Nigel Farage has warned the government that today’s 10,000 farmer protest is “the first day of real struggle” across the country as he was warmly welcomed by the rally.
The Reform UK leader spoke to the Daily Express shortly after meeting a group of farmers from his Clacton constituency.
Mr Farage demanded that the Government should at least increase planned inheritance tax thresholds to avoid destroying family farming as we know it in Britain.
He explained: “We have a Clacton contingent here, all of whom represent a typical family farm, and these are farms of 250 to 300 hectares.
“They are making very little money at the moment and yet land values are massively inflated as many millionaires have bought up farmland to avoid paying IHT.”
The Clacton MP added: ‘The problem with what the Government have done is that your small farmers will survive – someone who has 10 acres, someone who has a few sheep and processes a few vegetables.
“The giant farms will survive. It is those in the middle who have cared for the countryside, in the case of some families for centuries, who will face a huge problem, and many of them will be wiped out.
“I just think someone at the Treasury Department got their amounts wrong.”
Asked whether Rachel Reeves’ plans also threaten food security, Farage said Britain has a wider problem with underestimating how important the issue is, and that it is at the heart of wider debates over Net Zero, solar and rewilding.
He also sharply warned that he is “convinced” that if Ms. Reeves is allowed to implement her changes, “they will even ban shooting by the end of the next five years.”
Asked to respond to claims from the left-wing commentary that the Government should take ownership of land to decide what gets grown there, Mr Farage joked that while Britain is “not quite yet” on the verge of being compared to the liquidation of the kulaks by Joseph Stalin, the current policy direction feels like a ‘wider war against the English countryside’.
He also hit out at the Welsh government’s recent report which claimed rural Britain is “racist” due to “barriers created by exclusions and racism”.
In between comments, Mr Farage interjected: “Oh, and I almost forgot, too many of the rural areas are white, which seems to really upset them!”
He slammed Labour, claiming: “They have no respect for our traditions, our culture, our countryside, and I think this is the start of a real fight.
“This is the first day of a real fight. I want to see what’s happening in London, what’s happening in the market towns now, across the country.
“We’ll do it in a very British way – we’re not like the French, we’re not as disgusting in the way we behave – but I think this is the start of something I’m really doing.”
Mr Farage was cheered by farmers as he entered Whitehall during the protest, with one participant shouting: “Get them out, Nigel!”