Inheritance Tax

Plus a Clarkson Addendum

This piece is part of the Choc Board, a 30 day writing challenge instigated by Chocolate Knox. You can read his Substack here. This is day 4. I rarely comment on current events, but there’s always a time to try something new. So, we’ll see how this goes.

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If you have been keeping an eye on British news (and I realise it’s a niche subset of people who do) you will have seen farmers travelling to London to protest en masse. This is because the UK government is attempting to change inheritance tax laws, specifically as they relate to the inheritance of farm assets.

The UK currently has inheritance tax at the obscene level of 40% of an estate’s value over £325,000. Until now, farm assets have been exempt from this tax, which has given multi-generational farms the ability to scrape-by despite the host of climate taxes and regulations they face. In the latest government budget, it was revealed that farm assets will no longer be exempt from inheritance tax and will now be subject to an Inheritance tax rate of 20% of any value over 1 million pounds (with a higher threshold in some situations). 1 million sounds like a large number, and the government stats have been skewed somewhat to make it sounds like very few farms will be affected. However, the number of active family farms that fall below those thresholds is small and in reality, many farmers will be affected by this.

The government’s stated reason for the change is to stop the wealthy buying farmland in order to avoid inheritance tax, whilst raising funds for ever-hungry public services (as always the NHS card is played deftly… do you not care about sick people?). But the real reason is more fundamental than that. The real motivation for the change is a commitment to the principles laid out plainly in the communist manifesto.

What follows is plank three of ten, the third in the most fundamental tenets of establishing a communist utopia, The third commandment of the ‘new’ modernist religion:

“Abolition of the right of inheritance”

Modernists have long abhorred the slow growth of generational wealth and the ‘privilege’ it provides to those skilled in stewarding it. They brand it as ‘unfair’ for some to receive a ‘leg-up’ when others don’t. Fast cash and quick spending is more moral. Apparently.

In reality, the inter-generational growth of wealth is a training ground for patience, virtue, diligence and skill. It lifts-up the family unit, turns the generations towards one another and ultimately leads to a populace of invested but inconveniently un-mouldable people.

We are explicitly told that inheritance and generational wealth are good things in the bible:

“A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,
But the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous.”

Proverbs 13:22

And the futility of failing to pass wealth on reliably is one of the tragedies of a fallen world in Ecclesiastes.

Progressive modernists have hated this since the inception of their movement in the 1700s and this latest move by the UK government is simply another step in pursuing the same agenda.

I saw someone on X/Twitter ask for an explanation of all this in a way that a five-year-old would understand.

In reality, a five-year-old would find it remarkably easy to understand, because it all relies on standard five-year-old rhetoric. The kind of mood that any parent recognises:

“It’s not faiirrrr, they’ve got more than me!”

All of the details of this inheritance tax push, in essence, amount to a grown-up toddler’s sulk.

A Clarkson Addendum

As I have already mentioned, these changes have stirred uproar amongst farmers. And amidst it all has arisen an unlikely hero: Jeremy Clarkson. This ex-BBC presenter, car enthusiast, farm owner and TV personality, uncowed by the schoolmarm tactics of the BBC has been willing to speak clearly and boldly.

Here he is being ‘interviewed’ by Victoria Derbyshire of the BBC:

I did not grow up as a Clarkson appreciator; he was coarse, rude, boisterous, and worst of all was into cars, shooting, and probably sports. And these, obviously, are all markers of a first-order scallywag. Or so my respectable middle-class impulses would have told me.

But in recent years it has become much clearer to me that social niceties are an unreliable marker of good character and common sense. It’s easy to be a polite crook (or perhaps a ‘whitewashed wall’ to use an older metaphor).

None of that can be used to discard genuine courtesy, mind-you. Courtesy is commanded in scripture and all of the righteous prophets and apostles (not to mention Christ himself) were genuinely courteous, even in the midst of their coarsest moments. Courtesy cannot be discarded, but courtesy and polite niceties don’t have the same boundaries.

I am not claiming that Clarkson is ultimately a righteous man. But there is a marker of common-sense great-soulédness in Clarkson that I should have noticed before. A clearer guide to character than fluency with polite society: he is genuinely interested in things ‘for their own sake’.

It seems to me that Top Gear was first about the cars for him. The money was a great benefit, and I’m sure he enjoyed being in the limelight, but at root he simply finds cars fascinating. The same can be said about his farm endeavours. He bought the farm because he likes shooting, and now he has a genuine fascination with farming. None of it was particularly for fame or influence or wealth, even if that has been a fortuitous sideline.

Just as the great soul of Samwise Gamgee is shown in his love for gardens ‘for their own sake’, so the slightly-greater-than-normal-public-figure soul of Jeremy Clarkson has revealed itself through his interests. Genuine interests that he has simply because he hasn’t closed his eyes completely to the wonder of the world.

That has prepared him to be an unlikely spokesman for righteousness in this situation, and remain undaunted by the diminishing respectability of his position in the circles he used to move in.