The Hammond Quiz C/D 11Th January
Quizzes & Puzzles0 min ago
Tipical tories, if we cant whip up enough support lets try bribery, van loads of free food to attract more support. With only 270k signatures to support their claims I suppose its not looking to good. Just pay your tax and like everyone else and stop bleating.
How? Brexit damaged businesses across the board, inturn that damaged government revenue. Government revenue is paramount, so one way or another more tax will need to be collected in varrious ways, to fill that black hole. Hopefully that oven ready will soon be chucked in the bin because its now stinking to high heaven.
whatever the problems are with british farming (and there are lots) the fact remains that forcing medium or large estates to sell off their land will result in lots more small farms which are almost by definition less productive or it will result in that land not being used for farming at all. the warnings being made by farmers are in my view quite credible. it isn't a good idea to pick a fight with the people who produce our food especially when our goal is to rely more on domestic food than we currently do.
No one is forcing them to do anything. The only reason that maybe smaller farms are struggling( note i say maybe) is that the bigger farmers are crushing them on wholesale prices, the latter being no different than Tesco crushing the corner shop. No one is neither picking a fight, just requesting tax to be paid. If you want to blame anyone for what the smaller farmer (may or maynot) suffer, blame the land grabbing greedy tax avoidance snobs.
Clearly one poster in particular on here has no idea of how many family owned farms are passed on through the generations. There may be a few Clarkson types who moved into farming as a tax avoidance measure but this is hitting the small family farms hardest. Why use a sledgehammer to crack a nut / throw the bay out with the bathwater?
“Brexit damaged businesses across the board, inturn that damaged government revenue.”
It didn’t seem to do it too much harm. Government revenue in 2017-18 (the first full year after the referendum) was £593bn. In 2023-24 (the last full year) it was £829bn. That’s an increase of 39.7%. Inflation between April 2017 and March 2024 was 28.7%. To keep pace with inflation the government needed only to raise £763bn so it was £66bn better off
“Government revenue is paramount, so one way or another more tax will need to be collected in varrious ways,”
Government revenue is not paramount. Government spending is paramount and the government should spend what it can reasonably raise, not raise what it unreasonably thinks it should spend. However, those argument are peripheral to this one.
“The only reason that maybe smaller farms are struggling…”
This has not solely to do with farms which are struggling. Farms that are efficient and profitable will be hit equally.
“Then maybe the snobs who have such land use it to grow crops instead of it sitting there as nothing more than tax avoidance field.”
I quite agree. The concession is being abused. The reason for your lack of understanding is you feel that all farmers are rich Tory toffs. But they're not - they're really not. You can find figures for the average earnings of family farms easily enough
The problem to be addressed is the one where genuinely rich toffs are buying farmland to avoid inheritance tax. This government's idea will not stop that because it will still be advantageous for them to do so. Currently their inherited farmland is exempt from inheritance tax. Under the new rules they will pay 20% tax whereas if they held the money in other forms they would pay 40%. So they are still better off buying farmland and not farming it.
The problem it introduces is that because of that measure, farmland which has been in family hands for generations and which was simply passed down those generations will now be subject to inheritance tax. There is no justification for this. No money is being realised from the land. If it was, Capital Gains Tax would capture tax on the gain. The tax is levied simply because a member of the family has died.
Not only does this mean that some or all of the land may have to be sold to pay the tax. The land freed up by families having to sell will almost certainly be bought by the very rich toffs the tax is aiming to penalise and they will certainly no longer farm it. So, not unusually for many Labou schemes, it will exacerbate the very problem it sets out to cure (and reduce the amount if worked farmland into the bargain).
There is no doubt that the tax will see the end of a number of family run farms in this country with the land being sold to ultra-rich individuals simply in order to reduce their inheritance tax liabilities.
So, following my explanation, do you really believe it is a good idea to impose a tax which will raise very little in the overall scheme of things, but almost certainly see the end of many family farms in the country?
Now your 2 mates have finished snuggling up to you.
You can number crunch until the cows come home, but the truth of the matter business, lots of business has been lost to both imports and exports. Besides that your number crunching has about 4 years accounts missing, thats some black hole. But i do get the impression your suggesting that government only work hand to mouth, ( just the right income to suit just the right outgoing) no provision for a rainy day, not even a pandemic?
Well government out goings can never be set in concrete from one year to the next.thats imposible.
My understanding is NOT all farmers are rich tory snobs, but tory rich snobs have created the new tax, the rest of the farmers have since the year dot always claimed povety regardless. The government have a duty to plug tax avoidance and make buying up farmland to avoid tax less attractive and viable. Even with the 20% its still better than paying the full 40% elsewhere?? That maybe so at the moment, but even land thats not used for production of food, only for tax dodging, it still requires some sort of land managment, and that cost is still required, but now on top of the 20%, so it becomes less attractive, the latter can only be a good thing, because if the land grab carries on the young people who are at agriculture college now won't be able to start their own farms, buy or rent, very much like the grabbing of second holiday homes in Cornwall, out priced/ over priced.
Whatever government do in respect of getting incoming revenue and in respect of expenditure there will sometimes be collateral damage, a little like the WFA.
Like I said at the begining of this post farmers have always pleaded povety if they had the slightest inclin that their profits may suffer a little.
Any farmer that gives over his fields for 4/5 months of the year to produce thousands of tons of pumpkins for a possible 1 /3 day retail trade bonanza can't be very poor. Its a product that goes no where other than landfill.
Talk about landfill. That post is just pagefill. Six paragraphs of almost nothing new, relevant or making sense there nicebloke. For example newjudhe compared two years 2017 to 2024 to show the change since Brexit. Unless you can show one of those years was an oultlier and that including each of the intervening years then how do you know there's a black hole in his figures? And if farmers think they can make a profit from pumpkins (perhaps more than from other crops) why do you think that shows they have too much money? Doesn't make sense.
The one thing I think we all agree on is that the buying up of farmland purely as a tax dodge needs to be clamped down on. What we don't agree is that the governement should throw the baby out with the bathwater by increasing the IHT (and threatening the business) on medium to large family farms that have been passed on through generations. It'll raise a tiny amount but lead to farms being sold off, possibly more farms bought by large companies purely as a profit generator, and more imports/fewer exports.
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