UK Government waters down inheritance tax changes for farmers
Government plans to tax inherited farmland have been watered down following months of protests by farmers and concern from backbenchers.
The individual threshold for a 20% tax on inherited agricultural or business assets will be increased from £1 million to £2.5 million when introduced in April next year.
It comes after more than 20 Labour MPs from mostly rural constituencies abstained on the proposal in Parliament earlier this month, with Penrith and Solway MP Markus Campbell-Savours losing the party whip for voting against.
The increased threshold will halve the number of estates affected by the reform to the Agricultural Property Relief (APR), from 375 to 185.
Environment Secretary Emma Reynolds said: “Farmers are at the heart of our food security and environmental stewardship, and I am determined to work with them to secure a profitable future for British farming.
“We have listened closely to farmers across the country and we are making changes today to protect more ordinary family farms. We are increasing the individual threshold from £1 million to £2.5 million which means couples with estates of up to £5 million will now pay no inheritance tax on their estates.
“It’s only right that larger estates contribute more, while we back the farms and trading businesses that are the backbone of Britain’s rural communities.”
‘Reform will give peace of mind to farming families’
Chair of the Labour Rural Research Group and MP for Suffolk Coastal has welcomed the changes and said they represent a major boost for family farms and rural businesses.
She said: “This is a crucial reform that will give real peace of mind to farming families.
“By increasing the APR threshold to £2.5 million per person, we are recognising the true value of agricultural in rural Britain, and the importance of keeping farms in family ownership.
“For couples, the combined threshold of £5 million will make a transformative difference. It means fewer families facing impossible choices, and greater certainty that farms can continue to operate, invest, and contribute to our rural economy.
“This wouldn’t have been possible if the Government hadn’t listened to rural Labour MP colleagues in the Labour Rural Research Group, to farmers, and to industry. This move shows the government is fully committed to backing working farms and our countryside – after years of successive failures under the Conservative government that brought farming to its knees.
“This is a big step that will go a huge way to back Britain’s working farms, whilst the government takes forward wider recommendations in Baroness Batters’ Farming Profitability Review.”
NFU President: ‘Common sense has prevailed’
The National Farmers’ Union (NFU), which fought a campaign against the changes to inheritance tax for farmers, said that the increase in thresholds would come as a “huge relief to many”.
NFU President Tom Bradshaw said: “While there is still tax to pay, this will greatly reduce that tax burden for many family farms, those working people of the countryside.
“I am thankful common sense has prevailed and government has listened. I have had two very constructive meetings with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and dozens of conversations with Defra Secretary of State Emma Reynolds. She has played a key role underlining the human impact of this tax. These conversations have led to today’s changes which were so desperately needed.
“From the start the government said it was trying to protect the family farm and the change announced today brings this much closer to reality for many. I’d like to thank the Prime Minister for recognising the policy needed amending and the Chancellor for bringing in the spousal transfer in the Budget. Combined this is a significant change.
“I would like to thank all those Labour backbench MPs that were contacted by farmers and growers and decided to stand by their constituents as demonstrated by the recent abstentions on the vote on Budget Resolution 50.
“While small in number, it was a significant and brave move for many. We have spent the past year working with them and there’s no doubt their interventions behind the scenes have also played a huge role in securing today’s news. I would also like to thank all opposition parties for continuously raising the impacts of this proposed policy.”
Macron meets French farmers in bid to defuse anger over trade deal
By AFP
December 23, 2025
French farmers have been fuming over a litany of issues, including a trade deal under negotiation between the European Union and South American bloc Mercosur - Copyright AFP/File kena betancur
French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday met with farmers’ unions to discuss a controversial free trade deal and the government’s handling of a cow disease that has led to protests and roadblocks.
It was the first meeting between Macron and union leaders since the start of a protest movement against a mass cull of cows to contain the spread of nodular dermatitis, widely known as lumpy skin disease.
French farmers have been fuming over a litany of issues, including a trade deal under negotiation between the European Union and South American bloc Mercosur, with any further decisions postponed to January.
“The purpose of the meeting was to try to put out the fire that is raging across the countryside,” Stephane Galais of the Confederation Paysanne union told journalists after the meeting, calling for “strong structural measures.”
“We’ve passed the ball to them. It’s in their court,” said Pierrick Horel, head of the Young Farmers union.
“What was important for us was to convey to the head of state the extreme tension that is affecting the agricultural world,” said Arnaud Rousseau, head of the main FNSEA union. “We are opposed to Mercosur.”
The EU-Mercosur pact would create the world’s biggest free-trade area and help EU members export more vehicles, machinery, wines and spirits to Latin America at a time of global trade tensions.
Farmers, particularly in France, worry the Mercosur deal will see them undercut by a flow of cheaper goods from agricultural giant Brazil and its neighbours.
Meanwhile, the culls have divided the unions, with FNSEA supporting the government’s policy under which all animals in affected herds are slaughtered.
On Tuesday, the agriculture ministry confirmed a new case of the disease in southwestern France, bringing the total number of outbreaks recorded in the country since June to 115.
Protesting farmers have for days blocked roads, sprayed manure and dumped garbage in front of government offices to force the authorities to review their policy.
The protests eased ahead of the holiday season but some farmers refused to budge. On Tuesday, motorway blockades remained in place on the A63 south of the city of Bordeaux and on the A64 in the towns of Carbonne and Briscous.
The Petty Bourgeois Farmer
A prevalent phenomenon in the Americas
Anna López and Charles T.
Jul 04, 2024
Image from the Machinefinder Blog
Who is and isn’t the working class? When you get into the nitty gritty, this is a question that confuses many newcomer leftists who may not be well read on a variety of Marxist literature and subsequently do not fully grasp the philosophy. Some people believe that other service workers, like baristas, are not representatives of the working class, yet believe that the average American farmer, rural landholders, are some of the utmost representative of the working class. We’re here to shine a light on the reality, of whose interests aligns with who, and how labor and production is distributed in this regard.
The Historical Development of Land Ownership
In slave societies and especially feudalistic societies, land was characterized by servants and serfs bound to lands who would work to generate enough produce to subside themselves as well as their overlordship or community. This was characterized by urban communities and their leadership who would demand that the peoples working the lands around them would provide food for the community, in exchange for protection and security from other communities, as well as rudimentary public services guaranteeing more free and open trade, stable currency, charity, long-term storage of goods, as well as religious institutions and consistently scheduled holidays, among other things. The political control of these lands, their trade and security, and their division, was expressed through the demarcation of and establishment of lords who obtained their lordship out of being elected leaders of their urban community, through special religious institutions, through appointment by lords of a higher agglomerate of community, or through dynastic descent, in which case they often descended originally from highly respected chiefs and warriors/soldiers who took up leadership to protect the original community and as such divided land amongst themselves, or descend from respected patricians (who were also originally elected leaders of an urban community who often also had warrior origins). This leadership, regardless of their origin, employed many practically independent artisans, merchants, and soldiers, who would help craft tools, buildings, infrastructure, ships, and defend the land and community.
As technology, the means of production developed in quality, so too did the feudal class. Polities organized into larger confederations, a larger but more clear hierarchy, and a developing sense of nationality. Ownership of land became larger and more centralized. More positions of landlordship and community leadership became positions appointed by those higher up the chain of feudal lordship; enfeoffment. This is essentially the origin of “gentrification”, in particular the landed gentry who owned large swaths of lands who had many serfs, servants, farmworkers, or even slaves, work their lands, beginning to not only generate subsistence for their community, but for other communities as well, in essence, they began seeking to generate profit and expand their power and domain. Simultaneously, the urban merchants, tradesmen, artisans, crafters and whatnot, grew in importance, began banding together forming guilds, and employing free laborers to help with their craft. Inevitably some jurisdictions even began allotting land that a free farmer or serf worked on, to said farmer and former serf, letting them privately and freely own the land they work.
With the advent of colonialism, the demarcation of territory in the Americas soon began, and Western European powers began ruling over indigenous feudal polities, conquering indigenous nomadic tribes, assimilating them, such as New Spain, or pushing them away and replacing them entirely such as the coast of South America, North America, and the Caribbean. This prevalent replacement was prolific in these locations due to their ideal locations in growing large numbers of cash crops, that is crop that is highly profitable to the landholders. These areas were characterized by the leaderships of the various European powers allotting settlers large parcels of land, whether they were newcomers seeking economic opportunity, or political and religious exiles, or from merchant families back in Europe, they were allotted these lands as long as they agreed to subdue and/or assimilate the indigenous population, maintain allegiance to the crown, and proliferate their faith and system of governance, being allowed to exist as autonomous colonial communities . This is the beginning of what we shall call a form of para-enfoeffment, in the Americas.
As these colonial communities continued to expand over territory, they began forming a greater sense of autonomy, as well a larger sense of shared identity between each other, and began consciously and purposefully pushing for greater conglomeration and centralization, autonomy, and stronger efforts to subdue indigenous communities. With greater autonomy by the small gentry, gilded merchants and artisans, from the central nobility due to the English civil war, the Spanish war of succession and other similar nearby wars in Europe (especially France, Netherlands, and lower Germany), and with the increasing antagonisms between the crown and the merchants and artisans of the Americas, and between the crown and the increasingly autonomous new landed gentry of the Americas, as a result of the ruling class of the European powers seeking further control over their colonies, in the form of controlling trade through tariffs and taxation among other things, the merchant class (early bourgeoisie) and plantation, estate, and hacienda owners began banding together with a common goal of greater political autonomy from the crown.
Much of the world’s arable land today is split between large swaths of privately owned industrialized farmland, and collectivities of small plots of land for subsistence. The Americas themselves, are characterized by a dichotomy of large swaths of public or communal land, as well as large swaths of industrialized farmland. Much of this industrialized farmland is more contiguously present in temperate regions characterized by a more continental, predictable four seasons, and black, fertile soil, such as Las Pampas region in South America of Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil, as well as North America, most especially the heartland, the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and the Mississippi River Basin of the United States and Canada. These countries also have large swaths of government owned land such as natural parks, as well as military bases, land owned by various governmental and academic institutions, and indigenous community reserve lands.
More countries around Central America, from the northern Andes to Mexico, is characterized by much larger amounts communally farmed common lands. This is characterized by a much higher and more widespread prevalence of tight-nit, more food subsistence based, more traditional, and more indigenous, communities. This is a result of various struggles of land-reform, indigenous rights, and farmworker representation which led to events such as the Mexican Revolution which was a response to excessively liberal reforms. This led to the establishment of the Ejido system (communal-use lands nominally owned by the government) and Comunidads (collectively-owned land by loose indigenous communities), largely preserving the pre-Colombian communal lands common to most of rural Mexico. Of course bourgeois-liberal capitalist forces have made efforts to privatize many lands and have to a degree. Currently however, the way it works is that it is up to the community owners of communal lands to auction off their land. So most land overall remains communal however large proportions of the most fertile lands, such as in Northeastern Mexico and central Jalisco, are private, many a result of recent privitization, and many a result of pre-existing private ownership since even the establishment of the Ejido system itself.
Other countries with a largely Mixed and Indigenous population, such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, among some others, have similar systems in place. There is criticism of these systems from the left and indigenous as well, who argue that these systems do not go far enough in protecting communal lands and indigenous land rights. Of course that makes Bolivia the most ideal in this regard for other states to emulate, as Bolivia is a plurinational semi-socialistic civilization state which guarantees autonomy to all ethnic groups and the land they reside on.
Other countries in the Americas, primarly the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, instead of having a history of liberal assimilation and Mestizaje (encouraged or forced race mixing), and indigenismo, they have a history of displacement, genocide, war campaigns, and mobilizing European immigrants to settle the land, pacify the indigenous, and contribute to the New Economy. This leads to vary organized and large grid-like swaths of land all privately owned by individuals and corporations. Now, every country in the Americas has various different and unique policies regarding indigenous people and the Amerindian race, however the historical generalization between these two paragraphs remains largely correct.
The Petty-Bourgeois Nature of Private Farmers
The first and most essential characteristic of their petty-bourgeois nature is their relations to the means of production. They own their own capital and control their own means of production, regardless of whether they work their land alone with their family, or hire farmworkers. Though, it is worth mentioning that those own large swaths of land and employ many farmworkers (illegal, legal or otherwise), are ostensibly bourgeoisie, likely beyond mere petty-bourgeoisie.
These modern farmers are distinguished from old farmers, or rather peasants by the fact they do not produce for their own means of food subsistence, but rather produce to provide to the market, which in return generates them income, profit, which in essence is their true means of actual subsistence, living off this income and using it to provide for all their own means of actual subsistence, shelter, clothing, ulilities, and a variety of food. Furthermore, they are distinguished by the proletariat by the fact they control their own means of production and make a living, their means of actual subsistence, off of selling their product to the market in general, rather than proletarians, including farmworkers, who make their living, their means of actual subsistence off of selling their labor, recieving an income, a wage from their employer, which they then use to purchase all their necessities to subside themselves; food, shelter, clothing, utilities and whatnot.
Now, some have the erroneous belief that farmers are not petty-bourgeois, but rather an independent, stratified and “free” section of the working-class. The primary reasoning behind this belief is generalized anecdotal thought that because farmers take out loans for their equipment, home, and storage among other things, and that because society is primarily governed by the big bourgeoisie who control industrial capital and finance capital, that the farmers don’t truly own their means of production and therefore are merely a free and independent working-class producing for the general bourgeoisie of society and being alloted a wage by that society in general of which their actual means of subsistence is sourced. Aside from the fact of this notion of the degree of legal and financial ownership by farmers of their means of production is a generalization and anecdotal not based on any particular statistics, it can still be regarded as factually true for many farmers. Regardless, however of the degree of legal and financial ownership of their means of production, it is still their means of production.
We as Marxists must remember we see things through the relations to the means of production, through general political and economic control of society, not merely a piece of legal paper that declares one’s ownership over something. The majority of farmers of America, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and to varying degrees in the rest of the Americas and outside of it (especially Europe), who are petty-bourgeois, own, in the sense they control and utilize their own means of production. Ultimately going back to the point that their source of actual subsistence is the product they produce for the market, using their means of production, which includes their machinery and may or may not include farmworkers.
Another characteristic which makes them of a bourgeois nature, and is the source of their independentness (not some kind of independent and “free” working-class, but their nature as independent and petite, bourgeoisie), is their collective unification and shared interest across their industry, its profitability, and their ability to negotiate with big bourgeoisie and society at large guaranteeing being paid fairly for their labor and product. One may rationalize and reduce their negotiating ability as merely a result of the fact they produce food, which is essential to the continued proliferation of society; however this is not dialectical thinking. Ultimately, the petty-bourgeois farmers are a massive subsect of society and the bourgeoisie as a whole, and as such they are alotted by the big-bourgeois apparatus the ability to form networks of farmer cooperatives so that farmers can protect their individual interests and independent nature whilst negotiating and maintaining their rate of profit from society as a whole. On the flip side, this is also the source of their often reactionary nature and political stances, as ultimately they align with the big bourgeoisie to crush farmworker unions, to maintain their rate of profit and the proliferation of their product, as the petty-bourgeois farmer who produces the raw food, and the regular bourgeoisie who cuts it up, mixes it together and packages it (a form of light-industry), are ultimately aligned in holding onto their way of living, pushing their product, exploiting the proletariat, and subsequently maintaining their rates of profit.
These petty-bourgeois farmers are largely descendant of settlers, either literally or figuratively, in the sense that ultimately they are alotted land and independence by the bourgeois state and function as the civilian frontline of the settler-colonial and bourgeois state apparatus and the territorial integrity of such; para-enfeoffment. Subsequently they align with the bourgeois state, to maintain their way of living as strictly as possible, and that is the primary essence of their reactionary politics. The control over their land is largely disimilar from proletarian American homeowners, who continue to be pushed out of the housing market as property is bought up by big landlords and corporations. The petty-bourgeois farmers maintain their farmer cooperatives and ownership over their land, and continue to support reactionary policies to prevent the linear historical progress of capitalism and the centralization of rural production.
At most, private individual landowners, the farmers, due to employing farmworkers, and especially due to increasingly more efficient and automated equipment, buy and hold larger swaths of land. Yet they maintain their control and will continue to support reactionary policies to do so, to prevent the centralization of their rural production, by either corporations, or of course by the proletariat of society as a whole. The latter of which is fundamentally the goal of socialism, where food is not expected to be profitted off of and its price controlled, the proletarian state ultimately controls and owns all land, and remaining farmers become proletarianized, operating the machinery alloted to them by the proletarian state, and working, selling their labor and producing for their actual cooperative and for society as a whole, and not for profit.
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