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It might be tempting, given how much coverage has focused on it recently, to assume the forthcoming changes to inheritance tax regime are the single biggest issue facing farmers these days. 

But the reality is these tax changes come at a moment of extraordinary pressure, with farmers having to contend with a swathe of unsettling issues, many of which could prove existential for their livelihoods.

Put them all together and you realise that for many of those marching in the streets in London, inheritance tax isn’t the only problem – it’s more like the last straw.

Why does this matter for the rest of us? In part because there’s a deeper story here.

For decades, this country’s level of food security has been more or less constant. This country has produced roughly 60 per cent of our own food for two decades (the figure was even higher in the 1980s). But farmers warn that given all the pressures they’re facing, that critical buffer could be about to be removed, with domestic production falling and dependence on imported food rising.

Whether that eventuates remains to be seen. As of 2023 the amount of food supplied domestically was still 62 per cent of everything we consumed. But now let’s consider the challenges facing farmers (even before we get to inheritance tax).

The first of them comes back to Brexit.

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Following Britain’s departure from the EU, the government is making dramatic and far reaching changes to the way it supports farmers. For years, those payments, part of the EU-wide Common Agricultural Policy, were based on the amount of land farmed by each recipient.

Alongside these main farm payments there were other bolt-on schemes – Environmental Land Management schemes, to give them their category name – designed to encourage farmers to do more to look after local wildlife. But these schemes were always small in comparison to the main land-based farm payments.

There were problems aplenty with this old scheme. For one thing, all told, it amounted to a subsidy for land ownership rather than food production. Nonetheless, for many farmers it was an essential support, without which they would have had to sell up and stop producing food.

Under Michael Gove, Defra committed to far-reaching changes to these subsidies. Farms across the UK would get the same total amounts, he said, but instead of the majority being based on how much land they were farming, a growing portion would be environmental subsidies.

When Labour came into government it committed to accelerating this process, with the result that by 2027, fully 100 per cent of farm payments will be for environmental schemes.

Whether this is the right or wrong move is a matter of keen debate within the farming community. Many farmers argue that the net impact of environmental schemes is to reduce the amount of land being farmed for food, and that the schemes serve to reduce their crop yields rather than increasing them. Defra, and environmental advocates, argue that unless the soil and local habitats are preserved and improved, Britain faces ever diminishing harvests in future.

Speaking of harvests, that brings us to another issue farmers are having to contend with at the moment – poor crop yields. The past winter was exceptionally wet, with the upshot that the latest figures just released by Defra show 2024 was the second lowest wheat harvest since comparable records began in the early 1980s.

Now, the whole point of farming is that it’s weather dependent – no two years are alike. It’s quite conceivable that 2025’s harvest bounces back from this year’s. But one projection made by climate scientists is that the coming decades could be wetter and more volatile, spelling more trouble for farmers.

On top of this is another challenge: trade competition. Following Brexit, the UK has signed two trade deals with Australia and New Zealand, which raise the quotas of how much food each country can export to the UK. Look at trade data and you see a sharp increase in beef and dairy imports from Australia and New Zealand.

In other words, UK farmers are having to contend with more competition even as they contend with worse weather and drastic changes to their funding model.

Nor is this where the challenges end. Because we might also be in the midst of something else: a secular slowdown in farming productivity.

Look at a very, very long-range historic chart of crop yields in the UK. You see a few interesting features. For most of our history, from the Middle Ages through to today, the amount of wheat we could grow in a given hectare of land was pretty low and pretty constant.

Now look at what happened in the second half of the 20th century. Thanks to a combination of artificial fertilisers, combine harvesters and other technological leaps, yields leapt by 200 per cent.

This extraordinary leap is the story of British farming for the parents and grandparents of those family farms tending the land today: ever increasing yields even as the government provided large subsidies for farmers. It was, in terms of pure yields, the golden age for farms – fuelled in part by chemicals.

But now look at the far right hand side of the chart – the past 20 years or so. The line is no longer rising so fast. Farm productivity – at least based on this measure – has slowed quite markedly. Yields are no longer leaping in the way they once were.

Or, to put it another way, it’s getting tougher to generate a return for each hour of work and each pound of investment.

Over 300 tractors will descend on Westminster this week as farmers from across the UK ramp up protests against government policies they see as harmful to British agriculture.

Tractors from areas like Exmoor, Somerset, Shropshire, Kent, and Lincolnshire will arrive in central London on Wednesday, December 11, for a demonstration organized by Save British Farming (SBF) and Kent Fairness for Farmers.
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Farmers have staged protests at government plans

This might all seem miles away from the day-to-day debates on farming today. But each of these factors matters. Together, they help explain why things are getting tougher for farmers.

But there’s a broader issue at hand here. Despite having left the EU and implemented far reaching policies such as these, this country hasn’t really had a proper debate about food.

Do we prefer to subsidise farmers in an effort to maintain our domestic food supplies at 60 per cent of our consumption? Would we rather ditch those subsidies and rely on imports instead? Should we favour the long-term health of the environment over short term food production?

These are chewy questions – and ones we really ought to be debating a little more. This isn’t just about inheritance tax…

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Nigel Farage’s ‘fantasy’ policies will lead to Liz Truss-style economic meltdown, Sir Keir Starmer to warn

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Nigel Farage's 'fantasy' policies will lead to Liz Truss-style economic meltdown, Sir Keir Starmer to warn

Nigel Farage’s “fantasy” policies will lead to a Liz Truss-style economic meltdown, the prime minister will warn today.

Sir Keir Starmer is set to argue that Reform UK’s pledges would cause mortgages, bills and rent payments across the country to surge.

On Tuesday, Mr Farage vowed to reverse cuts to winter fuel payments and scrap the two-child benefit cap, with an ambition to slash income tax.

But new analysis from the Institute of Fiscal Studies suggest that his party’s aim of hiking the personal allowance to £20,000 a year could cost between £50bn to £80bn a year.

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Will PM’s ‘Farage lite’ strategy work?

Visiting manufacturing workers in the North West, Sir Keir will describe Reform’s economic agenda as a “mad experiment”.

He is expected to say: “In opposition we said Liz Truss would crash the economy and leave you to pick up the bill. We were right – and we were elected to fix that mess.

“Now in government, we are once again fighting the same fantasy.”

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Labour is criticising Mr Farage for betting “that you can spend tens of billions on tax cuts without a proper way of paying for it”.

The prime minister will add: “Just like Truss, he is using your family finances, your mortgage, your bills as a gambling chip. The result will be the same. Liz Truss bet the house and lost.”

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Angela Rayner ‘hoping’ for winter fuel update

Sir Keir is referring to the former prime minister’s mini-budget in 2022, which had proposed abolishing the top 45% rate of income tax.

But this policy, among others, spooked financial markets and led to economic turmoil in the UK – with a dramatic spike in the cost of government borrowing feeding through into interest rates.

Mr Farage has argued that his measures can be paid for by scrapping net zero commitments and ending the use of hotel accommodation for asylum seekers.

Recent polls have put Labour second behind Reform UK, while the local election results earlier this month saw Mr Farage’s party win a parliamentary by-election, control of 10 councils and two mayoralties, while Labour lost almost 200 seats.

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Farage could ‘definitely’ become next PM

Sir Keir has been under pressure from his backbenchers to regain the initiative, leading to the party’s U-turn on winter fuel payments last week.

Plans to scrap the two-child benefit cap have also not been ruled out by ministers, in what would be a second reversal of current Labour policy.

Dominic Cummings, the former top aide to Boris Johnson, exclusively told Sky News he believes Mr Farage could “definitely” become the next prime minister, with the right strategy.

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Elon Musk leaves DOGE as job was ‘uphill battle’

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Elon Musk leaves DOGE as job was ‘uphill battle’

Elon Musk leaves DOGE as job was ‘uphill battle’

Elon Musk confirmed that he’s quitting as the White House’s government cost-cutting czar after admitting it was an “uphill battle” trying to slash federal jobs and programs.

Musk’s status as a Special Government Employee leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) meant that by law, he could only serve for a maximum of 130 days, which was set to finish on May 30.

Musk confirmed his exit in a May 29 X post, thanking President Donald Trump “for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.” Reuters reported that a White House official said his “off-boarding will begin tonight.”

Musk told The Washington Post for a May 27 report that the “federal bureaucracy situation is much worse” than he expected, and it was “an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least.”

In separate comments to CBS, Musk criticized the multi-trillion-dollar tax break package that House Republicans approved on May 22, claiming it would increase the budget deficit and undermine the work that DOGE is doing.

DOGE, which is named after the cryptocurrency, claims to have saved taxpayers $175 billion since Trump’s Jan. 20 return to the White House, a figure heavily disputed by multiple news outlets, which report the figures are overstated, have multiple errors and are inaccurate.

The project’s claimed savings are only 8.5% of Musk’s initial ambition to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, which he later revised down to $150 billion.

According to the Reuters report, DOGE has cut almost 12%, or 260,000, of the 2.3 million federal workforce through layoffs, buyouts and early retirement offers.

Despite the criticisms, Musk said on X that DOGE’s mission will “only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”

Elon Musk leaves DOGE as job was ‘uphill battle’
Source: Elon Musk

It comes as a federal judge allowed a lawsuit to proceed that accuses Musk and DOGE of illegally exerting power over government operations.

The lawsuit, filed by 14 states, alleged that Musk and DOGE violated the Constitution by illegally accessing government data systems, terminating federal employees and canceling contracts at federal agencies.

Musk admits he spent too much time in politics

In a May 28 interview with Ars Technica, Musk, the CEO of EV maker Tesla, admitted that he spent “a bit too much time” in politics, which some critics claim has impacted Tesla’s performance.

“I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics,” Musk said. However, he added that the time he spent on DOGE wasn’t as significant as many believed, and he blamed media coverage for overrepresenting his involvement.

“It’s not like I left the companies. It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I’ve reduced that significantly in recent weeks.”

When Musk announced in Tesla’s first quarter report that his time spent on DOGE would drop significantly in May, Tesla (TSLA) shares rose over 5% in after-hours trading, despite the company reporting an 80% drop in net income.

As of March 31, Tesla still held 11,509 Bitcoin (BTC), currently valued at about $1.24 billion.

Related: Musk confirms X Money beta testing ahead of planned 2025 launch

Tesla shares are still down 5.9% year to date, in part due to Musk diverting his attention away from the company and Tesla’s sales falling considerably in the first quarter.

However, the fall is in line with other Big Tech firms, including Apple (AAPL), Nvidia (NVDA), Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG), which are also in the red in 2025.

Magazine: Crypto wanted to overthrow banks, now it’s becoming them in stablecoin fight

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Crypto vulnerable if CFTC not given authority, says ex-chair Behnam

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Crypto vulnerable if CFTC not given authority, says ex-chair Behnam

Crypto vulnerable if CFTC not given authority, says ex-chair Behnam

Former Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Rostin Behnam has said the crypto market will remain unregulated unless the agency he led is given greater authority.

In a May 28 Bloomberg TV interview, Behnam sided with the crypto industry on its long-standing argument that cryptocurrencies are commodities.

“If you look at existing law, the few largest tokens are commodities, which means the SEC does not have jurisdiction over those tokens, which include Bitcoin and Ether,” he said. 

He added that the Securities and Exchange Commission currently cannot properly regulate crypto because its law doesn’t allow it to regulate commodities, and the CFTC cannot regulate because it is a derivatives regulator.

Without new authority for the CFTC to regulate “cash markets in digital assets, non-securities,” this will remain an unregulated space, he claimed.

Crypto vulnerable if CFTC not given authority, says ex-chair Behnam
Rostin Behnam on Bloomberg TV. Source: Bloomberg

Behnam comments amid increasing scrutiny of the Trump family’s crypto ventures, which include the crypto platform World Liberty Financial, memecoins and a stablecoin.

On May 28, American political strategist and political commentator Sanders Townsend said Donald Trump is boosting his family’s investments in cryptocurrency and “is using the presidency to do it.”

The administration’s involvement in the regulatory process and legislative effort is “raising red flags” among some members of Congress, and there are “well-baked rules” for any elected or appointed government official that need to be complied with, he said. 

“Ultimately, until we do something, the [crypto] market will remain unregulated. Customers, investors, retail and institutional, will be more vulnerable to harm, fraud, manipulation and conflicts of interest, until the market is regulated.” 

Regulation critical to financial markets, says Behnam

Behnam also weighed in on Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Bitcoin 2025 conference, backing up the need for crypto regulations. 

Related: Trump’s use of presidential seal at memecoin event raises legal questions

Vance said in a speech at the event that “we reject regulators” and that crypto “has a champion” in the White House. 

“Regulators are extremely important,” Behnam said. “They’re the reason American markets are the most desired in the world.” 

“Consumer protections and enforcement of the law are extremely critical to the health of our financial markets,” he added. 

Magazine: Bitcoin bears eye $69K, CZ denies WLF ‘fixer’ rumors: Hodler’s Digest

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