Jeremy Clarkson says budget delivered ‘hammer blow’ to farmers and urges ministers to back down – UK politics live

Starmer declines to say if Ukraine will get approval to use Storm Shadow missiles to hit Russia

Jessica Elgot

Keir Starmer has refused to say if Ukraine will be allowed to use Storm Shadow missiles supplied by the UK to hit targets in Russia. As the Guardian reported this morning, Ukraine is expected to get approval to fire these missiles into Russia now that Joe Biden, has agreed to do the same for the similar American long-range Atacms weapon.

But, when asked about this in an interview at the G20, Starmer sidestepped the question. He said:

My position has always been that Ukraine must have what it needs for as long as it needs. [Vladimir] Putin must not win this war. But look, forgive me, I’m not going to go into operational matters, because there’s only one winner if I do that, and that is Putin and it would undermine Ukrainian efforts.

Starmer rejects claim inheritance tax plan amounts to class war, and says ‘vast majority’ of farmers won’t be affected

Jessica Elgot

Keir Starmer has said he is “very confident” that the “vast majority” of farmers will nto be affected by the extension of inheritance tax. In an interview in Brazil, where he is attending the G20 summit, he told the BBC:

If you take a typical case, which is parents who want to pass on their farm to one of their children … by the time you’ve built in the other income tax thresholds, it’s only those with assets over £3m that would begin to pay inheritance tax, and that’s why I’m very confident that the vast majority of farms will be totally unaffected.

He also said rural communities needed the extra investment the budget would fund.

I also say this; I know that in rural communities – I grew up in one – we also need really good schools, really good hospitals, and we need houses that people could afford to live in, and they were the measures that we invested heavily in the budget.

In an interview with Sky News, asked if he was waging “class war” on wealthy landowners, Starmer replied

Look, It isn’t at all what we’re doing. It’s a balanced approach. We have to fill a black hole which was left by the last government.

Labour would bring back winter fuel payments in Scotland, says Anas Sarwar, but tapered so wealthy get less

Libby Brooks

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has pledged to reinstate universal winter fuel payments in Scotland should his party win the 2026 Holyrood election.

In a move that piles pressure on Rachel Reeves’ controversial policy, Sarwar said his plan would mean “a fairer system” for Scotland and show the public that “we have listened”.

The pledge comes days before another set of council byelections in Glasgow and after polling suggesting the unpopularity of UK government policies is harming Scottish Labour’s vote. At the general election Scottish Labour was well ahead of the SNP, but now that lead has collapsed.

Sarwar said he had been “clear from the outset” that he thought Reeve’s pension credit threshold was too low and that he planned to reintroduce a universal payment for all pensioners, but tapered like child benefit is so that wealthier people receive less.

Winter fuel payment was set to be devolved to Scotland this year but, after Reeves’ announcement, the Scottish government said it had no option but to delay as it created a shortfall of £150m.

Sarwar denied that he was trying to distance himself from UK Labour policy, saying:

This is about recognizing that we have got to find a Scottish solution to this problem.

I’ve always been clear that we will take a different approach where I think it’s appropriate.

In Scotland, we took a different approach, for example, on how we supported our trade union movement on picket lines. We obviously took a much earlier and strong view on the conflict in the Middle East, a position supported now by our colleagues across the UK, and we have a different view around the threshold for this payment.

Jeremy Clarkson is now speaking at the rally.

He says he was unsympathetic to farmers when he lived in London. But since he started farming himself, he has learned how “unbelievably difficult” it is, he says.

(His speech is interrupted by someone saying a person at the rally needs medical attention.)

He says the costs for farmers are huge. A tractor can cost £200,000, he says.

You get people saying, well, I shouldn’t pay that. I can get a chicken from abroad. Yes, you can … it’s full of chlorine, it tastes like a swimming pool with a beak.

And he says the budget hit farmers really hard.

I know a lot of people all across the country and all walks of life took a bit of a kick on the shin with that budget. You lot got a knee in the nuts and a hammer blow to the back of the head.

Clarkson mentions other costs imposed on farmers in the budget – such as pickup trucks being classified as company cars, which he claims amounts to a 211% tax rise – and then he turns to the claim that only 73% of farms will be affected. (See 12.20pm.) He asks people in the crowd to put their hands up. And then he asks anyone unaffected by the change to lower their hand. It looks as if all the hands stay up.

After joking about being “off my tits on codeine and paracetamol” (he’s not feeling well), Clarkson ends with a message to the government. He does not want to make it a “shouty” one, he says.

I beg the government to be big, to accept that this was rushed through. It wasn’t thought out, and it’s a mistake. That’s the big thing to do – admit it and back down.

Jeremy Clarkson has denied buying a farm primarily to avoid inheritance tax.

Even though in the past he has publicly given this as a key reason for his decision to buy his Diddly Squat farm in Oxfordshire (named after the amount of profit the farm supposedly produces – not the inheritance tax he intended to pay), Clarkson claimed today that he only wrote about buying a farm for tax reasons (see 11.20am) because he did not want to admit the real reason.

Asked about the past comment, he told PA Media:

That’s actually quite funny because the real reason I bought the farm was because I wanted to shoot, so I thought if I told a bunch of people that I bought a farm so I could shoot pheasants it might look bad.

So, I thought I better come up with another excuse, so I said inheritance tax. I actually didn’t know about inheritance tax until after I bought it. I didn’t mind, obviously, but the real reason I bought it is because I wanted to shoot.

Clarkson also accused the government of using a “blunderbuss’ to try to get money out of people using farms as a tax dodge and he urged the government to think again. He told PA Media:

If [Rachel Reeves] would have wanted to take out the likes of James Dyson and investment bankers and so on, she would have used a sniper’s rifle, but she’s used a blunderbuss and she’s hit all this lot.

It was – as I understand it – it was a very rushed last-minute decision and I think we all make mistakes in life, and I think it’s time for them to say ‘you know what, we’ve cocked this one up a bit’ and back down.

There has been confusion about how many farmers will be affected by decision to subject some farms to inheritance tax because two government departments have produced figures implying quite different answers.

The Treasury claims only 27% of farms would be affected. It justifies this using figures showing that in 2021-22 73% of estates applying for agricultural property relief had assets worth less than £1m.

But the NFU has focused on figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs saying 66% of the UK’s 209,000 farms are worth more than £1m.

In a letter to the Commons Treasury committee, published on its website yesterday, Rachel Reeves says the Treasury figures are a better guide to how many families will be affected by her tax rise. She explains:

HMRC [HM Revenue and Customs] and Defra data are consistent, because they describe different things. The Defra data shows the asset value of farms in England. However, it is not possible to accurately infer a future inheritance tax liability from data on farm asset values. HMRC data relates to estates making claims for agricultural property relief. Claims data is the correct way to understand an inheritance tax liability. The number of affected estates, meaning how many estates making relief claims that would be impacted by this change, and their value, is affected by who owns the business, the nature of that ownership, how many owners there are, any borrowing the business has, and how they plan their affairs. For example, a farm worth £5m but owned by five relatives in equal shares could have no inheritance tax liability.

HMRC figures are based on inheritance tax administrative data relating to previous years, which is robust and based on observable outturn information, and illustrates the distribution of claims values where 100% relief has been available on agricultural and business property. We anticipate a significant behavioural response to grow over time to the reforms set out at autumn budget, which is accounted for in the published costings as certified by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility. We expect people to respond to this measure in a number of ways, including by changing ownership structures, and for land prices to become more affordable for farmers due to a reduction in tax-motivated investment in agricultural land.

Reeves sent the letter to the committee as a follow-up to her oral evidence session, where she gave information about the budget.

Joanna Partridge

Farmers attending the rally in London today have backed the NFU’s claim that the government is massively underestimating the number of families that will be affected by the inheritance tax change. (See 9.35am.) A group of farmers from Wales and Wiltshire told the Guardian said they believed all of their farms would fall into the remit of inheritance tax under the budget measures.

Sarah Godwin, a dairy and egg farmer from Wiltshire, said her 78-year-old parents-in-law are still actively involved in the business, which has been in the family for a century, and felt “horrendous” about the inheritance tax changes.

Philip Greenhill, a beef and arable farmer from North Wiltshire said there was “no correlation” between the earnings from a farm business and its asset value. He said:

You could have £5m of assets, but make £50,000 a year profit, depending on how you farm that. If you have got that you are looking at maybe £600,000 inheritance tax off a £50,000 income.

Holding a sign reading “farmer harmer Starmer”, Devon dairy farmer Sue Hosegood and her husband William said they were worried for their three sons who are involved in the business. “There is no future if we have to pay tax every generation,” William said.

Greenpeace UK is also supporting the farmers. Its head of politics, Ami McCarthy, released this statement about today’s protests.

Farmers have a vital job to do in growing good-quality food and looking after the countryside, but that job is getting harder. Extreme weather, competition from industrial farms and supermarkets denying them a fair price for their food – all this is putting farmers’ livelihoods under huge strain. They have reasons to be angry.

So whilst it is right that the richest landowners pay their fair share of tax, the government must look again at their wider offer to support UK farmers. Ministers should double the budget for nature-friendly farming and land management to at least £6bn a year, with no delay to the roll-out of new farm payment systems delivering on the principle of public money for public goods.

Money for investment in public services, nature protection and action on climate change is urgently needed. Supermarkets and industrial farming corporations have been making huge profits, while driving down standards, damaging the environment and impacting our health. The government could usefully look at the profits from these sectors as it seeks further ways of raising much-needed revenue.

Jeremy Clarkson is attending the farmers’ protest in London this morning. In some respects, he is not the ideal person to be there because he is probably the best example of why the Treasury has decided to get rid of the blanket exemption from inheritance tax that applied to farmland until the budget. He may not be the wealthiest man to have bought a farm wholly or partly for tax reasons, but he is the most famous and he may be the only one who has been willing to go public about his tax-dodging motives.

This is what he wrote explaining his motives for buying his farm in Oxfordshire.

I have bought a farm. There are many sensible reasons for this,” he wrote.

Land is a better investment than any bank can offer. The government doesn’t get any of my money when I die.

But Clarkson is also a hero to farmers, partly because he champions their cause with gusto, but mostly because they believe his Amazon Prime hit series, Clarkson’s Farm, has done more than almost anything else to present a positive and realistic view of what farmers do.

Here is some video of Clarkson being cheered at the protest this morning.

Victoria Atkins, the shadow environment secretary, told BBC News this morning that the Tories were opposed to the inheritance tax changes because they would have a huge impact on farming families. And she claimed the proposal showed that Labour did not understand the countryside.

Atkins, who is MP for Louth and Horncastle, a largely rural constituency in Lincolnshire, said she referred to the environment secretary, Steve Reed, as “city Steve”. Reed is MP for Streatham and Croydon North in London. Atkins said he had told farmers before the election that inheritance tax rules would not change, and that, when the Conservatives had suggested Labour was likely to apply inheritance tax to farms, Reed had called that “desperate nonsense”.

She went on:

This Labour government, which is a city-dwelling, socialist government that does not understand the countryside, must now listen to farmers, because I’ve never known farmers this angry … The fact they’re coming to London today in so many numbers from all over the country shows just how worried they are.