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Should the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, as any schoolchild knows, both the Tower and the kingdom will fall.
This was, until recently, the main way the United Kingdom was to collapse. But since Rachel Reeve’s budget you’d be forgiven for assuming that two new threats endanger this Scepter’d Isle: the introduction of inheritance tax on farms and the imposition of VAT on private schools.
Commentators in the right-leaning press have portrayed these changes as unprecedented and existential threats not just to public schools and generational farming estates, but to the UK’s economy and its society at large. Headlines have ranged from the critical to the sensational and some have been quite hysterical, in all senses of the word.
‘Labour’s (budget) is a Marxist nightmare’ wrote Kwasi Kwarteng in The Telegraph, a former Chancellor whose own mortgage payments went up “a great deal” as a result of the economic turmoil after his catastrophic mini-budget.
‘Britain is heading for oblivion, ruined by Labour’s greed, malice and stupidity’ wrote the paper’s resident apocalypticist, Allister Heath. And Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail waded in with the prophecy that Britain is doomed “to another lost decade”.
It is no surprise to read such proclamations. After all, Labour’s decision to go after the elite’s land and education goes to the very heart of Britain’s class system, and the media are willing pallbearers for the subsequent declared funeral of Britain.
Taxing the Land
It is hard to know which one has caused more outrage, but when it comes to the land inheritance tax, the outcry has been so great, it has caused the Prime Minister to go to the airwaves long after the budget to allay stoked fears, reassuring us that most will not be impacted by the cuts. His reassurances have largely fallen on deaf ears.
For background, since its introduction in 1984, agricultural property relief (APR) had exempted much farmland from inheritance tax. This relief applied to cropland, livestock-rearing areas, farm buildings, cottages, and houses.
The budget changed all this and, in response, the right-wing media rallied behind the landed gentry.
Reports from The Times highlighted the concerns among the wine-owning scions Berry Bros, who fear an inheritance tax ‘body blow’ on their £90 million property portfolio, amassed over 376 years. Meanwhile, The Telegraph reported that Zara Tindall might have to pay when she inherits the Princess Royal’s 730-acre Gloucestershire estate, valued at around £20 million.
Neither articles pointed out the rather obvious fact that this was the whole point of the tax – to stop the arcane accumulation of wealth from aristocracy to aristocracy, with no release valve to redress the societal consequences of this form of inherited capitalism
What is less obvious is the establishment papers have not always been so critical of death duties. When the first modern inheritance tax in the UK was introduced in the Finance Act by Lord Harcourt in 1894, it prompted The Times to report critically on the Duke of Devonshire.
A man who, the paper published, “seems impregnated with the conviction that there is something in the position of great landowners that entitles them to exemption from the load of ordinary mortals.”
The Duke was admonished in The Times’ pages for believing that landowners “are in some sort the special patrons of mankind, that in that capacity they ought to enjoy a real exemption from (taxes), because (taxes) might impose upon them a limit upon their munificence and upon their magnificence.”
Compare this with Lord James Dyson’s piece, printed in The Times days after the budget: “Labour’s budget will rip apart the very fabric of our economy”.
His was a scathing rant where he argued the imposition of inheritance tax on agricultural land would kill “off established family businesses”. What he didn’t mention was that he owned the largest farming company in the UK and 36,000 acres of farmland. In all, his land and property is listed as being worth £554 million.
This was not all. Papers even reported the tax meant the Prime Minister had “blood on his hands”. In the Daily Mail‘s coverage of the death of John Charlesworth, a farmer who tragically took his own life due to concerns about the tax rules, the piece had one major flaw. It failed to acknowledge that Charlesworth, being married, could have shielded up to £3 million in assets from the inheritance tax, meaning his £2 million farm would have been unaffected.
Charlesworth’s son said “all the scaremongering around it beforehand frightened him to death”. One could argue that the scaremongering was not the fault of Keir Starmer, but the media hysteria that exacerbated his mental health collapse.
School Fees
The next major bone of media contention has been the Government’s decision to impose VAT at a standard rate of 20% on private school fees from January 1. The move aims to fund the hiring of 6,500 new state school teachers across England. Again, this has been met with similarly emotive denunciations.
In this case there is, of course, the fact the tax will not just impact landowning millionaires but will impact more people. Inews reported that ‘Labour’s VAT policy to force 37,000 children out of private schools’; and the Independent that ‘Parents already turning down private school places as Labour’s VAT policy looms‘.
This might be the case. But this was no budget surprise. It was in the Labour manifesto. So, yes, a hard pill for some to swallow, but one designed to address the widening gap between the rich and the poor in unequal Britain.
What is, perhaps, more surprising is that even the BBC has stepped in line to report on criticism of the VAT addition without much in the way of critical analysis.
In September, for instance, their Staffordshire reporter, Anna Whittaker ran a piece called ‘Private school to close ahead of VAT change‘. In it, she reported that St Joseph’s Preparatory School in Stoke-on-Trent had announced it will close at the end of the year “due to ‘financial challenges’, ahead of the imposition of VAT on its fees.”
The financial difficulties of the school itself were not detailed in the piece. But an examination of the accounts of the governing body – the Edmund Rice England – shows a concerning gap between the school’s income and expenditure in recent years.
Since 2018, the total income for that charity was £19.7 million, and its expenditure stood at £26.3 million – meaning a shortfall of some £6.6 million. This drop in income – a decline that had nothing to do with VAT – led to a collapse in the charity’s total net assets by £6 million in five years.
Perhaps this drop of asset value by 42% in such a short span of time had more impact on the school’s functioning than the threat of a VAT hike in the future, but this was not detailed in the BBC report. The BBC responded to Byline Times saying that the report was fair, and “based on what the school said directly to our reporter”, amongst other sources.
“The finer detail of the school’s finances was not immediately available at the time of publishing,” the BBC said. Annual reports for charities are on the Charity Commission’s website.
In a similar vein, when BBC Scotland reported the concerns of Anthony Simpson, head teacher of Erskine Stewart’s Melville School in Edinburgh, characterising the VAT change as an existential threat to some schools within the private sector, what they did not report on was that the charity that runs the school – Edinburgh Merchant Company Education Board – holds net assets of £57 million.
Admittedly, David Wallace Lokchart’s piece was more balanced. Sampson had said that “there aren’t any spaces” in local schools, but the BBC reporter wrote that the City of Edinburgh council “contests the suggestion that there is no space for pupils in the authority’s state schools”.
But the deeper point is that many private schools are very asset rich and that such an embarrassment of riches deepens social inequalities through the country.
As exposed by this paper in 2021, some of the most elite schools in the UK increased their assets by more than half a billion pounds in just six years – namely the so-called ‘Clarendon Schools’ of Eton, Charterhouse, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster, Winchester, St Paul’s and Merchant Taylors’.
But such detailed reporting on private schools’ financing is often left out of emotive budget reaction reports.
Conclusion
The uproar, of course, is driven by two things. First, that death tax and school taxes go straight to the heart of British elitism.
On land, as the Government argues on its agricultural taxes, the reforms are anticipated to impact only the wealthiest 500 estates annually, leaving smaller farms unaffected.
They note that last year, the largest 7% of recent agricultural property claims made up 40% of the total agricultural property relief value, costing taxpayers £219 million. And on schools, as a Conservative Government-commissioned report into elitism concluded: Britain’s most influential people are over five times more likely to have been to a fee-paying school than the general population and that 7% of British people are privately educated, compared to two-fifths (39%) of those in top positions.
Second, we should contemplate where the hysteria is coming from: a British press where the ownership is largely concentrated under four men—Viscount Rothermere, Rupert Murdoch, Evgeny Lebedev, and Frederick Barclay.
These four control a significant portion of the national newspaper circulation and exert considerable influence on public opinion and political power – four men who have benefited from a class system upheld by the traditions of land ownership and education and that now stands threatened by a Labour Government.
Of note, the Daily Mail is owned by Jonathan Harmsworth, the 4th Viscount Rothermere, who also owns approximately 9,400 acres of land in the United Kingdom. This includes the 4,700-acre Bryanston Estate in Dorset and the 223-acre Ferne Park estate in Wiltshire.
The implementation of inheritance tax on valuable estates and the imposition of VAT on private school fees under Reeve’s budget, then, has ignited a fierce media backlash, predominantly from outlets with deep-rooted interests in maintaining the status quo.
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This media storm highlights a broader societal challenge: the clash between long-standing privileges associated with land and elite education and the growing demands for economic equity and educational fairness.
The response in the press, marked by hyperbolic doom predictions, reminds us just how far the power and persistence of these privileged classes helps shape public discourse. An entrenched resistance against reforms perceived to threaten the economic advantages and societal standings of the few at the expense of the broader public good.
The narratives spun by a concentrated media ownership serves not just to inform, but to defend the interests of the influential few. And we should be open-eyed about this when we next read an apocalyptic headline.