Farm Inheritance Tax didn’t arrive in isolation. That’s why it defies common sense

Watching the continuing bewilderment, frustration, fear and anger from so many across the UK farming community is not easy.

But the real difficulty for someone like me is not only the avoidable hardship that is now being felt. It is the sense that this policy sits within a much wider and deeply troubling direction of travel.

It is the reality that we cannot properly address what is happening, or why it is happening, until many more of us, and not least of all people from within farming and its related industries, begin to accept that what we are seeing, experiencing and increasingly becoming victims to, does not sit comfortably with our reasoned expectations of government and governance. It appears instead to reflect a much deeper worldview about food, markets, land, value and centralised control that many understandably find difficult to recognise, let alone accept.

Whilst many within the farming industry may feel that you can only understand and relate to the turmoil that this one change in public policy has caused if you are a farmer and have obvious skin in the game yourself, the action taken by the government and its failure to respond to months of concern in any way which makes practical sense is far from isolated. Not least of all because the tax that could be raised by the policy is, in public spending terms, trivial. That makes it very difficult to believe that tax revenue alone explains what this change is really about.

Indeed, what appears at first to be a harsh attack on ‘rich farmers’ is better understood as part of a much wider argument about food, food security, and the independence that locally controlled food production gives us. It is this that should concern us all more than anything.

It is vitally important for anyone who wants to address the real issues that UK food production faces to stop and look beyond the question of Farmers IHT itself.

To begin understanding how the bigger and deliberately complicated picture works, we all need to see how the IHT policy did not arrive in isolation. It appears to be the latest step in a long chain of policy changes and their implementation, which have been reforming, remodelling and steadily weakening, if not killing off, significant parts of UK food production for a period that now exceeds 50 years.

We should be under no illusion that the Farm Inheritance Tax policy belongs within a much bigger policy environment. Whether by intention, inertia, neglect or the worldview that now dominates public policy, that environment is placing the future of independent farming and food production of all kinds across the UK under severe pressure.

Likewise, we must recognise that food is power. And Who Controls Our Food Controls Our Future.

If food is power, we should not be surprised that influence over food production, processing and distribution has become increasingly important to the systems that shape modern life. Food is not simply another commodity. It is an essential requirement of daily living and, as such, influence over its supply carries consequences far beyond agriculture alone. The more concentrated decision-making becomes within the food chain, the less independence remains for producers, communities and consumers alike. That reality deserves far greater attention than it currently receives.

The last thing any centralised system of political or commercial power naturally encourages is a network of people and businesses capable of giving individuals and communities genuine independence. Yet that is precisely what independent food production can do.

Whilst this broader drift towards centralisation and dependency can be seen across many areas of life today, including the growth of rules intended to create safety and the shift towards digital and online alternatives to ‘real life’, few areas have the same level of potential impact on all of us as food and the supply of it.

Many of those farming smaller, ‘family sized farms’ or rather farm businesses that lie outside of corporate control, understandably perceive a specialised business landscape that cannot exist without subsidies, commercial contracts and the revival of the golden egg – which is a fair income from whatever they produce.

However, contrary to the accepted narrative that tells us ‘This is just how things work’ or this is where ‘progress’ has taken food production in the 21^st century, the truth that we all have to wrestle with a very serious paradox indeed, namely:

The only business sector that can genuinely provide UK Food Security, and with it the freshest, most nutritious, healthiest, most cost-effective food supply, that every person’s body across the UK needs at least twice daily is currently unable to provide the producers with a viable, unsupported or independent income.

Truly, the idea that growing the food we genuinely need cannot provide those who produce it with a viable living only begins to make sense when we recognise how the market and policy environment has been shaped. The practical result has been that scale, consolidation, dependency and financialisation are repeatedly rewarded, while farmers and consumers are left carrying the consequences.

Far from being the anachronism that many of today’s politicians would like voters to believe, small independent family farms are the future of food as part of a better future for us and for our communities.

The relatively easy to solve problem for farmers and consumers, and the deeply uncomfortable question for those invested in centralised power structures and business models, is whether we might rediscover the legitimacy of food independence and realise that communities can thrive without depending so completely on systems that no longer serve them well.

That possibility should be taken seriously, because it challenges assumptions that have shaped policy and business for decades.

All the rules that have slowly choked small farmers out of business, following policy change after policy change, heralded by major frameworks such as the Common Agricultural Policy, and by bureaucratic initiatives that have cascaded down into practical business operations in ways that have made support industries like abattoirs unviable, through health, environmental and quality rules, have all had long-term outcomes that now need to be viewed with clear eyes.

Policy after policy has been created, changed and implemented that has, at best, redirected and, at worst, damaged or destroyed businesses that could have adapted to the needs that people genuinely have for food. Needs that could otherwise be met more fully by functioning and supported UK food producers, rather than by leaving what remains of UK food producing industries trapped within circumstances that tell everyone they are unnecessary and therefore done.

6365 farming businesses have closed in this past year alone and with suggestions made that over 100,000 were lost between 1990 and 2023, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that as wider pressure builds around the control of the food supply and public dependency is pushed towards sources such as factory made ‘alternative proteins’, remaining independent food growing and producing businesses, still capable of changing direction to meet direct public need, are being placed under pressure to close or conform.

Some will argue that these changes are simply the result of economics, modernisation, efficiency, regulation or changing consumer preferences. There is truth in parts of that argument. But it is increasingly difficult to accept it as the whole explanation when viewed alongside the cumulative loss of farms, processing infrastructure, local food capacity and practical independence across the sector.

Whilst even now, many reading this essay may well disagree with what I am sharing, the evidence of this direction of travel is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore as it emerges into public view at speed.

To be fair, it certainly defies the logic and expectations of so many of us, who have always believed that we could trust public representatives to actually do what’s best for us.

Dealing with this problem should be as simple as getting politicians to change their minds. Perhaps do a U-turn. Or even waiting until the next government comes in behind just the latest in a long line who everyone believes to be solely responsible for wrecking everything today.

But it’s not as simple as that in any kind of way.

Government and politics no longer appear to work in the way many of us expect them to. Or in the way they should.

With many of the politicians we can publicly identify seeming unable or unwilling to lead as they should, and with government increasingly reliant upon advice and direction from advisers, institutions, lobbyists and other influencers who are presented as ‘experts’, we have to begin to understand that politicians may be acting within a worldview they have inherited, absorbed and been rewarded for accepting, rather than simply making isolated choices that can be reversed at will.

Even then, if we knew what politicians honestly believe, the full purpose or consequence of what they are being advised or directed to do may not be something that they themselves fully understand.

Regrettably and rather worryingly, the establishment understood as a worldview, and any political party, group or movement that remains aligned with that worldview, rather than with the people and what remains of all independent businesses themselves, is unlikely to change this direction of travel without sustained public, producer and community pressure.

This means that to reshape and redirect UK food production, farmers, growers and fishers must themselves voluntarily step away from the reliance and expectation historically placed upon centralised political and institutional systems, as well as upon those who wish to become part of them.

Food producers must take all steps necessary to develop a new, direct relationship with the public and therefore go it alone.

Regrettably, the alternative is to keep shouting whilst continuing to accept the status quo, and in effect sitting back and watching as UK food production and everything that still remains able to provide us with genuine freedom is weakened further, right up to the point that traditional, ‘natural’ farming and food growing practices may no longer exist in any meaningful form, and people may find it increasingly difficult to function independently and away from centralised systems of dependency ever again.

This blog and accompanying PDF were edited and updated on 22 August 2026 to improve clarity, flow and readability. No substantive changes have been made to the core arguments or conclusions.