Outside Parliament Richard Angood, 72, pulled his flat cap down further over his nose to keep the freezing rain out of his eyes. The Cambridgeshire farmer usually oversees 200 acres of sugar beet, wheat and potatoes, but on Tuesday he was in Westminster to join a 10,000-strong crowd protesting changes to inheritance tax.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Budget infuriated some rural voters after she announced that from April 2026, farms worth more than £1m will be liable for 20 per cent inheritance tax. Ministers argue farms worth as much as £3m can still be passed on tax-free once remaining reliefs are taken in to account.
The measure is aimed at closing a loophole exploited by some of the wealthiest estates, but the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) says it will break up family farms.
“We can’t earn enough money to pay the inheritance tax even if it’s over 10 years, and we can’t sell assets because it would be selling your tools,” Angood, a third-generation farmer, told i. “Inheritance tax was the straw that broke the camel’s back because it came on top of the national insurance rise. We’ve got a big farm next to me and they’re going to be paying about half a million pounds extra with the national insurance and Minimum Eage rise. And as farmers, we don’t get to set our prices.”
Greeting the farmers before they set off, Tory MPs were in their happy place, relieved to feel relevant and useful again. Victoria Atkins, the shadow Defra Secretary, even wore a union flag jacket. Aides handed out hi-vis jackets with the Tory tree logo on them. Placards were waved: “Keir Starmer, farmer harmer.” Later, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch was cheered as she told the crowd that the Conservatives “have your backs”. The energetic protesters had forcefully made their point.
Inside Parliament the atmosphere was totally different. Small groups of flat-capped, green-jacketed, booted farmers were shown into MPs’ offices, and the smell of wet tweed wafted through the coffee fumes. But the mood among Labour MPs certainly didn’t match the strength of feeling outside on Whitehall. Some were outright dismissive of the farmers’ concerns.
“These people don’t vote for us anyway and the Tories look ridiculous going along with the march. The Tories just come across as the political branch of the NFU,” one Labour insider said.
“I spoke to some in my patch at the weekend,” a Labour MP from a rural constituency told i. “They all turned up in their shiny tractors and brand-new Mercedes 4x4s – these aren’t poor people. But we know this isn’t just about inheritance tax; it’s about how rural people see themselves as being treated. I suppose it’s a bit like Brexit: it was a protest vote about the establishment, it wasn’t purely a vote on EU regulations.”
While Labour MPs sit in 114 rural seats, the voices of the 2024 intake were ignored in pre-Budget discussions. A Labour MP told i: “Rachel was warned about the impact on farmers in a meeting three weeks before the Budget, but she made the point that this was about wealthy people and she’s wasn’t going to back down. If she’s not backing down on the winter fuel payment, she’s not backing down on this.”
“I didn’t see the farmers protesting over Brexit, quite the opposite, and that has damaged them far more,” another Labour MP told i. “This is about fairness, and they should pay.”
Another Labour MP said: “There certainly isn’t a desire to change anything that’s in the Budget. The farmers can have their day in London, get it off their chests and then it’ll hopefully go away. Jeremy Clarkson and James Dyson aren’t our people anyway. No one really cares about the mega-wealthy being a bit less well-off.”
Outside in the rain, the crowds chanted “save our farms”. Small children rode their toy tractors around Parliament Square. Clarkson, in a beanie hat, addressed the rally.
“I beg of the Government to be big – to accept this was rushed through, it wasn’t thought through – and it was a mistake,” he said.
But Labour MPs were unmoved. One shrugged when asked about Clarkson’s star power to drive change. “He’s a divisive figure,” the MP said. “Some people like him, quite a lot of people don’t.”
For all the show of indifference from some in the Labour Party, others were taking the political risk from upsetting the farmers more seriously. There’s even a WhatsApp group for Labour’s rural MPs led by Joe Morris, the new MP for Hexham.
One MP from a rural constituency looked uneasily at the appearance of Reform UK MPs who were marching alongside the farmers. “This policy is really unhelpful to us,” the Labour MP told i. “Reform are making in-roads into our vote. This feeds in to the idea that no one is listening to ordinary people, but this time those ordinary people are in wellies.”
A total of 59 of Labour’s 100 most marginal constituencies – those where a swing of less than 5 per cent would lead to a Labour defeat – are in rural or semi-rural areas, and could be vulnerable at the next general election. Labour also faces the loss of council seats at the local elections next May, when all 21 county councils in England – which include swathes of farmland – are up for vote. Meanwhile in Wales, one Labour MP said their party’s vote at Senedd elections in 18 months would “100 per cent” be affected, predicting Labour could end up power-sharing with Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru in Cardiff.
Lots of Labour MPs are calling for a proper impact assessment of the planned changes after figures released by Defra and the Treasury didn’t match. The Country Land and Business Association says that capping agricultural property relief at £1m could harm 70,000 UK farms, against a Treasury estimate that only 500 farms will be affected.
Steve Witherden, the Welsh Labour MP for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr, said the Treasury needed to produce its modelling on the impact on family farms “so everyone knows where they stand,” adding: “It’s not remotely uncommon for any legislation to go through various phases. There’ll be the opportunity for debate.”
Some MPs have been lobbying Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to raise the threshold for the tax changes. They’ve also been appealing to Claire Reynolds, Starmer’s political director, who is in charge of liaising with the Parliamentary Labour Party and feeding back opinion to the Prime Minister, even when he is thousands of miles away at the G20 in Rio de Janeiro. From Brazil, Starmer maintained he is “confident the vast majority of farms will not be affected“.
Aled Thomas, 28, from a 400-acre potato and livestock farm in Pembrokeshire, Wales, was sporting a silver pig badge as he set off to march down Whitehall.
“I think Labour are intentionally sowing division between rural voters and urban voters,” he said. “I think they’re doing it to shore up the urban vote, to make sure they’re putting more money into the NHS which urban voters typically care about. It’s not just the Agricultural Property Relief, it was a Budget that had a lot of other nasties in it. There were taxes on fertilisers, more VAT on pick-up trucks. Also, Labour’s stance on bovine tuberculosis – it’s up every year. The inheritance tax change was the last fatal blow.”
For farmers, some of whom are threatening to stop delivering food supplies or block motorways with their tractors, the fight is far from over.
Even if Reeves doesn’t back down – and there are no signs she will – the bruising encounter may change the wider outlook of the Labour Party. One Labour MP said colleagues had been slow to realise that rural voters had lent their vote to Labour to kick out the Tories but could easily withdraw it again.
“With 400 seats, of course, we’ve changed the type of voter we’ve absorbed, but as a party we’ve been slow to acknowledge it,” a Labour MP said. “Maybe this protest will feed into future policy, or maybe we just accept now that we’ve lost some of the seats we took this year.”
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