CashNews.co
LONDON (AP) — With banners, bullhorns and toy tractors, thousands of British farmers descended on Parliament on Tuesday to protest a tax hike they say will deal a “hammer blow” to struggling family farms.
U.K. farmers are rarely as militant as their European neighbors, and Britain has not seen large-scale protests like those that have snarled cities in France and other European countries. Now, though, farmers say they will step up their action if the government doesn’t listen.
The flashpoint is the government’s decision in its budget last month to scrap a tax break dating from the 1990s that exempts agricultural property from inheritance tax. From April 2026, farms worth more than 1 million pounds ($1.3 million) face a 20% tax when the owner dies and they are passed on to the next generation.
“Everyone’s mad,” said Olly Harrison, co-organizer of a protest that flooded the streets around Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Downing Street office. He said many “want to take to the streets and block roads and go full French.”
Organizers urged protesters not to bring farm machinery into central London, though a handful of tractors drove past Downing Street festooned with signs saying “the final straw” and “no farmers, no food.”
They were cheered by a crowd that police estimated at 13,000. Some held signs proclaiming “Stand with a farmer, not Starmer.”
Children on toy tractors looped round Parliament Square after a rally addressed by speakers including former “Top Gear” TV host and celebrity farmer Jeremy Clarkson. Another 1,800 farmers were invited into Parliament for a “mass lobby” organized by the National Farmers’ Union.
“The human impact of this policy is simply not acceptable, it’s wrong,” NFU President Tom Bradshaw said. “It’s kicking the legs out from under British food security.”
Volatile weather exacerbated by climate change, global instability and the upheaval caused by Britain’s 2020 departure from the European Union have all added to the burden on farmers. Many feel the Labour Party government’s tax change, part of an effort to raise billions of pounds to fund public services, is the last straw.
“Four out of the last five years, we’ve lost money,” said Harrison, a fifth-generation farmer who grows cereal crops near Liverpool in northwest England. “The only thing that’s kept me going is doing it for my kids. And maybe a little bit of appreciation on the land allows you to keep borrowing, to keep going. But now that’s just disappeared overnight.”
Starmer’s center-left government says the “vast majority” of farms -– about 75% — will not have to pay inheritance tax, and various loopholes mean that a farming couple can pass on an estate worth up to 3 million pounds ($3.9 million) to their children tax-free. The 20% levy is half the 40% inheritance tax paid on other land and property in the U.K.