by Mark Gullick, The Unz Review:
On June 1, 1381, thousands of English rural laborers descended on the capital of London, the first martial event in what would come to be known as the Peasants Revolt. Over 650 years later, a somewhat less bloody rebellion showed itself in the same city, these latter-day peasants facing similar fiscal provocation to their 14th-century forerunners. Tens of thousands of small farmers descended on London to protest the latest in a series of government policies seemingly designed to destroy the farming industry in Britain, at least in its current form.
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The rally was at Westminster, home of government, mother of all parliaments. It was snowing, which would have depleted attendance had this been a pro-Palestine march, but these people are farmers. Being outside in bad weather is what they do. Their plight has attracted a well-known celebrity to their cause — a modern sine qua non for the protesting classes — in Jeremy Clarkson, for many years the presenter of a hugely popular TV motoring show, Top Gear. Clarkson himself bought a farm, and although he acknowledges his relative financial independence compared with the average farmer, he is popular, articulate and conservative. There is a very English rebellion afoot.
As with the Peasants Revolt, the farmers are rebelling over taxation. But whereas Richard II was trying to raise money to fight France, Sir Keir Starmer wishes to wage war on his own people, the people he was elected to serve less than five months ago (albeit it with only 20% of the electorate voting for his party). The PM’s method of raising the royal revenue is much the same as Richard’s but, not having any serfs to subjugate, he is sending his tax-gatherers after the small farmer. Well, at least he will avoid the Hitler comparisons that bedevil President-elect Donald Trump. Even Hitler looked after the small farmer.
In its recent budget, the government announced that a 20 percent inheritance tax would be levied on all UK farm property worth over £1m, as of April 1, 2026. Those incurring the tax would have a decade to pay it off. Now, a million is chump change in most sectors of the UK property market, but in terms of farm land it will hit two-thirds of the total of the roughly 209,000 British farms, and it won’t be the quaint old farmhouse that pushes up the value of the property. The average UK farm is worth a little over £2m, and farm land is a treasure trove to property developers, who are financially equipped to market aggressively. Farms which have been in families for generations will now be left financially underwater, and therefore easy and rich pickings for hawkish developers.
A case can be made that farming hasn’t changed essentially since British land workers operated under the feudal system at the time of the Peasants Revolt. But while the methods of this primary, extractive industry have remained largely unchanged, the land farmed has not. “Buy land”, suggested Mark Twain. “They’ve stopped making it”. Indeed, but they haven’t stopped ascribing value to it, value which may and does change over time. To a farmer, a hundred acres is his equivalent of the fixed plant of a factory. He grows crops on the land and he sells what the cattle don’t eat. That’s farming, it’s what the land is for. But for the property consortiums even now roaming the length and breadth of the land, assessing and auditing and circling round farmsteads like vultures, a hundred acres is a big block of flats and a supermarket.
Farm land in the UK has proved a good, stable investment in the past 20 years. In 2004, it was worth £3,000 per acre, rising to £7,000 in 2014 to £9-10,000 today. But that is its value as farm land. Business consortiums will have long been planning a land-grab of British farms, with the full backing of government, and they will be in a financial position to operate outside market parameters and make a lot of farmers an offer they can’t refuse. This is a government-assisted buyers’ market for the new land barons as they buy out what remains of the old ones.
