Shrove Tuesday was marked in London with another farmers’ rally in Whitehall, the fourth in four months. Farmers flipped pancakes and tried to put on a brave face, but a survey released the same day revealed that more than half of UK farms expect to go out of business within the next ten years.
The protests are in response to Labour’s announcement last October that the current 100% relief from inheritance tax for farmers will be restricted to the first £1 million of combined agricultural and business property. Above that, it will be rated at 20%. Although the tactics employed by the Labour government differ from the brutalities of the Soviet regime, the ideological goal driving the farm tax remains identical: the eradication of private ownership.
The measure is deeply unpopular, both with farmers and the public at large, prompting ministers to justify the cash grab as crucial for keeping the NHS afloat. Yet government figures indicate that the measure is only expected to raise £500 million a year for the treasury—equivalent to about 20 hours of NHS spending. So why do it?
Farmers have their own theories. Tim, a farmer from Wiltshire, told GBNews: “It’s an ideological issue—[Labour] is targeting ownership. They’re targeting not just agricultural property relief (APR) but also business property relief (BPR). They’re targeting anyone who wants to have the freedom to do business and to be incentivised to do that.”
Tim is absolutely right.
In the days leading up to last October’s Autumn Budget, Labour ministers were asked to share their definition of a working person. Labour’s manifesto had promised they would “not increase taxes on working people,” but this raised an obvious question: who exactly were “working people?”
A working person is someone who “goes out and earns their living, usually paid in a sort of monthly cheque,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Sky News. When asked whether he would include people who gain an income from shares or assets (as farmers do), he replied “Well, they wouldn’t come within my definition.”
Chancellor Rachel Reeves said they were “strivers who graft,” although apparently, that didn’t include people who graft hard enough to start their own business; her budget included a tax rise on employers’ National Insurance contributions. Reeves confirmed this didn’t fall under her definition of a tax on working people.
When asked by BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg “Why are people who run businesses not working people?” Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson dodged the question seven times, although she did offer a definition: “A working person is someone who derives their main income from going out to work”.
Was Phillipson a working person, Kuenssberg asked, given that as a cabinet minister Phillipson earns a salary in excess of £160,000? Phillipson nodded. “My income derives from my job”, she replied.
The median farm household income in England was £17,800 in 2021/22; for full-time employees, it was £33,000. “Working people” isn’t a “definition of wages,” Labour minister Pat McFadden explained.
The ministers’ inability to define a working person was largely treated as a joke at the time, given that it seemed nonsensical, but it is no laughing matter. The distinction being drawn here is indeed ideological: it is between the proletarian and the kulak classes.
‘Kulak’ is a Russian word meaning ‘fist’. It was also the label given by the Communists to those peasants who, following the abolition of serfdom in 1861, had striven and grafted enough to own land and employ workers. Officially the term was reserved for anyone owning more than eight acres of land; in reality owning any asset, even one cow, was enough to earn someone the label.
Russia’s economy was historically rooted in small-scale agriculture. As the more successful land-owners in their locale, the kulaks not only epitomised capitalistic enterprise, they also tended to be pillars of their communities. They would lend money, provide mortgages, run the local administrative affairs. All of this was anathema to the Communists, who wanted to transform Russia’s economy from small-scale and localised to large-scale and collectivised. For this to happen farming had to be collectivised, and that meant rooting out the kulak class.
In 1927, heavy taxes and restrictions were imposed upon the kulaks. When that failed to break them, the Communists simply started seizing the land. By late 1929, a plan to “liquidate the kulaks as a class” was underway. In the years 1930–31 some 100,000 kulaks were shot dead. Ten million were sent by cattle truck to remote areas, of which three million died en route.
“My great-grandfather was dekulakised because he’d installed a wooden floor in the house,” recalled Elena Lanher, talking to Radio Liberty. “He never reached Solovki prison camp, but died on the way.”
By the summer of 1931, the whole of the Ukrainian steppe had been collectivised. Some 40% of the nation’s cattle and 65% of the sheep were slaughtered by the peasants, who would rather kill their animals than hand them over. The inevitable result was famine. Between 1930 and 1933 an estimated 5.7–8.7 million people starved to death across the Soviet empire. Ukraine alone saw between 3.5 and 5 million starve in what became known as the Holodomor—‘murder by hunger’.
Yet, chillingly, the atrocities were hailed by the Communists as a resounding success, a blow by the workers against “activists, engaged in counter-revolutionary activities.” That narrative was to continue throughout the Soviet era. Anyone who disagreed with the Communist Party must, by definition, be a counter-revolutionary. In fact, only 44% of those arrested under the dekulakisation program were peasant farmers. The rest were clergymen, tradesmen, former Czarist civil servants, teachers, and others deemed part of the “intelligentsia”. Protesting the arrest of your farmer neighbour could result in death or deportation.
In modern Britain, as in Russia, kulaks are farmers and small business owners, but, as JD Vance pointed out in Munich, they can also be Christians engaged in silent prayer. It’s up to us all to rally at the next farmers’ march.
Labour’s Ideological War on the Kulaks ━ The European Conservative