[Diggers350] 5 suggestions to Save British Farming: but why are Monbiot, & UK ‘Greens’ dancing to the WEFs Finance Capitalism tune?

[Tony Gosling]

Five suggestions to Save British Farming: but why 
are Monbiot, Fairlie and the ‘Greens’ dancing to 
the World Economic Forum’s Finance Capitalism tune?

<https://old.bitchute.com/video/AH8pJ8vLnpQQ/>Prof. 
Michael Hudson explains Finance Capitalism

  https://tlio.org.uk/save-british-farming/   - 
<https://tlio.org.uk/save-british-farming/>2 
January 2025 
<https://tlio.org.uk/author/tony/>Tony Gosling - 
<https://tlio.org.uk/save-british-farming/#respond>Leave a comment -


Five suggestions to Save British Farming:

    * set up a charitable fund to pay off 
distressed farmers’ inheritance bills;
    * institute a chain of collectively owned 
farm shops in every market town to act as a mini 
supermarket for seasonal produce;
    * demand boycotts of supermarkets and/or 
products where price fixing is taking place, robbing farmers;
    * blockade factory farms and mass mechanised 
greenhouses owned by front companies for private equity firms;
    * set up a direct action group to occupy and 
obstruct individuals and businesses which are destroying UK family farming.

How’s that for a start. Please email me or add 
your own suggestions in the comments below.


Simon Fairlie’s Land Magazine follows the 
Socialist Workers Party and George Monbiot , 
dancing to the World Economic Forum’s global finance capitalism tune



STROUD: 02Jan24: Tony Gosling takes a look at UK 
Green ‘social justice’ campaigns’ extraordinary 
distancing themselves from farming’s 
<https://tlio.org.uk/a-short-angry-history-of-land-in-britain/>grassroots, 
and unwitting sucking up to a Swiss-based 
oligopoly who want corporations to rule the world

2022 to 2024 were a terrible year for The Land 
Magazine. The two founding editors were evicted 
from their home at Monkton Wyld near Lyme Regis. 
Simon Fairlie through the kangaroo courts in the 
Autumn of 2024 while Gill Barron was bullied out 
of the same rural community the year before.

Emacs!



The screaming irony now is the four individuals 
who hoofed Simon out of Monkton Wylde as 
residents and trustees simply walked away from 
their roles and the community 
 just a couple of 
weeks after Simon drove his last van-load of 
belongings away from his, and the magazine’s beautiful old home.

But Gill and Simon did considerably better than 
‘One Man and his Dogger’ Robin Page, author, 
journalist, national advocate for 
wildlife-friendly farming who was evicted in 2021 
from the eight-figure valued Countryside 
Restoration Trust he founded and built up over 
decades. He died 18 months later, of cancer, and a broken heart.

<https://savebritishfood.org/>
[]


Simon Fairlie founded The Land Magazine in 1996 
which began, after The Land Is Ours successful 
six-month long Guinness occupation in Wandsworth. 
As ‘Land Essays’, the ‘long read’ version of The 
Land Is Ours newsletter, it was always, as now, 
an occasional publication but in the last decade 
or so it has failed to address the contradictions 
in the ‘zero carbon’ agenda, such as new forest 
burning power stations, soaring living costs and 
more recently the supermarket and energy 
price-fixing assault on Britain’s family farms.

In the 2020s, sadly, my contributions, even to 
the Land Mag’s. letters page, have been spiked. 
The editorial has turned decidedly 
anti-livestock, anti game-hunting or poaching, 
backing the 
<https://tlio.org.uk/rewilding-britain-timeline-cover-for-private-equitys-global-enclosures-by-stealth-and-pantheism/>WEF’s 
discredited Rewilding’ programme (now Robin’s CRT 
is conveniently out of the way) promoted by 
George Monbiot’s partner, Rebecca Wrigley. 
Keeping it, top-down and where possible foundation funded, in the Davos family.


No Charmer: Starmer The Farmer Harmer

November and December 2024 saw two unprecedented 
family farmer protests at Westminster with around 
10,000 turning out to a lobby called by the NFU 
in November and 6-700 tractors filling Whitehall, 
as the DEFRA select committee asked why the 
Treasury hadn’t just ended business rollover 
relief where millionaires were using farmland as 
a tax dodge, in the run-up to Christmas.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpjypnxnS4U>
[]


Taking farms off families is against everything 
social justice or environmental campaigners 
believe in. Yet in the 2025 Land Magazine [see 
below] Simon argues that the demise of small 
farms since 1984 is because there hasn’t been 
inheritance tax on larger farms. One wonders if 
he actually talks to or knows any farmers, who 
will tell him that a whole raft of price and 
ever-changing ‘variety’ policies and punitive 
penalties, imposed by supermarkets, have been 
cutting deep into margins right across farming ever since Thatcherism.

Families, and the secure tenure, such as freehold 
and copyhold, they have passed down, have been 
the bedrock of national food security since 
hunter-gatherers began to establish farming in 
England 6,000 years ago. It was the increasing 
surpluses these families produced, as they honed 
their craft over countless generations, that 
allowed for towns to grow and civilisation to flourish.

Ideally smallholdings and market gardens should 
be viable but that’s not been the case roughly 
since the 1970s, again since Thatcher and the 
supermarkets took over. You could argue today’s 
bigger farms, over 750 acres say, should be 
taxed, over 1000 definitely 
 but not ONLY if 
they are in individual ownership. Families who 
intend to pass their land or homes on to their 
children are ALWAYS the best stewards of the land.

The EEC and EU’s CAP subsidies were weighted 
towards rewarding massive landowners, the Royal 
family and their immediate underlings, 
<https://tlio.org.uk/common-agricultural-policy-rich-list-receive-millions-in-eu-subsidies-greenpeace-report/>Dukes 
and Duchesses, typically being granted the 
biggest ‘welfare payments’ which ensure their 
position on the Sunday Times rich list,

Taking it off families starts to sound like the 
son of the Nazi nuclear bomb scientist Klaus 
Schwab’s ‘You will own nothing, and be happy’ 
brigade again. The big institutional and feudal 
landowners, including Crown Estate, Duchys of 
Cornwall & Lancaster, Church of England, Ministry 
of Defence, Forestry England, Duke of Westminster 
etc etc all have their land in trust or Ltd 
companies so will avoid the tax these family farmers have to pay.

Rachel Reeves is not John McDonnell. When Jeremy 
Corbyn was bounced out of winning the 2017 
General Election by Labour party apparatchiks and 
the London media, a new finance capitalism 
friendly Labour party under the iron grip of Starmer and Reeves arrived.

Emacs!


The good old 2003 illegal war party, with Blair 
and Campbell major figures behind the scenes, was 
approved fit to govern, by good King Charles and 
the City of London. When the high priest of 
finance capitalism Blackrock’s Larry Fink was 
schmoozed by Reeves and Starmer Downing Street in November 2024.

<https://archive.is/HgJJB#selection-2401.31-2401.40>The 
prime minister responded by outlining his plan to 
overhaul British regulators, streamline 
regulatory approval processes and make the 
regulatory framework more consistent, the people added.

<https://www.ft.com/content/b2279b03-320f-4dec-b241-a755d36c7b9e>He 
told the executives that a new unit in the UK 
Treasury would be set up to co-ordinate this work 
across government, according to officials at the meeting.

The Family Farm Tax is part of a much wider 
post-war attack by global finance capitalism, 
which accelerated under Thatcher,  on people who 
work land they own, to feed us. Added to 
skyrocketing energy prices, ridiculous 
supermarket demands, etc, all brought about 
through fascist price-fixing, land put on the 
market to pay the tax or just to escape the 
ridiculous hours and negative margins, benefits
? 
Those who finance: solar farms, giant automated 
planting/harvesting greenhouses, factory farmers, 
industrial agriculture, carbon offset firms, 
those clear-cutting forestry as a biofuel. The 
list goes on and on as far as a speculator with 
pound signs in their eyes can dream.

<https://old.bitchute.com/video/AH8pJ8vLnpQQ/>Prof. 
Michael Hudson explains Finance Capitalism

As the source of all wealth the dying capitalist 
empire has given up trying to compete with China 
in manufacturing anything, its risk taking 
adventurous acolyte firms are looking for new 
profit centres amongst the dying Western 
countries they’ve ravaged. They are actively 
seeking out pastures new, of every and any 
sort,<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE> 
including clearcutting ancient forests to feed 
into power stations 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE>as 
documented by Jeff Gibb and Michael Moore in Planet of the Humans (2020).

But more importantly we are witnessing the 
beginning of a further wave of enclosure.  This 
time, land is not being stolen from peasants by 
large farmers. Its beginning the move from 
private, into corporate hands. And The Land 
Magazine, and Land Workers Alliance, along with 
traditional left-wing workers groups such as the 
SWP are cheering it on. ‘You see those farmers 
all vote Tory’. ‘Why shouldn’t they pay 
inheritance tax just like everyone else’.

Simon Fairlie has become George Monbiot lite. 
Simon still clings to that cruel anti-vegan 
trope, meat-eating, and is therefore not 4th 
Reich WEF extremist enough for the Guardian. 
Which, while everything is done to keep Simon on 
side, remains the George Monbiot domain.

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet>
[]




Nevertheless
 I’m not here to sell you anything, 
I’m the sort of editor who will invite all sides 
to the dinner table. So, over to Simon


<https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/>
[]



The “Family Farm Tax”, might there be up-sides?

By Simon Fairlie, December 2024

In the Spring of 1920 Sir Nicholas Bacon of 
Raveningham Hall in Norfolk wrote to the tenants farming his land:

It has unfortunately become necessary for me to 
follow the course already pursued by many 
landowners ­ that is, of selling a considerable 
portion of my estate . . . Heavy war taxation, 
the great increase of Death Duties of last year’s 
budget, the increased cost of living, and the 
growing up of my family, for whom provision must 
be made, compel this step. I can only hope that 
many of my tenants may be able to purchase their 
farms, and so not leave their homes.

The four years that followed the First World War 
witnessed an unprecedented shift in 
landownership, something akin to land reform. 
“England is changing hands,” The Times observed. 
To counteract inheritance tax and other expenses, 
large numbers of aristocratic farming estates 
were sold off. No one knows exactly how many 
acres, and claims that “a quarter of England 
changed hands” may be exaggerated. What is known is that:

owner-occupation increased from 10.9 percent of 
the cultivated area of England and Wales in 1914, 
to 36 per cent of the cultivated area in 1927 . . 
. roughly one quarter of the cultivated area 
changed from being tenanted land to being land owned by the farmers.

Many of Britain’s independent family farms owe 
their existence to increased death duties, first 
introduced by the Liberal Lord Harcourt in 1894 
and reinforced by Lloyd George twenty- five years 
later. It is somewhat ironic then, that many of 
these farmers are now vociferously opposed to 
parallel increases in Inheritance Tax, made in 
the Labour Government’s Autumn Budget. 
Agricultural property inheritance tax relief has 
been removed, theoretically from all farms valued 
at over £1 million, though after allowances for 
spouses etc this is more likely to equate to £3 
million. The Government states that some three 
quarters of all farms will be unaffected, but 
nonetheless the National Farmers’ Union has 
dubbed the move “the Family Farm Tax”. Its 
President, Tom Bradshaw claims to have

heard about distressed elderly parents who are 
having to apologise to their children in tears 
for something that isn’t their fault, telling 
them they’re sorry because they feel they’re now a burden on the family.

Besides the need to plug the much vaunted £22 
billion budget shortfall, some of the thinking 
behind the new Labour Government’s assault on 
Inheritance Tax relief can be traced to the work 
of the French economist Thomas Piketty and 
others, who have noted that rising wealth 
inequality is fuelled by the flow of inheritances 
from one generation to the next. The ratio of 
personal wealth to national income is rising and 
over the last 20 years the value of property and 
land has increased far faster than wages or inflation.

Nowhere is this tendency more noticeable than in 
the farming sector which is inherently dependent 
on land and property. A 200 acre farm worth in 
the region of million, might yield an annual net 
income of only £25,000, just one percent or even 
nothing at all other than the available 
subsidies. In such cases the real profit lies in 
the increasing value of the property, and many 
farm-owners are simultaneously underpaid workers 
and fat capitalists. Under these frankly bonkers 
economic conditions, failing farmers throw in the 
towel and cash in, while successful ones engross 
their holdings, leading to the consolidation of 
assets that is endemic to unregulated capitalism. 
As farms get bigger and economies of scale 
increase, the margins dictated by the 
supermarkets decline and another cohort of farms 
finds it impossible to make ends meet, and so it continues.

The National Farmers’ Union, which is at heart a 
landowners’ union, knows only too well how to 
exploit this schizoid role, posing to the public 
as the defender of the hard-pressed food 
producer, while advocating policies that benefit 
the engrossing landowner, and that is precisely 
what it is doing in respect of the “Family Farm 
Tax”. Since 1984 the regime of exemption from 
Inheritance Tax has accompanied the loss of 
around half of the farms under 100 hectares in 
England and Wales and an increase in those over 
200 hectares. To claim that removing the 
exemption for the largest farms will threaten family farms is brazen hypocrisy.

How much impact this measure will actually have 
is hard to say, but if it goes any way towards 
breaking up large holdings, and releasing land 
onto the market that is cheaper and more 
accessible to new entrants, that is very much to 
be welcomed. The total area of land currently coming onto the market

around 150,000 acres in 2023 is less than a 
quarter of the area traded in 1950, and an even 
smaller proportion of the area that changed hands in 1920.

Only one caveat has been voiced by the Tenant 
Farmers’ Association, representing farmers whose 
hard work boosts the largest landowners’ incomes, 
and who may find the land they rent sold to pay 
off Inheritance Tax. Its Chief Executive, George Dunn has written:

“The £1 million tax-free exemption may help small 
owner occupiers, but it will not help small 
tenant farmers on large estates, particularly 
those occupying under insecure Farm Business 
Tenancies. The Chancellor of the Exchequer must 
think again. The 2026 legislation must include a 
provision to exempt land let for 10 or more 
years. Without this provision, we could see the 
loss of many small family farms”.

Alternatively some of the money raised could be 
used to help fund any such tenants who wished to buy the property.

Simon Fairlie is founder, now co-editor of 
TheLandMagazine.org.uk and the printed mag with 
Mike Hannis (Kingshill), Gill Barron and SM Parsons


SOURCES

J.Beckett and M.Turner “End of the Old Order? FML 
Thompson, the Land Question, and the Burden of 
Ownership in England” AgHR 55,11.

Anthony B Atkinson, “Wealth and Inheritance in 
Britain from 1896 to the Present”, LSE OnLine, 2018.

Fami statistics from DEFRA and Savils.
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