The Family farm tax is very damaging. It was troubling older farmers greatly, threatening splitting up farms and making the less viable. Now some of the smaller family farms have been exempted. Still many small businesses and some of the larger family farms are being attacked by IHT, making it difficult for them to pass them on to a new generation of owner/managers. It puts people off building businesses here in the UK or leads to early closure.
More damage was done to more people by the Jobs tax of the first Labour budget, the hike in Employers National Insurance. As some of us forecast there has been a fall in vacancies, and a rise in unemployment. There are especially acute problems for young people looking for their first job. Putting the Minimum wage up at the same time as the big tax rise exacerbated the problem, leading more employers to cut back on recruitment or to slim their workforces down. The catering and hospitality sector was particularly hard hit, and shops also suffered another blow to their chances of survival. The addition of big rises in business rates, against the government promise of helping pubs and High Street shops, was another unexpected hit when they had been promised rates reform to lower their bills.
The language Labour used in its Manifesto to avoid tax rises on working people and to boost living standards has been blown away by a run of anti growth tax rises, managed price rises, and the overriding policy of dear energy to speed net zero. Many more people are now on benefits, and many more young people are not in training, education or work. The government struggles to define a working person, and finds plenty of people to tax more that look like working people to the rest of us. The Chancellor says she is concentrating on getting the cost of living under control, yet she grants large wage rises to a wide range of public sector activities and allows through rises in energy prices, rail fares, Council tax bills and other public sector activities.
As Labour criticise their leader and examine other options, their attention goes to things that will make the situation worse. Every deal with the EU entails paying the EU more money for no advantage, leading to yet higher taxes. The Erasmus deal costs far too much and will if like the last time we were in it pay for more EU students to come here than it will help UK students to go abroad. The idea of joining the Customs Union would mean putting many more tariffs back on imports to the UK, pushing up prices and making UK business less competitive with dearer imported raw materials and components. They have given far too much of our fish away for 12 more years, preventing the good growth of our local fishing industry. They have still not lifted the ban on getting our own oil and gas out of the ground, which bring us more tax revenue and well paid jobs. They still are wedded to closing down all our petrol and diesel car plants by 2030, which means more closures and job losses soon.
To get the econo0my growing again, to help create more jobs, to get the numbers on benefits coming down will take more than a small tax cut on family farms, welcome though that is. They must reverse many of their bans that stop us making and growing things here. They must bring down the costs of employing people, especially young people, by cutting their Jobs tax. They need to review taxation of small businesses generally and create a better climate to encourage new and growing businesses to stay and flourish here.
The government has carried out one sensible U turn on its farms policy. It says it wants to get back to growth, to controlling the cost of living and to encouraging investment. To do that it needs more U turns on its tax rising agenda. It needs to grapple more successfully with runaway public sector costs. it needs to concentrate on getting many more people back to work, whilst issuing fewer sicknotes for life.
December 27, 2025
Indeed and they also did the same for small unquoted trading companies (no U-turn on AIM shares). Note however that in order to pay a 20% inheritance tax on a farm or a business you will almost certainly have to either take dividends out of the business or farm paying 25% Corp. Tax on profits then the dividend tax and then the 20% so the total tax is far higher. Or by selling part of the farm or company possible incurring CGT. To pay say £10m in IHT on a business assets of say £12.5 m you might well end up having to pay more like £25m in all the taxes.
This might well be 25 years of income from a business or even more for businesses like farms that make low profits. Or perhaps borrow it which just defers the problem but makes it larger as you also have to find the interest and fees.
December 27, 2025
The £5 bn that the government expected to gain from the farms land grab, no doubt to facilitate the use for renewable generation, is around the same as Starmer has bunged to the EU to pay for their students to study here and deny our students the possibility of going to other English speaking universities.
December 28, 2025
+1
December 27, 2025
Sir James Dyson:- “Companies are valued on a multiple of their earnings,” he said. “So if you’re paying 40 per cent of a multiple of your earnings, that’s billions in my case. We haven’t got billions of cash… so you have to sell the business to pay it.
“A company has no value. There’s no assets that you can sell. Its value is a multiple of its profits. So it’s paper money. You simply don’t have [it].”
Indeed and with IHT, CGT, Corp. tax, dividend tax it can well be far more than 40% – even if the IHT itself is only 20%.
Sensible countries charge no IHT as it destroys most incentives to invest or build businesses or create jobs in the UK. The government are already taking 25% of profits in CT, then about 50% of the payroll is tax and NI, then perhaps 10%+ of turnover goes in VAT often other taxes too car taxes, fuel, energy, net zero taxes, landfill… Who owns this business? You or the state? The state is likely to be getting far more out of the business than the owners perhaps as much as 10 times as much.
December 27, 2025
Ms Reeves and Labour will rapidly find out that taking say 25% from businesses and workers will give you a far higher tax take than killing and deterring businesses and growth by taxing them at the far higher rates she is pushing and this is on top of the Net Zero rip off energy lunacy, the insane worker right and employment laws and endless other red tape and compliance costs! This especially when UK government spend and waste money so appallingly often doing huge net harms with it!
Not that the top medium/long term tax take (Laffer Point) should even be the goal, that is far too high for the maximum good of the people and country!
December 27, 2025
LL,
It’s The Gangster State.
December 27, 2025
Anarcho-tyranny – a system of government that combines oppressive power, taxation and mugging against law-abiding citizens with a simultaneous failure to enforce basic laws against actual real criminals.
December 27, 2025
And the same for commercial property of course, it’s worth multiples of its annual rent.
Wiping out our cities and towns has destroyed billions.
December 27, 2025
@Lifelogic – they(the UK Parliament) cant get their head around what families are, real people, human-beings that naturally want to look out after them-selves, protect and nourish those around them, create self-reliance to advance and create better lives for all.
It was never money belonging to the State, all dues, taxes etc had been paid.
Then the miss the big one everyone can spend money better than those in the UK Parliament. All inherited wealth creates more wealth, those people then pay taxes and boosts the economy. When people spend you have an economy, a growing economy, when Parliament spends it heads down the drain – a spiral of decline
Instead the Country is crippled by limp ideologue’s in Parliament with perverse personal political ideology that they want to impose on others, not one of them wants a tomorrow and economy that will fund that future for all. A Parliament acting like Gods that must be obeyed seeing ownership as theft, by that they mean theft from themselves personally. Those in the UK Parliament have seen how to rule from the likes of Putin & Xi Jinping, how people bow down and are beholden just to be allowed to live in their shadows that’s the dream of those that inhabit the UK Parliament. They don’t give a monkeys about the minions, the hard workers they are just the fodder
December 27, 2025
The last Tory government was absolutely awful but this current Labour one is so much worse. How can a government have got so much so wrong in such a short time? How can the UK survive another three-and-a-half years of such bad governance? We cannot trust a single word that any government minister, especially the Prime Minister, says because they lie and they find lying so easy to do.
One such lie is that they have ‘reinstated’ the Winter Fuel Allowance (WFA) when in fact they have done no such thing. They have partially reinstated it. A pensioner couple I know got WFA of £250 each in 2023. They got nothing last year after Reeves’ cruel withholding of it, and this year that same couple got £100 each so that is hardly ‘reinstating’ it. Reinstating it would have meant giving them £250 each, not the £100 they actually received, which left them £300 short to pay their ever-rising bills. Energy prices keep going up – mainly thanks to the net zero nonsense – yet pensioners dipped out completely last year and got less than half this year. I don’t even call that a U-turn. I call it seeing just how little in the way of helping its indigenous population an incompetent government can get away with while still financing its favourite causes like foreign aid, like the accommodating and supporting of illegal migrants, like encouraging big families to have even more children that will be a drain on all our public services, like net zero, like supporting Ukraine indefinitely without discussing bringing that war to an end, like funding the vast salaries and expenses of MPs, like funding an unwanted and unwarranted return to the EU, and so on and so on. The list of things this government is wasting our hard-earned taxes on gets longer and longer.
I worry that the U-turn on IHT for family farms will be treated in the same disingenuous way so that it won’t be exactly what it says it will be – the lifting of the risk of IHT on farms under a certain value. It will be worded as a saviour of small family farms but that will be the last thing it turns out to be and, of course, the threat of IHT on them for the last sixteen months will have caused some of them utter devastation and heartbreak.
I ask again, how can a government have got it so wrong in so short a time and, a more pertinent question, how can we rid ourselves of it before it does even more damage? The prospect of the next three-and-a-half years under this current bunch of incompetents terrifies me.
December 27, 2025
Kathy, the government has got nothing wrong, it’d deliberately spiteful against anyone they perceive not to be a liebour supporter.
Following the WEF playbook which 2TK is a cheerleader for means stripping all personal wealth from the population and redistribution to their chosen cohort.
41,000 mainly young men have crossed the channel this year to date. This is an invasion by hostile people but the government does nothing to stop it. It must be government policy. Thousands on student or work visas are claiming asylum. It should be a condition of entry that no one on a visa can claim asylum but no, that’s too easy.
We are being deliberately displaced to the point of bankruptcy and the country is simmering.
There appears to be endless funds to cater for this invasion and this pile of excrement will do nothing to stop it.
December 27, 2025
Yes, it is entirely deliberate.
December 27, 2025
Ian, I do agree with you to an extent. What you say is right, of course, but what the government has got wrong is the speed at which it has operated. It wasted no time attacking those that it knew didn’t and wouldn’t vote for it and it made almost the entire electorate hate and despise it even during the honeymoon period. Everything it has done so far has been done, as you say, out of spite but I am surprised that even this incompetent bunch didn’t try and soften some of the blows it has landed on us. Did government ministers really not expect to be criticised for any of its damaging anti-British not-in-the-manifesto policies?
December 27, 2025
You are too kind to Starmer and Co., they have not got it wrong in their eyes, in fact they have not ‘gone wrong’ enough yet – more wrongness is on the way. Starmer believes he is doing everything right, we just need to believe in his socialist dream and we’ll all feel happy and warm….
December 27, 2025
They are driven by ideology not reality. Reality, or the acceptance of it, make people reconsider their position. Mature and rational people are able to do this. Instead we have people who think that the ends justifies the means no matter how cruel.
December 27, 2025
@Kathy – each Parliament from Blair onwards had the opportunity to right his wrongs, they all not only refused but took the next steps to carry on his crusade of fighting the Nation and its People bleeding them dry to ensure there is no tomorrow. Rather than correct the missteps they saw them as opening the door to take the destruction that one step further.
It about personal political ego and destruction, those that stand up and suggest we need an economy to fund a tomorrow are moved to the shadows and ignored.
A tomorrow for the Country and its People is not part of the ‘Plan’ other wise every Parliament since Blair would have exercised their right to change and grow the country before personal ego
December 27, 2025
“more moves to lower taxes” you say but this is just making a vast proposed tax increase slightly better! Not really lowering taxes but reducing a vast proposed tax grab and asset theft.
What matters is to reduce government expenditure hugely and to make sure what they do spend it spend effectively. Alas this government and the last wasted billions much of it spent doing net harm. Net harm Covid “vaccines”, Covid lockdowns, Net ZERO war on plant food, PPE scandals, payment to augment the benefit feckless, low skilled net cost immigration, the Chagos lunacy, HS2, the war on private schools (with will damage education and cost more than it raises), the pushing of EVs and “renewables” with subsidies, rigged markets and tax breaks, burning wood (young coal) at DRAX, our dire defence procurement, DEI, diversity appointments, the dire structure of the NHS…
December 27, 2025
The £2.5M limit will doubtless be frozen so it is inflated away (a process that the appalling Osborne started). He promised £1M each nearly 20 year back but he and the Con Socialists ratted on this and kept the threshold at £325K (now worth more like £200K). So we now have IHT at 40% (or sometimes 20%) above threshold of £325K, £650K for a couple, £1m if you have a residence you can pass down to children or grandchildren, £2.5m if you have an unquoted business or farm land or £5M for a couple. What a complete dogs breakfast. All taxes should try to be fiscally neutral so as not to rig markets. Unless there are very good reasons to rig them, perhaps (for example) anti-smoking or other anti-drug taxes! Though even these just tend just to increase the black market, smuggling or just switch people to illegal drugs!
December 27, 2025
Note you do not pay CGT on death but it can become due if you need to sell before death or on post death gains. This rule means old people with high gains on property often effectively have to keep them until they die as otherwise they might have to pay CGT (without even inflation indexation now) at perhaps 24% and then iHT at 40% shortly after.
December 27, 2025
IHT can be rather random too. People die and often early & unexpectedly then perhaps their beneficiary dies shortly after so the state grabs up to 64% of the estate of say the grandchildren less probate, funerals, agents fees & legal costs! Can be mitigated with life cover but perhaps some pay you IHT early state scheme might help make the system more fair!
One way to avoid it seems to be by marriage or civil partnerships I hear that some people are using essentially fake ones for tax planning! Can you have a civil partnership with your brother, children or grandchildren I assume not?
December 27, 2025
@Lifelogic – as we all know as the greater majority of us practice it 24/7/365 you only spend what you can earn. If you cant control your expenditure you will not have a tomorrow
December 28, 2025
Well you will but on benefits – supplied by taxpayers until they runs out!
December 27, 2025
Several decades of Governmental and Local Government tax and anti-car policies, along with the growth of online purchasing, have effectively killed the High Street. We were told that the replacement to the traditional retailers would be cafes, restaurants and services – turning High Streets into centres for socialising.
So first of all the Uni-Party hammered pubs and cafes with the Covid Tyranny. Then Theeves decided to clobber those which had managed to survive with massively hiked taxes, including NI and an increase in the minimum wage.
On Christmas Eve, three more retailers in my local small market town put up the Closing Down signs and most people no longer have much disposable income for regular socialising in pubs, cafes and restaurants, so they will be next.
Most employees in these sectors are women and young people – those most likely to vote Labour. I guess we just have to hope that they are learning the lesson because the Labour Party NEVER does.
December 27, 2025
@Donna – it is possible to suggest Theeves learnt from her predecessors, they opened the door for and thought ‘that is how to do it’ She just has a bit more zeal and a Parliament, that place that is there to hold her to account is rock solid behind her destruction.
December 27, 2025
You use many words, while I would state that this government is financially illiterate.
They spend money on projects and people who will show them no profit while setting out to destroy all those family businesses and SMEs that are the positive element of the UK economy.
On top of this incompetence they are the most demoralising influence on those who cannot escape their negativity. Roll on the day when the money lenders tire of their inane proflegacy.
December 27, 2025
This government and all since Thatcher even Thatcher to a degree!
December 27, 2025
@agricola – supported by a Parliament that has forgotten what it was empowered and paid to do, hold the executive, the Government, to account. It would appear Parliament supports this Governments every move, as such the greater majority of MPs in that house own personally all the destruction be forced on the UK. They don’t want to control expenditure, they want to spend the lot so there is no money for a tomorrow for their kids and gran-kids – it a malicious act from the cabal that is there to serve
December 27, 2025
Good morning
In short, the Labour Party has to become more conservative.
What tipsy-topsy world we live in.
Of course the Labour backbenches will never allow it not while they believe that there are enough people with wealth to rinse out.
December 27, 2025
The small U turn that Labour have finally done, was only after lots of pressure from farmers out on the streets regularly with their tractors. The U turn would have never happened otherwise!
December 27, 2025
I agree. IHT is an evil tax that forces unwelcome decisions and financial gambles on elderly people who have made responsible & prudent savings during their working lives. IHT must be scrapped all together.
December 27, 2025
Indeed also a huge deterrent to investment and hard work and an incentive to leave the country! But you can see it as a 40% discount on your World cruise or hip operation I suppose!
December 27, 2025
@James Morley & @Lifelogic – its a malicious irresponsible act by Parliament and its Government, setting out to punish those that come from a World of resilience and self-reliance, those that gave more than they took
December 27, 2025
Pure greed on behalf of government to claim tax on monies passed down through generations.
Again ut is the middle classes most affected. How much did Ed Miliband’s family pay. How about the Lord who died a while back worth £4 billion.
Tax, as ever is paid by those who don’t gave enough to pay advisers.
Spend less, tax less.
December 27, 2025
It surprises me that reporters don’t obtain the probate and wills, which are public records, for the rich and famous to show how they circumvent inheritance tax.
December 28, 2025
If the will includes trusts, these are essentially created to keep the estate assets private. This privacy distinguishes trusts from other estate planning tools like a last will and testament, which indeed becomes a public court record when it is submitted for probate. Because a trust typically avoids this court-supervised probate process, its content remains confidential between the creator, the trustee(s), and the beneficiaries.
So reporters would see the will and probate and simply learn that indeed they include trust(s) but not their contents.
December 27, 2025
The move we need is to a different but sensible government.
December 27, 2025
So essentially, Labour are financially incompetent and are trashing the economy. Who’d a thought it ……
December 27, 2025
‘Head of TUC Paul Nowak says a customs union with the EU could boost the UK’s economy’ reports the Guardian today. Mr Nowak has never worked anywhere other than in the trade union movement and has not followed a course of study in economics, according to his Wikipedia profile. Government ministers are far more likely to read what he says to reinforce their existing confirmation bias, than read the healthy scepticism of John Redwood.
December 27, 2025
When you say they must do more U turns to enable economic growth and activity Sir John, what you are actually saying is Labour must revise their core political policies and reflect on their core values as a Political Party.
The socialist mindset of Labour does not accept, having more people dependent on the state for survival is a bad thing. In fact that is their core strategy, make as many aspects and activities as possible dependent and beholden to state hand outs.
They genuinely believe a controlled state operating entirely to serve the wants of the state authority is a perfect situation. People only being alloed to do what the state requires/desires is how they imagine utopia.
That is why the Public Sector are getting inflation busting pay rises and employment privileges, including early retirement on inflated pension conditions guaranteed by the tax paying Private Sector. Labour want everyone to see state employment as a positive thing….everyone.
If Labour were in an English exam situation, they would expect to be given full Marx (sic) for their essay on how to run a country.
December 27, 2025
This Labour government is both clueless and couldn’t care less about businesses and what makes them tick. That is why so many have stopped recruiting, or are packing it in or are voting with their feet and wallets to go to more business friendly economies.
One grand daughter has taken over a year and 55 job applications to get an actual offer of employment. Another is treading water in an interim job.
December 27, 2025
It’s all do as I say, not as I do, with these politicians. Look into David Lammy, who has claimed £7k per year for accountants to do his tax return. I pay about £400 for mine and my husband’s. So what special tax avoidance schemes is he setting up? Don’t think for one minute that these politicians will pay the same amount of tax we have to pay.
December 27, 2025
Welcome as it is that is far from adequate and will take a lot more from labour before anyone can trust them with the economy.
If they were really earnest about growth and jobs – they would continue with the U-turns on just about every policy they came out with as well as a pile from Tory days, starting with denationalising the railways.
That would of course be hopelessly optimistic, socialists believe in huge government, limited democracy and of course everyone, except the ruling class, reduced to the lowest common order of impoverishment.
December 27, 2025
It really is quite remarkable that somebody who has read PPE at Oxford and then a Master’s in Economics from the LSE could get things so wrong so quickly…
December 27, 2025
Unlike the UK Parliament Governments, there is a tendency for the rest of us to only spend what we earn to cover expenditure. If there is no money available to spend there is no economy, if there is no economy taxes dry up – it is that simple. Its what the UK Households call budgeting… They do it 24/7/365
Parliaments do not create economies, that’s what everyone else does and does infinitely better. Parliaments like the one entrenched in the UK are the destroyer of economies. Parliaments can at best just create frameworks for everyone to thrive to reach potential
Parliaments do not have the wherewithal to run business, that is what happens in the real world, the competitive world of competition. It competition that causes businesses to thrive. The UK Parliament even shields itself from elections, its elections that are after-all intended to keep Parliament on its toes
I am beginning to learn that one of the fault lines is UK Education, and the concept of the Politics, Economics, and Philosophy (PPE) degree. It is interpretive not definitive, so its a nothing. Its hard for logical hardworking people to comprehend that economics is not related to being able to do basic Math, but to a personal interpretation of a Tutor, it is a vague concept without the balance of logic. The trouble that it has brought on the rest of us is the PPE Students cant balance the books, they cant see were the input figure comes from so how can they understand outputs? Yet they received a degree in Economics they wouldn’t even get a pass in ‘home economics’
December 27, 2025
In science as Richard Feynman put it “if it does not agree with experiment it is wrong, that is all there is to it”
Lefty magic money tree economists do not seem to have grasped this concept. Socialism has never worked I suppose it might if we just changed human nature hugely!
December 27, 2025
@Lifelogic – we all compete, we might not like it at times but we are all the better for it. Socialist don’t bring people up they lower them, its a race were every one is supposed to finish last, that means should never aim to improve.
What the UK Parliament fails to recognise is every 3rd World Country is marching forward at such a rate, its competing, advancing, growing attaining wealth funding a future and it is the UK they are passing on the their way forward.
December 28, 2025
+1
December 27, 2025
The last Conservative government put up corporation tax from 19% to 25% in a single step so at least the Labour government hasn’t done anything as damaging to growth as that. Small mercies.
December 27, 2025
Well the NIC raid was a similar scale and this taxes companies that might not have any profits with which to pay the tax so they go bust or have to pay people off.
December 28, 2025
Labour has just piled more destruction on top of Sunak/Hunt’s.
Raising Employer NI at the same time as halving the threshold when it kicks in, as well as raising the minimum wage, is so destructive of part-time employment, particularly in the retail and hospitality sectors, it looks like it was deliberately designed to destroy them.
Only large Corporations will be allowed to survive. The WEF (and their-bought-and-paid-for-politicians) want “the peasants” to own nothing.
December 27, 2025
The farm tax was never about setting the public finances straight. It paid for less than 1 day of borrowing.
It’s all about impoverishing the natives and giving their lifetimes work to the married cousins.
December 27, 2025
It’s not just the taxes piled onto business, but another raft of employee rights. The ACAS site is a good place to view them. Any potential employer looking at them will be firmly discouraged. I’m all for employee rights, but how about not piling them onto employers?
December 27, 2025
Zero contrition from Starmer or Reeves, news affecting farmers slipped out with parliament in recess. Shameful behaviour. What about those farmers who sold up and now realise they didn’t need to? Why is Labour surprised there’s no growth? Increasing minimum wage and NI then introducing additional employee rights have all conspired to dampen demand. The arrogant incompetence of this government is breathtaking.
December 27, 2025
Thisismoney.co.uk 24/12/2025 ´Ten ways to avoid inheritance tax: How to protect your wealth’.
Frankly with the access to internet, all the offices proposing to help legally fight IHT (sometimes close to zero) and the type of publications as the one above, I cannot make sense of today’s blog.
Don’t tell me that anybody with two grams of brain has not consider their options.
Or are Sir John’s faithful readers so @£@«$% they never did so and day after day are just complaining without having taken any sensible measure? In this case won’t they get what they so richly deserve?
Reply I have not read the ten ways. This site does not recommend or support breaking tax law which increasingly bears down against schemes to avoid tax.
December 27, 2025
Another huge cultural difference between the British and the Continent.
We are content to obey our laws, we complain when they are unjust.
We try to argue for a remedy.
We don’t like searching for ways to upend the law, and live like criminals.
December 28, 2025
They nearly all involve “giving it away” in one form or another and it has to be done when you are confident that you will live at least another 7 years. Most of the suggestions are not an option for people whose wealth is tied up in their home, they are getting older and need to consider possible long-term Care bills.
The suggested alternative is SPEND IT. And then make yourself reliant on taxpayers if you need Care which I would have thought was hardly the behaviour the idiots in The Treasury would want to encourage.
December 28, 2025
ThisisMoney is the consumer/money site of the Daily Mail, part of DMG Media (Daily Mail & General trust).
Reply Yes, but its advice still needs to be used carefully to see where it is legal for any individual to apply it to their circumstances.
December 27, 2025
Inheritance Tax is a disgrace, whoever it affects. It should be abolished completely, but never will be by this shambles of a Labour Government. It is a tax on ambition, energy, hard work and works against the natural human instinct to pass something to your children and grandchildren, if you are able to.
Governments must learn to live within their income and not keep finding ways to tax us more and more.
Lower taxes, less regulation, and let people use their talents productively and keep more of what they earn and surprise, surprise the UK economy will start growing!
December 27, 2025
In the Telegraph today
Alan Howard, Nik Storonsky, John Fredriksen, Lakshmi Mittal. Their wealth value that’s left the UK equates to £35bn have all fled the country due to Parliaments tax impositions. £35bn that wont be paying taxes in the UK any more
From the comments section “Wealth creates wealth, and by frighting away the wealthy, only the poor will be left.!” who will pay the benefit’s then?
Rationally as their can be no other explanation, it is part of the ‘Plan’. A plan inspired by the WEF as the way to achieve the ‘great reset’ and a Marxist/Socialist World
December 28, 2025
Levelling down in action.