Enemy of the Farmer: How Inheritance Tax Policies Betray Rural Communities

Farmers: When Did the Left Forget Marx?

One of my favourite plays is Enemy of the People an 1882 play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen that delves into the conflict between personal integrity and societal norms. The play centres on Dr Thomas Stockmann, who discovers a serious contamination issue in his town’s new spas, endangering public health.

There’s one particular scene where Dr Stockmann uses a metaphor to tell the people what he sees. He asks them to imagine they were scots on a mountain top they are watching a column of their own soldiers marching along. The scouts see they are walking into a trap. He tells the people the scouts have a duty to warn their comrades they are walking into a trap.

The scouts atop Henrik Ibsen’s mountain would weep at what they see approaching our rural communities. Under the guise of progressive taxation, we’re witnessing the largest transfer of agricultural wealth since the Enclosure Acts—not to communities or cooperatives, but to corporate boardrooms and investment funds.

Today I see that trap we are walking into and that trap is coming with the decimation of family farming.

Labour says it is “those with the broadest shoulders” who will be affected by this tax change, but most of the landed gentry are exempt from it. If their home and estate is deemed of cultural and historic value, it can avoid inheritance tax. Guy Shrubsole, author of The Lie of the Land, said: “While everyone’s debating changes to APR, more than 350 aristocratic estates are also claiming an additional tax break – the ‘tax-exempt heritage assets’ scheme – and using it to prop up ecologically damaging grouse moors and pheasant shoots. Closing this tax loophole would raise money for public services and give nature a break, too.”

Let’s be brutally clear about what’s happening: While the Duke of Westminster’s £9 billion estate remains safely protected in trusts, fourth-generation family farmers face an existential threat. This isn’t redistribution—it’s predatory capitalism wearing a progressive mask.

“The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralised humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.” ― Michael Parenti, Against Empire

When Did the Left Forget Marx?

There’s a peculiar irony in watching the liberal left champion policies that would make venture capitalists blush. The government’s new “Tractor Tax” represents everything the authentic left has traditionally fought against: the commodification of land, the destruction of rural communities, and the transfer of wealth from working people to corporate interests.

The farming minister, Daniel Zeichner, has also said there is a “discrepancy” in the numbers, with the National Farmers’ Unionsaying Defra’s own figures show that 66% of the UK’s 209,000 farms are worth more than £1m and so potentially eligible to be taxed. Tom Bradshaw, the NFU president, said: “Far from protecting smaller family farms, which is what ministers say they’re doing, they’re actually protecting private houses in the country with a few acres let out for grazing while disproportionately hammering actual, food-producing farms, which are, on paper, much more valuable. Even Defra’s own figures show this, which is why they’re so different to the Treasury data this policy is based on.”

Let’s be brutally honest: Karl Marx himself warned against precisely this kind of attack on agricultural inheritance rights. He understood that abolishing peasants’ (farmers) property rights would only serve to benefit capitalist tenant farmers (corporate farming), transforming independent cultivators into wage labourers. Yet here we are, watching supposed leftists cheerleading policies that Marx explicitly cautioned would accelerate corporate control over agriculture.

Marx insisted that it was vital not to “hit the peasant over the head” — for example, by “proclaiming the abolition of the right of inheritance or the abolition of his property.” Such measures would only be possible in a situation where “the capitalist tenant farmer has forced out the peasants, and where the true cultivator is just as good a proletarian, a wage-labourer, as is the town worker.” Although he warned against any move to deprive the peasants of land they already possessed, Marx also rejected “the enlargement of the peasant allotment simply through peasant annexation of the larger estates, as in Bakunin’s revolutionary campaign.”

“When we are in possession of state power, we shall not even think of forcibly expropriating the small peasants (regardless of whether with or without compensation), as we shall have to do in the case of the big landowners. Our task relative to the small peasant consists, in the first place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise and private possession to cooperative ones, not forcibly but by dint of example and the proffer of social assistance for this purpose.” -Karl Marx

Once you put your pitchfork down and understand this inheritance bill will not hit the wealthy landowners or the corporations that own vast swathes of our countryside, you have to stop and wonder why…

This isn’t socialism – it’s capitalism in its most predatory form, dressed up in progressive clothing. The same BlackRock executives who crashed the global economy in 2008 are now positioning themselves to become the new lords of British agriculture. And somehow, they’ve convinced parts of the left to hold the door open for them.

Consider the parallels with urban gentrification, a process the left typically opposes. In cities, we protest when working-class communities are displaced by luxury developments. Yet in rural areas, we’re meant to celebrate when family farmers are forced to sell to corporate agribusiness? This isn’t progressive policy – it’s class warfare with a green wash.

The numbers expose the lie: 37% of EU farmers have vanished in a decade, while mega-farms have increased by 56%. This isn’t organic economic evolution – it’s systematic displacement. When investment funds promise 15% returns on agricultural land, they’re not planning to improve farming – they’re planning to industrialise it.

Karl Polanyi warned us about treating land as mere commodity. He understood that when you reduce agriculture to spreadsheet calculations, you don’t just destroy farms – you unravel the entire social fabric of rural communities. Yet here we are, watching supposed progressives applaud as hedge funds circle family farms like vultures.

Researchers found that the number of mega-farms in the EU, with an economic output of over €250,000, jumped by 56% between 2007 and 2022, while the number of farms in the small-scale commercial category (with outputs between €2,000 and €49.999) dropped by 44% over the same time-frame.

This loss of almost two million commercial farms and 3.8 million jobs suggests that the model of small-scale family farming is dying out through regressive taxes. At the same time, only 306,000 more people are now employed in mega-farms. Overall employment on commercial farms in the EU dropped by 38% between 2007 and 2022…

You do see where this is going, don’t you….

This isn’t just a tax policy issue—it’s a government betrayal that threatens the survival of family farms and accelerates the rise of corporate agribusiness.

By supporting this, you’re walking straight into a carefully laid trap. Soon, vast swathes of the British countryside will be blanketed with solar panels and wind turbines. Those who don’t sell out to energy companies will likely find themselves at the mercy of giant corporations like BlackRock, which has already acquired significant tracts of land across the EU.

The end game is painfully clear. Those vast tracts of family farmland won’t become worker-owned cooperatives or community gardens. They’ll become corporate mega-farms, solar panel fields, and luxury housing developments. Your local produce will soon come stamped with corporate logos, grown on an industrial scale with profit, not sustainability, as the driving force.

True progressive policy would strengthen family farming, not destroy it. It would target genuine concentrations of wealth as Unite the Union and The Workers Party of Britain proposed through measures like the proposed 2% tax on wealth above £10 million – a policy that would raise £24 billion hitting the haves, not the have-nots without devastating rural communities. Confronting actual wealth and power is something this government seems unwilling to do.

This is why the silence from certain quarters of the left is so deafening – and so damning. In supporting this policy, they’re not advancing socialism; they’re enabling the largest transfer of agricultural wealth since the Industrial Revolution. They’re not fighting privilege; they’re helping investment banks acquire our countryside.

For those genuinely committed to progressive values, the choice should be clear: stand with family farmers against corporate takeover, or admit that your definition of progress aligns more closely with BlackRock’s board room than with working rural communities.

The transformation of British agriculture is indeed coming, but let’s be clear about what kind of transformation this is. It’s not the democratisation of farming – it’s the corporatisation of our countryside. It’s not progress – it’s primitive accumulation dressed up in modern clothing.

As family farms vanish, replaced by corporate agriculture answering only to shareholders, remember: this wasn’t inevitable. It was a choice – a choice made not by socialists or progressives, but by those who saw our countryside as nothing more than another asset class to be consolidated and monetised.

The pitchforks being raised against farmers might better be turned toward the corporate boardrooms where this agricultural coup is being orchestrated. For those genuinely committed to progressive values, the choice should be clear: stand with family farmers against corporate takeovers that will hoover up the sale of land, or admit that your definition of progress aligns more closely with BlackRock’s boardroom than with working rural communities.

Paul Knaggs

Editor, founder, Labour Heartlands, Citizen journalist. LeFT wing political refugee. Fighting a constant struggle with dyslexia that’s overcome with a burning desire to speak out against the corrupt political system and the social injustices it creates. Advocate for Free speech and open, accountable, democracy. #GTTO