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A member of the Question Time audience sparked laughter and applause this evening after she remarked she’s “starting to think Labour doesn’t actually know what it’s doing”. The observation came after a tense row between senior minister Nick Thomas-Symonds and Fiona Bruce over how many farms will actually be affected by Rachel Reeves’ planned tractor tax. Turning to the audience, the BBC Question Time host went to a woman who blasted Labour over their incompetence and love of tax rises. She quipped: “I’m starting to think that Labour doesn’t actually know what it’s doing. “You’ve taxed people who grow and make food, you want to make people poorer who have actually worked and contributed - what are you doing? “I think it’s just a stalling tactic just to tax people in the end. What are you doing? I don’t know!” The camera then cut to Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds shaking his head as the audience applauded. A second audience member also criticised the government’s inheritance tax policy, saying farmers don’t just hand out a business but a livelihood. The man said: “I thought inheritance tax was to tax the wealth that somebody inherits, whereas these farmers are inheriting a way of life, a livelihood. “Therefore they’re not gaining anything in wealth, so if they were to sell [the farm] ok yes go for the capital gains and other taxes. But inheritance tax, no, this is one they shouldn’t get burdened with.” A farmer in the Wiltshire audience said that while he accepts there is a burden on the country’s tax pot at the moment, he worries that at the point inheritance tax becomes due “you aren’t in a position to pay it without selling an asset that then destabilises the exact entity you’ve built up to create a profit from.” He explained that his parents who own the farm are in their 80s, and therefore the 7-year rule around gifting to avoid inheritance tax “is not relevant to many many people to parents who are farming with their children.” Conservative MP Harriett Baldwin recounted the emotional stories she had heard from her local farmers who attended this week’s rally in Westminster. Ms Baldwin said they were in floods of tears over their family livelihoods, and insisted all family farms will eventually be caught out by the tax over time. She explained family farms “do something very precious for us”. “They provide food security to the UK. One of the things that I learned this week was a phrase from Clement Attlee, about whom Nick [Thomas Symonds] has written a biography, which was that after the First World War when we ran into food security issues he vowed that the UK should never find itself in that position again. “So that I think is what makes this different from the ordinary family who is caught in an inheritance tax situation. “These are people who put food on our table, who provide the milk in our supermarket, who feed us. “To take away a fifth of their farm every time it changes generation you can see how over the long term that is going to erode their ability not only to pass down the land but really importantly to pass down those traditions of dairy farming, arable farming.” She won a large round of applause from the Wiltshire audience for her opposition to Labour’s policy.
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