Why should farmers be exempt from inheritance tax that applies to everyone else?

In theory, the problem is one of compounding assets. If you have a family farm with multiple inheriting children and the farm has to be sold to pay off the inheritence tax debt, who buys them? Inevitably, bigger industrial agriculture firms. So more and more plots are aggregated within a smaller and smaller number of privately owned farming companies.

In practice, this has already happened decades prior (centuries prior, if you look at the history of land ownership in Ireland). The people buying up small plots of land aren’t pioneering farmer entrepreneurs. They’re people explicitly looking to dodge taxes by converting their accumulated wealth into an untaxable asset. So you’re not seeing small farmers shielded from consolidation thanks to inheritance taxes. You’re seeing celebrities and mega-millionaires shielding cash assets behind an accounting trick.

Millionaire farmers driving around in their tractors protesting that when they die, their wealth shouldn’t be redistributed to any degree is pathetic.

Wealth in the UK isn’t being redistributed, its being aggregated. The prior and current governments have gone all in on private equity as a cure for sluggish growth. This is purely Rich Guy on Rich Guy violence.

If you genuinely care about protecting the assets of the working class, you need less middling Starmerism and more radical Maoism.

The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry

• Michael Parenti