If James Herriot was alive now, he would be horrified by what this prime minister is doing. I’m speaking for him, really,” Jim Wight told me. As the son of world-famous Yorkshire vet and All Creatures Great and Small author Alf Wight—known to the public as James Herriot—Wight should know. Wight, now eighty-one, was also a vet and worked alongside his father for many years. He believes that U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer’s proposed 20 percent inheritance tax on farms, which were previously exempt, will be the death knell for both family farms and rural culture.
Wight isn’t alone. On November 19, thousands of farmers gathered on Parliament Square in London to protest what they see as an existential threat; TV personality and Clarkson’s Farm star Jeremy Clarkson joined them, calling Starmer’s cash grab a “hammer blow to the back of the head” for farmers. “This is a very cruel tax for farmers,” Wight told me. “It is very hard for modest family farms. The suicide rate among farmers is very high, and I think it’s going to get even higher with these taxes. A lot of governments are run by urbanites who haven’t got a clue about the rural economy.”
In Wight’s view, rural English culture simply isn’t important to most politicians. “We need farmers, and we cannot afford to lose farms and farmland,” he told me. “The world is in a precarious situation at the moment. If we end up in World War III, then we’ll need the food. There will be an about-turn in the attitude towards farming then, although I hope it doesn’t come to that. We need these farmers not only for our own economy, but as guardians of our environment. All of these people come out to see James Herriot country and wonder at this beautiful, beautiful place. Who is making it look like that? Farmers!”
Starmer has vigorously defended his tax on farmers and insists that the financial burden is not onerous. Wight says that is ridiculous, and that many family farms that form the foundation of England’s rural culture will not survive. Instead, they will be replaced by big, profit-driven outfits while those who have been connected to the land for generations will be forced out. “These hill farms are just surviving,” he said with anger. “The hill farmers keep the Yorkshire countryside beautiful, and they’re on the brink of survival.” Once the family farms are gone, Wight told me, they will be gone for good.
“Take, for example, a farm very close to me,” he said. “It’s a family farm. The father isn’t well and won’t survive long. Let’s say the farm is worth three million pounds. If it is passed on, the inheritance tax will be 600,000 pounds. The two sons who are now running the farm will have to come up with that. They don’t have it and won’t have it. Family farms may be asset-rich, but they are cash poor. The only way to pay that tax is to sell off much of the family farm, and that’s the beginning of the end.”
Wight says the cycle is predictable. The government demands a share of the farm. The sons sell. Another family farm, passed down for generations and sometimes centuries, is lost, likely bought by a large-scale agricultural operation driven by numbers, or by a developer. Farm by farm, the rural culture vanishes, the landscape changes, the population is transformed. Without the countryside, Wight says, there is no English culture, and he is frustrated that the prime minister does not seem to understand that.
