By Rebel News | Created at 2024-11-20 20:26:27 | Updated at 2024-11-24 13:44:47
3 days ago
On last night's episode of The Ezra Levant Show, independent journalist and Rebel News alumnus Lewis Brackpool discussed why farmers in the U.K. are taking to the streets in opposition to Keir Starmer's inheritance tax changes.
Thousands of farmers have converged in London and have been protesting outside the British Parliament over fears the changes to the inheritance tax could lead to family farms being destroyed and food production being limited.
"It will actually affect over 60% of working farms despite the government believing that it will only affect the 'wealthy,'" said Brackpool.
Speaking about PM Keir Starmer, Levant said, "In the U.K., the war has been declared against farmers by the new Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer."
"But I don't even think he's pretending that it's a global warming threat. I think he just doesn't like the fact that farmers are generally conservative, are property owners, and I think there's a class issue there," he said.
Levant went on: "So he's brought in a policy that farmers will have to pay a 20% inheritance tax before bequeathing the land to their family. But of course as you know, farms may be valuable on paper but farmers are not cash rich."
"If you have land that's presumably worth one million pounds, you don't have that cash sitting around, so you're going to bequeath it to your kids and have to pay 200,000 pounds for the pleasure of doing so," he said.
"That's basically a way of expropriating your property and making way for developers or other non-farm uses," Levant added.
The Labour government removed a tax break dating back to the 1990s from its budget last month that exempted agricultural property from the inheritance tax, according to CTV News.
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