On June 1, 1381, thousands of English rural laborers descended on the capital of London, the first martial event in what would come to be known as the Peasants Revolt. Over 650 years later, a somewhat less bloody rebellion showed itself in the same city, these latter-day peasants facing similar fiscal provocation to their 14th-century forerunners. Tens of thousands of small farmers descended on London to protest the latest in a series of government policies seemingly designed to destroy the farming industry in Britain, at least in its current form.
The rally was at Westminster, home of government, mother of all parliaments. It was snowing, which would have depleted attendance had this been a pro-Palestine march, but these people are farmers. Being outside in bad weather is what they do. Their plight has attracted a well-known celebrity to their cause — a modern sine qua non for the protesting classes — in Jeremy Clarkson, for many years the presenter of a hugely popular TV motoring show, Top Gear. Clarkson himself bought a farm, and although he acknowledges his relative financial independence compared with the average farmer, he is popular, articulate and conservative. There is a very English rebellion afoot.
As with the Peasants Revolt, the farmers are rebelling over taxation. But whereas Richard II was trying to raise money to fight France, Sir Keir Starmer wishes to wage war on his own people, the people he was elected to serve less than five months ago (albeit it with only 20% of the electorate voting for his party). The PM’s method of raising the royal revenue is much the same as Richard’s but, not having any serfs to subjugate, he is sending his tax-gatherers after the small farmer. Well, at least he will avoid the Hitler comparisons that bedevil President-elect Donald Trump. Even Hitler looked after the small farmer.
In its recent budget, the government announced that a 20 percent inheritance tax would be levied on all UK farm property worth over £1m, as of April 1, 2026. Those incurring the tax would have a decade to pay it off. Now, a million is chump change in most sectors of the UK property market, but in terms of farm land it will hit two-thirds of the total of the roughly 209,000 British farms, and it won’t be the quaint old farmhouse that pushes up the value of the property. The average UK farm is worth a little over £2m, and farm land is a treasure trove to property developers, who are financially equipped to market aggressively. Farms which have been in families for generations will now be left financially underwater, and therefore easy and rich pickings for hawkish developers.
A case can be made that farming hasn’t changed essentially since British land workers operated under the feudal system at the time of the Peasants Revolt. But while the methods of this primary, extractive industry have remained largely unchanged, the land farmed has not. “Buy land”, suggested Mark Twain. “They’ve stopped making it”. Indeed, but they haven’t stopped ascribing value to it, value which may and does change over time. To a farmer, a hundred acres is his equivalent of the fixed plant of a factory. He grows crops on the land and he sells what the cattle don’t eat. That’s farming, it’s what the land is for. But for the property consortiums even now roaming the length and breadth of the land, assessing and auditing and circling round farmsteads like vultures, a hundred acres is a big block of flats and a supermarket.
Farm land in the UK has proved a good, stable investment in the past 20 years. In 2004, it was worth £3,000 per acre, rising to £7,000 in 2014 to £9-10,000 today. But that is its value as farm land. Business consortiums will have long been planning a land-grab of British farms, with the full backing of government, and they will be in a financial position to operate outside market parameters and make a lot of farmers an offer they can’t refuse. This is a government-assisted buyers’ market for the new land barons as they buy out what remains of the old ones.
In fact, this whole legislative instrument is designed to impact farmers’ finances negatively. Supposing 10% of small farmers decide to sell up in the wake of the new tax, a scenario quite possible and even probable. Not only does the value of farm land drop concomitantly in a saturated market, but even the price of plant and other chattel assets would drop, as one in ten small British farmers all try to sell their tractors at once. A tractor costs around a quarter of a million pounds, a combine-harvester half a million. This is not selling off the office furniture in a fire sale.
It should not be suggested, however, that the current British government has no money available to invest in farming, or that it is failing to invest that money. Why, it has just signed off £536m as an aid package to help farmers grow food for consumption in the UK. It’s just that the farms happen to be in Africa, Asia, and South America, including recipients in Brazil, the world’s eleventh richest country. Some of the money is said to be going towards “carbon capture” farming, so the dispossessed, last generation of farmers in the UK have got that going for them.
The satirical image the British have of farmers is rooted in a past of class war, when the landed gentry had money. But the upper-middle class, gentleman farmer, in his new Range Rover and expensive Barbour jacket, doesn’t really exist outside of situation comedy. Farming is as tough and visceral as it ever was, and as for wealth creation, that is not what farming seems to most UK farmers. It is estimated that small farms make 1–2% of their value annually as profit, and the average farmer earns a shade under £40,000, around £5,000 more than the national average. Given the variables factored into farming, that is not much of a slush fund should one become necessary. Nor is it much of a financial reward, despite the vestigial, reflex class response of the metropolitan Leftist elite who run contemporary British politics and its provisional wing in the media.
The Left are acting as contrarily as ever over the farmers’ plight. Where once the media and the Party would have got behind the working man as a default position, the temperament of the Labour Left has changed in recent decades, led as this revolution was by the Blair government. Farmers now are subsumed under the category “white working class”, and so despised on two fronts by Labour. They are also an easy target as they represent White industrial secession. You just don’t get Black or Muslim farmers, so there is no problem with the ethnics as far as Labour and their acolytes are concerned. If there were Black or Muslim tillers of the soil in significant numbers, farming would be the best protected, most lavishly funded industry in Great Britain.
This synchronizes, as ever, with the response of the media complex. Ex-Labour spin-doctor John McTernan, a man who made a living under Tony Blair altering and manipulating facts and figures to make them fit for consumption by the public, gives a flavor of the metropolitan attitude to the plight of the farmers. He suggested Starmer do to the farmers what Thatcher did to the miners (Starmer disowned him, but that means nothing). That is, in the popular mind, decimate the industry and force men out of the pit, perhaps getting your enforcers to rough them up a bit while you’re there. He suggests that farming is an industry we can do without, but that’s not what he means. He means it’s an industry in the wrong hands.
Whose hands would be the right ones, for our globalist overlords? Veteran maverick politician George Galloway was one of many emphatically not on the political Right to suggest that the UK is due to be sold off to BlackRock, Bill Gates, and other financial super-predators. Gates has bought up a lot of American land, and allegedly has land here in Costa Rica. As Kissinger said, control the food, control the people. And if Britain really is on the market, then the British Left thoroughly approve.
Veteran Left-wing journalist Will Hutton, writing inevitably in The Guardian, does not see farmers as the stewards of the countryside they so clearly are, but is of the opinion that they “have hoarded land for too long”, as though small farmers were sick old misers gloating over a casket of jewels. In fact, farmers are fighting so that they can pass on the land, and its stewardship, to a new generation — the very opposite of miserliness. There is more than a whiff of revenge for the Brexit vote from the Left, as farmers are widely perceived to have typically voted to leave the EU.
This attack on farmers also dovetails neatly with a wider assault on the British countryside. For the past few years, regular pieces have appeared in the mainstream press claiming that “the countryside is racist”. A new piece of spurious research will show that Blacks and Muslims are under-represented o’er hill and dale, the courtier press will dutifully report it, and debates will creak into action on chat shows once again. It’s the familiar, gormless, post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy it always is, they even have their own warped syllogism:
- A sector of society without a sufficient number of Black people is therefore racist.
- The countryside does not feature a sufficient number of Black people.
- Therefore, the countryside is racist.
I discount the fact that, for the vast majority of White folk enjoying the countryside, the absence of Blacks is a much-desired feature, not a glitch. The “racist countryside” trope reveals two key aspects, two ascriptions, which feature in all these faux-exclusionist charades. Firstly, Whites are always and already guilty of this bucolic apartheid. Secondly, the absence of Blacks in the countryside can only be because of racism, and not due to the moral agency, or decision-making abilities, of Blacks. Liberals do not believe in such things. In the parched and perverted landscape of the Leftist mindset, that is the sole reason there are almost no Black farmers. It is not that Blacks are culturally unsuited to farming due to their hunter-gatherer genetic predisposition, or even that they choose not to pursue that career path. It is because Britain is irredeemably racist. It is irredeemably racist, as a matter of fact, just not in the way the Leftist believes. Anti-Whiteness is at the core of the Labour strategy to defarm Britain.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is, we are constantly reminded, the first woman to hold the post. She is also alleged to have falsified her CV to get on in her chosen career, claiming that she was an economist for a major bank during a period when she was actually a teller for a lesser banking concern. This kind if deception is, it seems, an entry-level requirement for today’s political class. On the subject of inheritance tax and farms, however, she treated the viewing public to a rare and candid event. This took the form of an explanation, on camera, by a British Chancellor, of exactly why a new tax is being levied, and what will happen to the tax weal generated. The money raised from the farmers, Reeves said, as though explaining arithmetic to the problem child in a fourth-grade class, will be used to help pay for the NHS. The implication here is that farmers should be grateful for “free” healthcare, and should be made to pay for it, despite the fact that everyone already pours income tax into this fiscal black hole, farmers included.
Calculators flickered across the internet, and it was soon established that the likely revenue from inheritance tax on farms, expressed annually, would pay for 25 hours of NHS provision. The farming industry is dealt a blow that might finish it, but at least we get a day’s worth of paying diversity officers.
And what would be the ultimate fate of the land? Is it simply required for housing, with some estimating that the country needs to build a house every two minutes just to keep pace with rising demand? What else could it be used for? There are rumors. In fact, the political scene in the UK at present is positively Elizabethan — the first Elizabeth, not her recently departed successor — and the court, as they say, is awash with rumor. And the loudest whisper is that of “new towns”. These were first tried in the 1960s and 70s as a way of rationalizing the overspill from the cities, a never-expanding suburbia that was packaged rather than allowed to sprawl. But these new towns were for the White, indigenous citizens of the UK — that was an unspoken guarantee. This was long before the present day, in which everything down to and including urban planning is geared to operate in opposition to the wants and needs of native Whites. If one rumor in particular is anywhere near the truth, that farm land is required for building new estates for immigrants, then the UK’s cold civil war may be about to turn hot.
This Labour Party is governing like it’s the 1970s. They don’t grasp that if the government makes announcements that are gross distortions of reality, it no longer takes a couple of intrepid gumshoe reporters burning the midnight oil to expose it six months later. The real facts and figures will be all over YouTube by noon, and this is the main reason Labour is going after big tech. Thus, when Reeves dismissed the inheritance tax as affecting only about 500 farms — and implying that these would be the richest holdings — it didn’t take long before the actual figures of farms affected was going viral. The truth is that roughly two-thirds of Britain’s farms will be crippled by this new tax, brought in just when arable food supply chains have been so adversely affected by the Russian incursion into Ukraine. Does Starmer think he can get away with this, considering he has already risked the nation’s ire by removing winter heating payments from the elderly? Yes, he does, and for a simple reason.
This has all the makings of a one-term administration. The question is simple; is it intended that way as just another globalist chess move? Tory politician Rab Butler famously said that a week is a long time in politics, but in four years and with a comfortable bilateral mandate, Labour can achieve a great deal more ruinous policy before the next general election, which might be a perfect one to lose, particularly for Starmer. The Labour Party can be real wreckers, not the ones invented by Stalin. Then they can all just walk away and write their memoirs.
Sir Keir Starmer has been compared to Stalin for reasons other than the mere similarity of their names. “Stalin” means “man of steel”, but it is difficult to see just which alloy Starmer is formed of. On the level of personality, the British PM’s lack of any discernible charisma whatsoever is fascinating in itself. There is something subtly sinister about a man who, when asked what his favorite book or poem was, looks surprised at the question and says he has neither. He answers questions as though quoting from old NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) text-books. This is Tourette’s Syndrome as government policy.
But the British farmers are not kulaks, at least not yet, and the Peasant’s Revolt 2.0 involves polling rather than pitchforks. The popularity of both the Labour Party in power and Sir Keir Starmer personally have plummeted to record depths. On November 23, a petition was started on the official UK Government website asking for a second General Election. These petitions are theoretically considered for debate in the House of Commons if they reach 100,000 signatories, although this rarely if ever happens. It is a sort of virtual democracy, like a video game rather than the real thing, there but not there, like an online Speaker’s Corner where you can get it all off your chest but affect nothing. 24 hours later, the number of signatures approached a million, and after 48 hours it had passed the two million mark and is still rising at the time of writing. This may not be the men of Kent storming the City of London in 1381 and putting heads on pikes, but these exercises are a good litmus test of national sentiment, and if the polls and the punditry continue to pile up against Starmer and his fragile-looking government, they may wake up to find, once again, that the peasants are
