Capitalist Dekulakization

The New UK budget presented by the Labour Party (left) on Wednesday 30th October states that from April 2026, bequeathed agricultural assets, which were previously exempt from inheritance tax, would be subjected to a 20% levy if worth more than a million pounds.

If that threshold seems quite high, the reality is that most farmers are assets-rich but cash-poor. The fruit of their labor does not wield a vast amount of money.

While the value of their land can quickly reach this threshold (if they decide to sell it, bearing in mind it is not their intention to sell but to work the land), on average farmers in the UK earn barely £30K per year, working over 60 hours per week and allowing themselves only a few days off.

Being a farmer is a tradition, a way of life, passing on land from fathers to sons, a profession which in reality does not make you rich but which is absolutely critical as it serves to feed the nation.

In truth, the value of farming lands over the past decades has been pushed up artificially by general inflation and housing developers investing in the countryside. Also, besides their land, farmer's “work tools” are to be counted as part of their assets e.g. machinery (tractors) or herds.

As a consequence, the inheritance tax will even affect those who earn minimum wages working on their family lands, and who will be forced upon their parents ’death to sell in order to pay the fee. But who will have enough funds to buy those agricultural properties?

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Well, maybe asset management companies such as Blackrock, whose chief executive Larry Fink traveled to the UK to talk business with Prime Minister Keir Starmer in his official residences and offices of Downing Street on October 21^st.

In the aftermath of the meeting, Starmer tweeted: “I’m determined to deliver growth, create wealth, and put more money in people’s pockets. This can only be achieved by working in partnership with leading businesses, like BlackRock, to capitalize on the UK’s position as a world-leading hub for investment”.

BlackRock has been previously criticized for investing in fossil fuel and the arms industry, so what will prevent them from investing in the UK farmlands?

Even Forbes has praised the potential high returns at low risk of such investment. And American billionaires such as Bill Gates, who owns 275,000 acres of farmland, already invest in agricultural properties as a way to extend their portfolio and assets.

In conclusion, the socialist government of the United Kingdom has signed with the inheritance tax the transfer of farmlands to American investment fund companies.

What’s more, the Labour Party, in order to try to get the popular opinion on its side, is deploying tactics resembling those employed by Stalin during the dekulakization of Russia between 1929 and 1933 in which more than 6 million Kulaks (peasants) were forced to move to distant areas and even often deported to gulags in Siberia.

Similarly to most of the farmers in the United Kingdom, the Kulaks were not aristocratic fat cats but peasants who after the reform of 1861 that abolished serfdom in Russia, granted them freedom and the right to buy, had managed to purchase lands. Similarly to most of the farmers in the United Kingdom, they were not wealthy but assets rich.

If the Kulaks were first tolerated after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, needed for their cultural expertise to feed the population, they were, however, soon demonized by the party due to their ability to hire employees (generally their neighbors living in the same village to help with agricultural work i.e. harvest) and their status of land owners in contradiction with the ideal of a classless society.

By virtue of the identical predatory egalitarian ideology, an apex egalitarianism, the socialist government of the United Kingdom has revoked the exemption granted to farmers claiming that there is no reason for them not to pay inheritance tax when everybody else pays it.

While Stalin wanted to eradicate the Kulak class through execution, confinement, or by diluting them into the vast territory that was the soviet union, the UK Labour government sought to eradicate the farmer class by forcing them to sell their land in order to pay the tax.

And while the Kulaks were portrayed as exploiters, grain hoarders and enemies of the party, left-leaning pseudo-intellectuals and the media portray the British farmers as being wealthy greedy tax dodgers.

Stalin believed the state needed to control agriculture to finance the industrialization of the Soviet empire. Starmer, as per his tweet, is determined to deliver growth by selling off the UK farmlands to American investment fund companies such as Blackrock.

As usual, economic and social liberalism has proven to be a duplicate ideology. One hundred years after the Soviet dekulakization, we are about to experience the capitalist dekulakization.

As collectivization disrupted agricultural productivity, it contributed to one of the most devastating famine in Soviet history, the Holodomor, killing millions.

Therefore, I dread to think about what would be the consequences of this capitalist dekulakization.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.