A well-known TV face has made farming the talk of the day in Britain. Thousands of farmers from around the country came to London to demonstrate with Jeremy Clarkson.
LONDON World-renowned TV host Jeremy Clarkson is now Britain’s best-known agricultural influencer. It was visible on the wide Whitehall street leading to the official residence of the British Prime Minister.
Thousands of farmers arrived with Clarkson there to oppose the government’s plans to impose a steep 20 percent inheritance tax on farms worth more than £1 million (€1.2 million).
The plan is one of the many taxes and cuts introduced by the Labor Party, which came to power last summer, to turn the country’s miserable economy around.
Farmers have arrived with tractors in government quarters before, but with Clarkson, the media coverage was unprecedented.
Clarkson is remembered for his Top Gear car show. He also hosts the Who wants to be a millionaire TV show in Britain.
However, Clarkson’s new reality TV series has gained tremendous popularity in Britain. Clarkson’s farm series documents the celebrity’s new career as a farmer. Millions of Britons watch the show, and it has unexpectedly become popular in China as well.
– Clarkson has done perhaps more for British agriculture than anyone else, said the person who arrived from his farm in Hampshire Richard Wills.
Wills says he’s in the fourth generation of farming and worries about whether his children will be allowed to continue.
Clarkson has now become a messenger for farmers. Farmer Paul Davey From Lincolnshire says Clarkson is talking sense. He enjoys watching Clarkson’s reality show.
– It looks chaotic, and that’s what farming is. But it’s fun to watch the chaos of other people’s work, Davey laughs.
During the protest, Clarkson briefly argued with reporters about the need for a new inheritance tax, demanded the government withdraw the tax plan, and then walked through the protest area to huge applause.
Farmers remind us that a million pounds is small change in today’s Britain. In London, many residential buildings already cost more than a million. Agricultural producers warn that the inheritance tax will force them to sell their farms at the time of generational change.
According to the government, this is an exaggeration. According to its calculations, no more than 500 wealthy landowners would have to pay inheritance tax per year. If the couple makes a generational change, the next generation would have to pay inheritance tax only on the property worth a good three million euros.
In Britain, the economy of farmers has also been tested in recent years by, among other things, the weather, the covid pandemic and the exit from the EU.
Post-Brexit governments have not been able to continue helping farmers, such as EU agricultural subsidies.
The leader of the far-right Reform UK party, which pushed for EU separation Nigel Farage defended leaving the EU in protest to , despite the farmers’ plight.
– We spent six billion pounds a year on agricultural subsidies, and three billion of that ended up in Europe. So we should have enough money for the farmers, he claims.
Farage opposes the previous Conservative government’s policy of tying agricultural subsidies to afforestation instead of food production and the new government’s inheritance tax intentions.