UK farmers descend on Parliament to protest tax to “ruin” small farms

With banners, bullhorns, toy tractors and an angry message, 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.

UK 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 per cent 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 with angry farmers. 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 tightly packed crowd — many in in the countryside uniform of Barbour jackets. Some held signs proclaiming “Stand with a farmer, not Starmer.”

Children on toy tractors were due to lead a march around 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” of lawmakers nearby organized by the National Farmers’ Union.

“The human impact of this policy is simply not acceptable, it’s wrong,” NFU President Tom Bradshaw told farmers gathered for the mass lobby. “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 U.K. 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 on his family farm 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.

Supporters of the tax say it will recoup money from wealthy people who have bought up agricultural land as an investment, driving up the cost of farmland in the process.

“It’s become the most effective way for the super rich to avoid paying their inheritance tax,” Environment Secretary Steve Reed wrote in the Daily Telegraph, adding that high land prices were “robbing young farmers of the dream of owning their own farm.”

But the famers’ union says more than 60 per cent of working farms could face a tax hit. And while farms may be worth a lot on paper, profits are often small. Government figures show that income for most types of farms fell in the year to the end of February 2024, in some cases by more than 70 per cent. Average farm income ranged from about 17,000 pounds ($21,000) for grazing livestock farms to 143,000 pounds ($180,000) for specialist poultry farms.

The last decade has been turbulent for British farmers.

Many farmers backed Brexit as a chance to get out of the EU’s complex and much-criticized Common Agricultural Policy. Since then, the U.K. has brought in changes such as paying farmers to restore nature and promote biodiversity, as well as for producing food.

Some farmers have welcomed those moves, but many feel goodwill was squandered through missteps by successive governments, a failure of subsidies to keep up with inflation, and new trade deals with countries including Australia and New Zealand that have opened the door to cheap imports.

National Farmers’ Union Deputy President David Exwood said the tax hike was “the final straw in a succession of tough choices and difficult situations that farmers have had to deal with.”

The government has “completely blown their trust with the industry,” he said.

Starmer spokeswoman Camilla Marshall said the decision had been “difficult” but was not being reconsidered.

Opposition politicians see an opportunity.

The main opposition Conservative Party — which was in government for 14 years until July — and the hard-right populist party Reform UK are both championing the farmers. Some far-right and conspiracy theory groups attended Tuesday’s protest, though the organizers were not affiliated with them.

Harrison said the demonstration was intended as “a show of unity to the government” and an attempt to inform the public “that farmers are food producers, not tax-dodging millionaires.”

“It’s every single sector, whether you’re a landowner or a tenant, whether you’re beef, dairy, milk, cereals, veg, lettuce — you name it, everyone has had a hammer blow from this,” he said.

“Every farmer is losing.”

By Jill lawless, AP