Why is the BBC engaging in muck-spreading against farmers? - David Behrens

The industry reckons that 70,000 farms will be affected over time. That’s around a third of the UK total and includes all plots larger than 120 acres and worth £1m or more.

But Keir Starmer put the figure at just 500. How is such a discrepancy possible?

In insisting that the lower number was closer to the mark, the PM appeared to rely on an unofficial BBC interpretation of the figures. “You can check out…the impact. The BBC has already done it,” he told reporters in Rio.

He was referring to a video from the corporation’s ‘Verify’ unit which reported that “70,000 is almost certainly an overestimate” and that fewer than 500 farms worth more than £1m had been inherited last year.

But the PM and the BBC were being selective. That figure of 500 represented just 12 months of transactions; at that rate it would be 10,000 over 20 years. And when you factor in the costly farm machinery as well as the land itself, many more estates will exceed the new £1m threshold.

Farmers can see this yet the Government seems unable to. Or perhaps it just doesn’t want to – for this is more than just a disagreement over pounds, shillings and pence.

You don’t need to be a farmer to imagine the sense of betrayal at being told to abandon your life’s ambition of passing your home to your children so that they too may have a livelihood. It would be an abrogation of all you had worked for. Pensioners will certainly recognise the feeling from the day Ms Reeves cancelled their winter fuel payments.

And while it’s true that the old system of inheritance tax exemption set farmers apart from everyone else, it did so for a reason: to keep food on all our plates. It was recognised that running a farm meant working harder for less reward than most people would countenance, and that the number prepared to do it was growing smaller. Those who continued often did so because they were carrying on their family business.

That remains the case. Britain produces less than 60 per cent of the food it needs and the portion will shrink further with every family that now has to sell up because inheritance tax has wiped out their profits.

This could have been explained to the Treasury before the Chancellor stood up in the Commons – but the rural affairs department wasn’t consulted until a few hours beforehand. In Whitehall it takes longer than that to open the lid of a laptop, let alone renegotiate a policy that might eradicate a way of life.

Even now there is uncertainty in the Government about how many farmers will get tax bills they weren’t expecting. Yet there is no sign of anyone admitting they made a mistake.

It was Jeremy Clarkson who led the call for Ministers to back down. Since he bought a farm of his own in the Cotswolds, he has done more than anyone to articulate the depressing reality of agricultural life for viewers whose knowledge of the subject comes from looking at the picture of a potato on a bag of crisps.

He is the first to admit that he bought his 1,000 acres because it incurred no death duties. But the near impossibility of turning a profit brought the chickens home to roost and for all his faux sarcasm there is no doubting his sincerity now.

In fact, the cynicism at Tuesday’s demonstration came from the BBC presenter Victoria Derbyshire who thrust a microphone in his face and demanded to know why he was there. “So it’s not about your farm and the fact that you bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax?” she interrupted in the sort of tones usually reserved for politicians caught with their trousers round their ankles.

The pejorative way she conducted the interview – coupled with the questionable interpretation of the figures from the ‘Verify’ unit – led to accusations of bias which Broadcasting House will have to answer.

Meanwhile, Clarkson had his own estimate: “Ninety-six per cent of the population does not pay inheritance tax,” he said, “and after this becomes law, 96 per cent of farmers will.”

That’s not provable statistically. But neither are the Government figures the BBC seems to have taken as fact. And most farmers will recognise that Clarkson’s reckoning gets closer to the truth of why so many of them feel they’ve been sold out.