps a LLC would be better.

  15. “Go ask the average man on the street, or even regular business owners what they think of farmers getting a special IHT exemption. Why should a farm get it and not a factory? ”
    I’d wish them all the luck. If someone can find a crack in a law it gives someone else the opportunity to prise at it & widen it out. You have to think of the whole war & not just your little skirmish. That’s an attitude I think is largely missing amongst Brits. You’re too intent on looking at you’re own interests & miss the bigger picture. Why you get so much rammed down your throats. United you might win but divided you’ll definitely fall. And politicians understand the game of playing one lot off against another.

  16. ” Go ask the average man on the street, or even regular business owners ”

    Hasn’t Business Property Relief also been capped at £1m? Thus meaning that all privately owned businesses are on the hook for 20% IHT tax over £1m as well?

    Its odd that the changes to BPR have not made the same impact that the APR changes have. But I’d have thought the impact of the former is far greater for the wider economy than the latter.

  17. Incidentally, most tractors have creeper gears, for operating farm equipment that needs a very slow forward speed, like potato harvesters, and manure spreaders. So you aren’t stopped on the Public Highway, just proceeding very very slowly…….

  18. @salamander: don’t forget the income tax and CGT that the trust pays. Its CGT allowance is only £1500 per annum. Its income tax is at 45% with no personal allowance though the beneficiary to whom it is distributed can claim some back if his own tax rate is lower: more bloody admin.

    And (if I understand it correctly) if the value of the gift to a trust exceeds £325k there is immediately a 20% tax charge on the excess.

    Trusts are for keeping control not for avoiding tax.

  19. Jim – I’d have guessed that a big difference between the two might be that the ROCE for farms where the land is owned rather than tenanted will be very much lower from that of a non- farming business with similar revenues. The kind of notional sinking fund that salamander was looking at falls for lack of profit being generated relative to the land value.

  20. If there is to be IHT then I can’t see why anyone, farmers or otherwise, should be exempt. The problem isn’t the existence of the tax, but the rate at which it is extorted. The rates at present are enough to kill the business stone dead. Ditto VAT, ditto just about any tax you care to mention.

    Why no politician seems not to understand that the answer is to spend less, I’ll never know.

  21. Jim “Its odd that the changes to BPR have not made the same impact that the APR changes have. But I’d have thought the impact of the former is far greater for the wider economy than the latter.”

    Maybe because it would be easier to morph a business into another structure, ie. one company becomes several with much juggling of assets and liabilities, not so easy with a farm which is mainly a block of land?

  22. I would love it if British companies of all types just refused to supply the public sector, with anything. You want milk or chickens – you ring up your supplier: “are you on a contract to supply any public buildings with catering”, “Well, yes – Compass buy from us and they supply Whitehall”. “Well fuck off then, buy what you want elsewhere instead of acting for an intermediary who is stealing from me”
    Won’t happen though.

  23. Because of the asset inflation in agricultural land caused by wealthy people such as Clarkson, the average working farm makes a return on assets of roughly 1%. But at least they can get loans to tide them through rough times, based on the inflated asset value. If Clarkson and Co sell up and agricultural land falls to its natural level, then this sector of the economy will probably collapse…. It’s like watching the Cccp versus the kulaks all over again

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