Russell Jones's Week Moment: All Aboard With Jeremy and Nigel on the Inheritance Tax-Avoiding Tractor Wagon!

The bestselling author of 'The Decade in Tory' on the festival of hypocrisy and self interest that is the debate about tax and farmers

Last week, driving across East Manchester to visit my mum, I drove by my old school, a crumbling, faux-Victorian pile with pretensions of dignity. Very much like my mum, in fact.

She’d been a member of the Parents and Teachers Association when I attended the school in the 1980s, at which point the place was already dilapidated. Temporary huts thrown up during World War II were still used as classrooms, a cluster of frozen, mildew-dappled wooden shanties where 37 classmates had to share a single copy of the school’s only Geography textbook. She told me the school only held a Latin class because it still had a glut of Latin primers, dating back to the 1950s. French, however, was limited, because teaching materials weren’t available. There was no money for such things.

In an all-boys school in one of the most deprived areas of the country, if you wanted to have a PE lesson, you had to provide your own football. The school didn’t have one. If you wanted to learn woodwork, you had to source your own wood. If you wanted to learn music, you were, frankly, shit out of luck, unless being beaten in three-four time counts, but I’m not sure it does. Kids – and their parents – would commonly steal supplies from shops or lumber yards in the area.

We were all in it together, all experiencing the same grinding, perpetual crisis. Like many poor people, we had to hang together, or we would surely hang separately. This kind of upbringing can fill you with anger, shame, or selfishness, but many became filled with compassion for the suffering of others.

So understandably, my heart went out this week to the hundred Eton parents who say it’s going to be difficult for them to pay VAT on the £63,000 luxury lifestyle choice they have entirely voluntarily opted for. You may have heard about this great national calamity. I’d be gobsmacked if you haven’t, quite frankly. Their voices are megaphoned across the whole of our media landscape.

But I’d be equally gobsmacked if you’ve heard that dozens of state schools now only open four and a half days per week, because they don’t have the funding to provide a full time education. Urgent televised reports are broadcast nightly, totally ignoring the 70% of state schools in England that have less funding than they did in 2010. Watch now as Kate Adie is brought from retirement to describe the crisis of 3,500 teachers lost, while more than £5,000 per pupil has vanished, and curriculums are being cut. Tune in for the fundraising telethon for the 94% of school staff who have to pay for vital classroom materials out of their own long-frozen wages, while four fifths of schools are lacking the funds to maintain their buildings, and 38% of them are at risk of collapse.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage joins farmers’ protest over inheritance tax change, Westminster, 19 November 2024. Photo: Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire/Alamy

Maybe I missed those reports from our leading broadcasters. It’s clearly a less important problem than the one facing the 7% who are rich enough to send their kids to a private school. After all, those massive problems only affect the other 93% of us for our entire lives, so we’ll just have to cough up a bit more tax to fill the Conservatives’ £22 billion fiscal black hole, without the aid of those Eton parents.

The VAT debate has been blown out of all proportions for one simple reason: only 7% of British children go to a fee-paying school, but 44% of the country’s most influential journalists did. It’s this kind of imbalance that allows those at the top to define the narrative, and boy-oh-boy do they get cross when somebody corrects them.

Which brings me to Jeremy Clarkson. Perhaps it is the educational averageness arising from his £11,000-per-term stay at Repton that explains his confusion over the other epic crisis looming ominously over a statistically insignificant number of incredibly privileged people: inheritance tax on very valuable farms.

The spin is that Labour is destroying a traditional cornerstone of Britain’s farming, dating back to time immemorial. But the tax relief threatened with reversal has only been in place since 1984, and while it may have been introduced to aid working farmers, it has long since metastasised into a blatant tax avoidance scheme, openly advertised as such by tax experts and solicitors.

It works like this. A rich guy buys a farm, gouges the rent for a few years – and last year alone, farm rents, for example, those of tenant dairy farmers, rose by up to 19% – and then dies, leaving it all to his kids. When you or I work for our money, we pay 40% tax on income over £50,000. When the rich guy’s kids do no work for their money, they get it tax free. And I would point out that “Landowner” is not a job. I’ve checked.

The recipients of this state-funded largesse are, as per Clarkson, utterly committed to farming, which is why in 40% of cases they get planning permission, boost the value of the land yet further, and then flog it off to Taylor Wimpey, leaving crops ungrown and the farm workers out of a job.

Let me be clear: this scenario describes vanishingly few people. On average, farmers – real farmers – earn less than £30,000 a year. It’s a blisteringly hard industry, battered by climate, by Brexit, and by over-powerful supermarkets forcing profits down to (quite literally) a single penny. I have every sympathy for anybody in this situation, and am genuinely grateful for the hard, invaluable work they put in.

But we must not allow genuine struggling farmers to be conflated with tax avoiding multimillionaires.

Even if Labour’s proposed changes are implemented, those affected will still inherit property worth £1 million tax free, plus the standard untaxed sum of £325,000. You can double those allowances if the landowner was married, plus paying no inheritance tax on the primary residence – a farmhouse. Combined, this means a landowner can easily leave around £3 million tax free, and his descendants will only pay 20% tax on everything above that.

The independent tax expert Dan Neidle calculates the number of farms affected by abolishing this wheeze will be below 500 per year. There are 209,000 farms in the UK, so we can’t even say we’re taking about the fabled “1%”, since only the very richest 0.2% will be affected. They may think they’re poor, but median household wealth in the UK is £302,000. If you’re inheriting ten times as much tax-free, you shouldn’t be surprised that I don’t want to buy your charity single.

Which brings me back to Old McBono, doing his White Saviour – okay, Yellowish-Grey Saviour – bit for the peasantry of Chipping Norton. Clarkson occupies a very particular position in space-time, being smart enough to earn £55 million, ethical enough to become a standard-bearer for the farming community, but stupid enough to write in his own Top Gear column that he only bought his comedy farm so he could jump on industry-harming tax bandwagon I described above.

As befitting a man who made his name at the BBC, he immediately turned on the BBC when this was put to him by Victoria Derbyshire, who owned Clarkson so completely that she’ll probably have to pay inheritance tax on him when he dies. Oh, the irony. It was a bad moment for his be-wellied rebellion, but at least the organisers had the wit to avoid another one, because Nigel Farage, bandwagon-hopper extraordinaire, couldn’t wait to turn up and co-opt the entire thing. He was prevented from speaking because the organisers had clued-in to the fact that his last rebellion in support of the industry led to a 35% cut in subsidies for sheep farmers.

But that didn’t prevent him from engaging in a bit of cosplay. Before entering politics, Nigel Farage was a commodities trader on the London Metal Exchange, so strictly speaking, he should have turned up in a double-breasted pinstripe suit, and a pair of furiously red braces. In the event, he remained silent, while very nearly perfecting the jackboot look, marching around the paved streets of London surrounded by a bevy of heavies, wearing pointless wellies, and trousers so dazzling you’d think his washing machine has a Chernobyl setting.

This kind of posturing idiocy explains my key problem with fee-paying schools. It’s not that they produce two-tier educational outcomes, because they don’t: GCSE results from state schools are the same as those from private schools, so if, like Clarkson and Farage, you’re both rich and stupid, feel free to part with £30,000 to get the same education I got for nothing, while expertly illustrating one of the key failings of late-stage capitalism.

And my problem with fee-paying schools isn’t that one group of kids is starved of resources while another drowns in them. My school had no heating. Eton has its own aquatics centre, a symphonic hall, and three theatres permanently staffed with a cohort of stage professionals.

No, my problem is that private schools are personified in the tobacco-stained forms of Nigel Farage and Jeremy Clarkson. They are a system designed to propel those with rich parents to the top of society, regardless of ability. Such in-group, masturbatory, self-congratulation helps explain why 44% of journalists are buying Clarkson’s narrative, just as far too many bought that of Farage, and of Boris Johnson. Are we truly persuaded the country needs yet more generations of this?

Charge the VAT, I say. Charge it twice. Close the inheritance tax loopholes. Make those kids achieve for themselves, rather than relying on hand-outs, just as capitalist theory dictates. Drive them into state schools, like the bleak and destitute one I attended. And then watch in awe as a bit of education seeps into the darkness, and they learn for themselves why the country urgently needs a greater financial contribution from the luxury class.

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Russell Jones is the author of two books, The Decade in Tory, and most recently, Four Chancellors and a Funeral. His forthcoming book Tories: The End of an Error, the final volume in the ‘Torygeddon Trilogy’, to be published in Spring 2025, can be pre-ordered now on Unbound. His legendary #The Week in Tory threads can be found @RussInCheshire on X/Twitter