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Kemi Badenoch has been to Jeremy Clarkson’s pub to talk to furious farmers about Sir Keir Starmer’s so-called tractor tax.
The Tory leader has attached herself to the former Top Gear presenter’s campaign against Labour’s decision to scrap agricultural property relief.
The change means previously exempt farms will be hit with a 20 per cent levy on farming assets worth more than £1m, with critics saying it will force family farmers to sell up and rip the heart out of Britain’s countryside.
And on Thursday Ms Badenoch went to speak to local farmers at The Farmer’s Dog, Mr Clarkson’s pub in Asthall, near Burford in Oxfordshire.
“Family farms across the country are now at risk because of Labour’s budget,” Ms Badenoch warned.
And she repeated her promise to reverse the “cruel family farms tax” at the earliest possible opportunity.
The visit came as Sir Keir insisted there would be no U-turn on farmers’ inheritance tax changes, announced by Rachel Reeves in October.
The PM said he was not specifically targeting either family farms or wealthy landowners using agricultural land as a way of dodging tax, insisting it was not “aimed at a particular group of individuals”.
But it is believed the tax changes were brought in to clamp down on those buying up agricultural land to minimise their inheritance tax bills.
Since the row over the tax erupted, Mr Clarkson has backpedalled on his previous claim that avoiding inheritance tax was “the critical thing” in his decision to buy a farm himself.
He wrote on the Top Gear website in 2010: “I have bought a farm. There are many sensible reasons for this: Land is a better investment than any bank can offer. The government doesn’t get any of my money when I die. And the price of the food that I grow can only go up.”
But he has since claimed he bought it for his love of shooting, and that he thought tax avoidance would be “a better PR story” to explain why.
At the Budget chancellor Rachel Reeves ended inheritance tax exemptions for farms worth more than £1m, although in some cases that threshold could be as high as £3m.
The move has led to protests from farmers who claim the death dues could force them to sell off land which could have been in a family for generations.
But appearing in front of the Liaison Committee of senior MPs, Sir Keir defended the way the policy had been drawn up, restating the government’s view that the vast majority of farms will not be affected and the revenue raised was necessary to fund public services.
Asked by Mr Carmichael whether he was targeting the “super rich sheltering wealth” or family farmers, the prime minister said: “The purpose was to raise revenue in the Budget, so it wasn’t aimed at a particular group of individuals.”
He added: “What we tried to do with the regime we put in place was to protect the family farm, putting in a high threshold for inheritance tax for farms, which means that if you take the figures on the estates for farms, the vast majority of them are unaffected by the changes we put in place.
“But we weren’t aiming at a particular group.”
NFU president Tom Bradshaw said Sir Keir had confirmed it was “simply an indiscriminate revenue-raising measure”.
Shadow environment secretary Victoria Atkins said on Thursday that farmer suicides are the “human cost” of Labour’s tax changes.
She told MPs: “Not everyone will be able to celebrate Christmas. In recent weeks, a farmer took himself off to a remote part of his farm and killed himself. The message he left his family, who wish to remain anonymous, is that he did this because he feared becoming a financial burden to his family because of changes to inheritance tax.
“This is the human cost of the figures that the Secretary of State provides so casually. What does the Secretary of State say to that grieving family?”
Environment secretary Steve Reed said: “I send my heartfelt sympathies to that family but I think it is irresponsible in the extreme to seek to weaponise a personal tragedy of that kind in this way. Where there is mental ill health then there needs to be support for that, and this Government is investing in it.
“She knows from the last year for which data is available that the vast majority of claimants will pay absolutely nothing following the changes to APR (agricultural property relief).”
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