CHARLIE WHELAN: My part in making sure The Rolling Stones got no satisfaction in tax row
Who doesn’t like and admire our farmers?
Everyday, come rain, snow or shine they are working to produce our food.
Every day I see our local farm labourers at work. What you rarely see though is the owners of the land doing any work.
Lest we forget, in our lifetime we have seen landowners kick hard working people out of their homes when they come to retire, instances reported here in this very paper.
It’s not the farm workers complaining that for the first time in recent history that the farm owners will have to pay a small amount of inheritance tax, in fact half of what the rest of us pay.
After every budget including the ones I was involved in with Gordon Brown you get a small minority complaining.
I remember the rock band The Rollign Stones hitting the headlines because they didn’t like the Chancellor closing a tax loophole
They soon shut up when I leaked a story that they didn’t even pay tax in this country.
The rich always like to avoid paying their fare share of tax which is why Jeremy Clarkson by his own admission forked out millions of pounds to buy a farm specifically to avoid inheritance tax.
But why let the facts get in the way of a good Tory media story that Labour are bashing poor farmers.
Let’s not forget it was Margaret Thatcher who exempted landowners from inheritance tax for millionaire landowners and does anyone really believe that the rich landowners of Scotland can’t afford to pay their fair share of taxes?
It is they not the lads and lassies you see driving the tractors on our Highland roads who own the farms, it is landowners who will rightfully have to pay.
Even then with a little work from their tax accountants, it’s only on land worth more than £3 million and that will be taxed at half the normal rate of inheritance tax.
Some in the farming community may not realise it but this budget also had in it an allocation for farm subsidies of £5 billion over the next two years!
The NFU seem to be very quiet over that.
As the respected head of the Institute of Fiscal studies rightly said: “I have very little sympathy with their arguments on inheritance tax and the impact on family farms.
“This is special pleading by some extremely wealthy people.”
Next time you hear or read about someone complaining about this tax, including our own MSPs, it also might be worth asking them how much farmland they themselves own here in Scotland and England.
• Readers of this column will be aware of the 20-odd years campaign to get a non motorised user path from Dulnain Bridge to Grantown.
When you realise that such a ‘footpath’, as most of us call them, involves three government agencies and four landowners you can see why it’s taken so long!
I’m now told by my snout Nigel who has almost single handedly fought all this bureaucracy that it will be another year before construction can get underway.
Is it any wonder that people have so little faith in our politicians?
• The latest scandal in Holyrood involves an SNP Minister using his ministerial car to take him to watch his football team Aberdeen.
That’s nothing much compared to the hundreds of millions wasted on ferries not being built or the funicular railway that was built but doesn’t work.
We now read that an expert has proclaimed that the supports for the train should never have been built with concrete because it can deteriorate in freezing temperatures.
Did we really need an expert to tell us what is blindingly obvious?
Charlie Whelan (Labour) was one-time spokesman for Gordon Brown.
