Victoria Derbyshire si scontra con Jeremy Clarkson mentre gli agricoltori protestano per il budget

First it’s important to state the shock of the thing. This change announced in the budget came out of nowhere and effectively undoes 400 years of national farming history. 

Distilled to essence it makes the statement: ‘farming by inheritance is wrong, just as an inherited peer sitting in the House of Lords is wrong. Nobody has the right to become a farmer because their parents were a farmer’.

That’s a massive ideological shift with no preamble or warning. I won’t get into the debate of it, but the point is, farming families are real, the skill set and lifestyle is highly specialised and very hard work, the assets are ridiculously expensive and frankly you have to be mad to want to do it, so dependant on the weather and crossing your fingers and hoping for the best as it is.

EXCEPT I believe that statement isn’t what labour meant at all. They simply made a change in an incompetent and inept manner and didn’t think through the consequences and are now trying to justify a moronic idea like ‘that’s what they always meant in the first place’ which I will further explain…

The problem labour have tried to get at is real. Tax dodgers are buying up agricultural land to avoid paying tax. This inflates the price of the land beyond its useful productive value. This is why farmers ‘profit per acre of land’ is so poor. They aren’t competing with other farmers, they are competing with institutional tax avoidance. If the price of the land goes down, a farmers profit per acre will actually increase. This is a good thing!

But labour have made no attempt whatsoever to separate the working farmers from the tax dodgers. They have just lumped it all together and said ‘sod it, pay some money you entitled privileged scroungers. I’m off down the pub whilst you sort this out. Jeremy clarksons getting involved? He’s literally one of this tax dodgers. Ha ha. Hahaha’.

It’s just like the winter fuel payments drama. They are making changes without doing any real analysis of the consequences, then scrambling to justify afterwards how they were right all along. Farmers are in the crosshairs to be utterly screwed over. They could have devised some sort of audit system to appraise the productivity of the land. Nope. Are all poor pensioners receiving the pension credit necessary to get the winter fuel payments? Oh dear, nope, better do some tv adverts.

So it’s not an ideological change after all, it’s just incompetence.

To add even further context with the history of farming and the land ownership itself, 100 years ago most farmers were tenant farmers. They rented the land from the local aristocracy, baron lord viscount etc who owned the land. After the world wars, the aristocracy desperate for cash to rebuild sold off some of the land. Farmers operating under a feudal system suddenly found themselves masters of their own fields.

But not entirely. Most farms are still split between owned and rented land. The aristocracy held on to much of its land and to this day that land is still rented back to the farmers and tenants alike.

THOSE are the tax dodging scroungers. The Ones the farmers must pay to farm their fields for them. THOSE are the true target of this tax. But labour, woefully inept, has decided to shoot the farmer working the field at the same time as the land baron making a profit from inherited aristocracy. And we all know the many tax avoidance schemes of the ultra rich, like trust funds and off shore accounts mean the true aristocracy won’t pay a penny on this change.

And so the optics of this mess are a steaming quagmire. You are being shown rich farmers crying over spilt milk and not the heart of the problem – Britain’s sordid past of entitled monarchy and inherited wealth.

Had him absolutely squirming there and he had to start deflecting and insulting.

He’s openly spoken about using it to avoid inheritance tax, now he’s trying to play the concerned farmer role.

Clarkson is a coward and a bully, and he always has been. He is too spineless to own his own words and has to try to deflect being questioned back to the crowd, with a little “typical BBC” dogwhistle thrown in.

He handled that absolutely terribly, and he knew it

I love it when the BBC just goes mask off that it’s a hyperpartisan propaganda outlet for SW1 liberals. Reddit ofc being completely oblivious to reality will applaud this as “stunning and brave”.

Oh shit..

Millionaire gets poor working class people together to help him avoid tax.

Personally I’d like to see this guy with Diddly Squat left. Just another grifter.

Cunts like him are exactly the reason this law will come into place.

I enjoyed Clarkson’s Farm, and feel like it did shine a bit of a light on things in the UK a lot of people were totally oblivious to. That said, Clarkson is precisely the sort of person these rules were introduced to tackle. The idea that he is somehow speaking up for them while in reality it’s him and others like Dyson who triggered this change in the law in the first place is fairly ironic.

I can only wish that he is right and 96% of farmers in the UK have estates large enough to require paying this tax.

“Go to any of these offices and if you don’t understand what someone is doing, fire them” that is an amazing strategy Jeremy,

Thing is people like him enough that they’ll believe the waffle he just spat out after getting ruffled.

He’s right. She was ignoring the wider protest and concentrating on an individual.

A lot of people on here commenting without watching, or rather listening to, the whole exchange. The point he’s making is that he will still avoid inheritance tax (by using a trust) and that it’s smallholders who’ll suffer (because they can’t afford to pay a lawyer several hundred pounds an hour to set one up and maintain it).

Do people here honestly not understand that people frequently advocate on behalf of the interests of others with whom they sympathise or emphasise? I’m guessing the fact that the average Redditor’s roots in the area they live are usually pretty weak, as well as largely being introverted, makes them disconnected from their wider community and its interests (I count myself as both, before people take on offence)

I have some sympathy for the farmers… Imagine Clarkson being the spokesman.