{"id":366322,"date":"2025-02-16T10:01:01","date_gmt":"2025-02-16T09:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=366322"},"modified":"2025-02-16T10:01:03","modified_gmt":"2025-02-16T09:01:03","slug":"farmers-is-the-nfu-really-worth-36-millions-of-your-money-each-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=366322","title":{"rendered":"Farmers, is the NFU Really Worth \u00a336 Millions of Your Money Each Year?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From The Daily Sceptic<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0David Craig<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019m rather annoyed with the National Farmers Union (NFU). A week or so ago, I emailed two people in the NFU media department with details of a story which I first featured in a Daily Sceptic<\/em> article<\/a>. I have also emailed the story to three or four NFU regional offices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the article, I showed how the inheritance tax on farmers wasn\u2019t really intended to raise much money to cover the supposed \u00a322 billion black hole in the public finances which Starmer and Reeves apparently discovered about five minutes after Labour had been elected, forcing Labour to raise the taxes which five minutes earlier Labour had promised not to raise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the article, I explained how investment company Aberdeen (also known as the capital-letter-free, vowel-free \u2018abrdn\u2019) had launched its FLAG (Forestry, Land and Agriculture) strategy to spend hundreds of millions of pounds buying up forests and farmland. But Aberdeen had been frustrated in its attempts to buy agricultural land due to much of the land being owned by family farmers. So Aberdeen paid for a report on Britain\u2019s tax system by Left-wing think tank Demos. Surprise surprise, one of the key recommendations of the Aberdeen-sponsored Demos report was to impose inheritance tax on farmers. Given that many farmers are \u2018asset rich but cash poor\u2019, this would have forced many farms to sell off land to pay the inheritance tax, thus allowing what Aberdeen called \u201cpurely financial owners\u201d like Aberdeen to buy up the land. To help push through this policy, Aberdeen managed to get its head honcho onto a taskforce of business leaders invited in October 2023 to advise Rachel Reeves on what she should be doing when Labour inevitably won the July 2024 General Election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had imagined that the media geniuses at the NFU could pick up the story, get a few great quotes from outraged farmers \u2013 in particular Jeremy Clarkson \u2013 and launch a blitzkrieg on Reeves leading to widespread public fury and to her having to cancel the tax and possibly even resign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t consider myself anyone special. But, as I have had more than 10 current affairs books published covering such topics as politics, economics, charities, the psychology of selling, universities and non-existent anthropogenic climate change, the least I expected from the NFU media heroes was an acknowledgement of my email to them and of the story. But there has been nothing, zilch, no answer apart from two automated email responses informing me that the person I had contacted was on annual leave. The NFU gets an (astonishing to me) \u00a336 million a year, or thereabouts, mostly from farmers. About \u00a326 million of this goes on NFU staff costs. So I started to wonder whose interests the NFU actually serves \u2013 those of farmers, who pay almost \u00a336 million a year to the NFU, or those of NFU employees whose lifestyles are supported by the apparent generosity of Britain\u2019s farmers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many wonderful theories about organisational behaviour. One very simplistic one I have developed is that in any non-commercial organisation \u2013 healthcare, charities, government departments, regulators, local councils etc \u2013 there are two main types of person:<\/p>\n\n\n\n