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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