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 isn’t the wholly avoidable tragedies that are part of the much bigger engineered tragedy that is unfolding.
It is the reality that we cannot do a thing about what is happening, and 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, bears no relationship with our reasoned expectations of government and governance. But is instead being driven by a different set of truths that are very difficult to 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 sense, is far from being isolated. Not least of all because the Tax that could be raised by the policy is in public spending terms trivial and was never what the change was really about.
Indeed, what appears to just be a nasty attack on ‘rich farmers’, was, is and will continue to be all about food and the independence that locally controlled food production gives us. It’s this that should be concerning 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 didn’t arrive in isolation. But was in fact just the next step in a long and calculated chain of policy changes and their implementation, which have been reforming, remodelling and slowly strangling, if not killing off all 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 is part of a much bigger strategy and plan. One that places the end of independent farming and food production of all kinds across the UK at its very heart.
Likewise, we must recognise that food is power. And Who Controls Our Food Controls Our Future.
So those who wish to have control over everything – including people and how we are allowed to live and behave – want to secure complete control of the food chain. Simply because of the absolute control that it will shortly allow them to impose, if the status quo continues, unopposed.
The last thing an establishment already struggling to hide its totalitarian and authoritarian plans for the future wants, is for anyone or any business to exist that can provide any person or any community with the independence that could very quickly derail and wreck everything they aim to do.
Whilst this malfeasant but cleverly legitimised strategy is being slowly but very surely implemented across every area of life today to restrict freedoms, including just about every rule that’s meant to create safety and switch to digital and online alternatives to ‘real life’ that there is, there are none that have quite 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 21st 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 unable to provide the producers with a viable, unsupported or independent income.
Truly, the idea that growing the food that we genuinely need is not possible, can only begin to make sense when we accept that the whole problem has been created for farmers (and consumers), so that specific interests can be advantaged above others and that this was the deliberate choice of whoever has and is now controlling the levers of government.
Far from being the anachronism that many of today’s two-faced politicians would like voters to believe, small independent family farms are the future of food as a part of a great future for us and for our communities.
The relatively easy to solve problem for farmers and consumers that really is a very big concern of the establishment, is the threat that we will rediscover the legitimacy of food independence, whilst realising that we don’t need centralised power structures and business models to thrive and have much better life experiences on our own.
It’s this that the establishment really doesn’t like and is quietly terrified of.
All the rules that have slowly choked small farmers out of business, following policy change after policy change, heralded by Trojan horses like the Common Agricultural Policy, and 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 been created with long term outcomes in mind.
Policy after policy has been created, changed and implemented that have at best been intended to redirect and at worst destroy businesses that could have and still could adapt to the needs that people genuinely have for food. Needs that could otherwise already be being fully met by functioning and supported UK food producers, rather than what is left of UK food producing industries being the victims of engineered circumstances that tell everyone they are unnecessary and are 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 was arguably inevitable that as wider plans for controlling the food supply and pushing public dependency towards sources such as factory made ‘alternative proteins’ became more important, that remaining independent food growing and producing businesses, still capable of changing direction to meet direct public need, should be encouraged to close.
Whilst even now, many reading this essay may well scoff at what I am sharing, I’m afraid that the evidence of all this is now beginning to shout very loudly as it emerges into public view at breakneck 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 work anything like we expect them to. Or in any way as they should.
With many of the politicians we can publicly identify being incapable of leading as they should and they themselves being wholly reliant upon the advice and direction of many other people and influencers who are both considered to be ‘experts’ (in what?!) and who we are unlikely to ever know of, we have to begin to understand that what and why the politicians we have are doing what they are doing may actually be for reasons that may be very different to what we expect.
Even then, if we knew what the politicians honestly believe, the genuine purpose or truth behind what they are being advised or directed to do may not even then be something that they themselves would easily believe.
Regrettably and rather worryingly, the establishment and any political party, group or movement that is aligned with the establishment, rather than the people and what remain of al independent businesses themselves, will not change the direction of travel of any of this, until they either succeed or their plans are stopped.
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 the establishment as well as those who wish to become part of it.
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, whilst in effect sitting back and watching as UK food production and everything that still remains able to provide us with genuine freedom is destroyed, right up to the point that traditional, ‘natural’ farming and food growing practices no longer exist, and people will never be able to function independently and away from the control of the establishment ever again.
Adam Tugwell 
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