Got to admire farmers in their optimism ....coming to the centre of a town where everyone pays Inheritance Tax at 40% on any property over £325,000 (The price of a 2 bedroom flat in the suburbs) and whining about paying IHT at 20% over 10 years on over £1,000,000. Surely this can only inspire Marie Antoinette levels of sympathy...
Over at the Telegraph the Landed Gentry who threw us all off the agricultural land during the Enclosure Acts have deployed a Duchess to tell us all how unfair this is. I don't know why they didn't get Audrey fforbes-Hamilton in and be done with it.
But apparently they need to completely avoid IHT in order to preserve their way of life because they are "asset rich but cash poor" and need to leave their farms as indivisible entities to their offspring. Matthew Stadlen asked the obvious question. What happens if there's more than one child? Surely then you have to divide the estate ... to which many protested that they leave the farm to only one child - presumably cutting the others out the will completely like it's 1730? The problem with this would be that dependents can now put in a claim on any estate that unreasonably cuts them out.
A memorable case was Heather Ilott who took her late mother Melita Jackson's executor to Court when she decided that she'd rather leave her £486,000 estate to the cats home than her own biological daughter who she had disowned for marrying the wrong gentleman. I think she got £50,000 in the end. A shame really as that's the plot of Pride and Prejudice can never happen again - where all 5 daughters have to get married because property is entailed and can only be passed to a male heir and if they don't they'll be destitute. I mean, if they wanted to preserve their way of life that much why don't they get Captain Swing back, break up the threshing machines and go back to the feudal system? And no one else has their way of life preserved - the rest of us are left to Adam Smith's invisible hard ... but as ever the rich don't really want a free market either. At least not one where everyone is subject to the same tax regime. They've only had their IHT tax break since Thatcher brought it in in the 80s anyway ... alongside abolishing the rates for the Poll Tax and getting rid of tenants rights...
It's odd that we have a society where so many people are obsessed with IHT ... The average age of inheriting parental wealth is about 50 so what have these people been doing with their lives until then? Are they all just sitting round waiting for octogenarian parents to kick the bucket of animal feed? Presumably if the survival of the business as a unit mattered so much to these people they could gift if to their children 7 years before death or are they literally all working till they fall off their perches...?
Question for farmers protesting about inheritance tax.
— Matthew Stadlen (@MatthewStadlen) November 19, 2024
Consider a farmer who has £5m of land. He has 2 children. One wants to continue with the family farm and the other works in a town.
How is the money handed down? Does the town son get any money or does the farmer son keep…
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