Inventor of the bagless vacuum-cleaner James Dyson is the latest billionaire to kick up a fuss about chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Autumn Budget. It’s over the inheritance tax changes on Agricultural Relief that far-right Reform MPs and Jeremy Clarkson have been bleating on about hitting farmers. In reality, this is little more than a steaming pile of bull-crap. Dyson wading into the debate is only more proof of this.
Digging a hole over inheritance tax
Dyson penned a piece for the Sunday Times lambasting the Labour Party’s inheritance tax changes and its impact on “family firms and farmers” banging on about how:
Labour has shown its true colours with a spiteful budget. It detests the private sector and has chosen to kill off individual aspiration and economic growth.
Of course, Dyson hoovering up vast tracts of UK land couldn’t have anything to do with his protestations. As many highlighted on X, the article somehow failed to mention his 36,000 acres:
I would have probably mentioned that Dyson owns 36,000 acres of farmland in England which was previously liable for zero inheritance tax pic.twitter.com/Xz4IURmZUH
— Jim Pickard 🐋 (@PickardJE) November 4, 2024
Land justice and environmental campaigner Guy Shrubsole has previously uncovered some of the vast land-holdings Dyson has sucked up. It includes enormous estates across Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire, and Oxfordshire.
In 2017, Shrubsole pointed out that he’d been sweeping up all this land for a combination of lucrative purposes. These included farm subsidies, alongside land subsidies for anaerobic digestion (AD).
Crucially though, it was also to avoid paying inheritance tax:
Billionaire James Dyson is complaining about changes to agricultural tax breaks.
Dyson has hoovered up c33,000 acres of land: https://t.co/bHiRkeuyVc
Farmers Weekly on Dyson: ‘Buying farmland is popular with many wealthy investors because it doesn’t incur inheritance tax.’ pic.twitter.com/9luMCDkHzy
— Guy Shrubsole (@guyshrubsole) November 4, 2024
Interesting piece in Farmer’s Weekly eight years ago asking why billionaire James Dyson we buying up thousands of acres, some of which had probably been worked by local food producers who’d been there for generations. https://t.co/cmy8Vkjb6F. pic.twitter.com/YeozCMkRi7
— Tom Baldwin (@TomBaldwin66) November 4, 2024
Unsurprisingly, Dyson would have avoided a significant sum:
James Dyson’s Dyson Farming Limited owns land and property worth £554,315,000. 20% of that – the new rate of inheritance tax on farmland – is £111m.
No wonder he’s having a grump. pic.twitter.com/4bryqHlkNh
— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) November 4, 2024
Won’t somebody think of the Dysons?
Moreover, when Dyson says “family firms and farmers”, he really means the gilded fortunes of an elite landed class.
That’s because as the Canary’s Steve Topple already highlighted, it applies to landowners with estates worth over £1m. And more likely, for most, this will be £2m – due to existing rules around inheritance tax and married couples. He underscored that:
According to CenTax research based on HMRC data, between 2018 to 2020, an average of £900 million in Agricultural Property Relief went to around 1,300 estates per year. Almost two thirds (64%) of all Agricultural Relief went to roughly 200 estates per year that each claimed more than £1 million in relief, with an average estate value of £6 million.
The government’s own analysis suggests that 73% of estates with agricultural property won’t be affected by these changes.
In other words, the new 20% inheritance tax will actually only hit a small proportion of UK landowners. Naturally, these largely happen to be the wealthiest, with the most land.
Of course, Dyson is one of these filthily rich landed families. For one, he’s among the biggest landowners in the UK. He and his family also currently sit at number five in the ‘Sunday Times Rich List’ with over £20bn.
Dyson double-standards
Not to mention that Dyson was also a raging Brexiteer. You reap what you sew:
Is he the multi-billionaire James Dyson who bought estates to become one of Britain’s biggest landowners?
The same flag-waving Dyson who backed Brexit then moved his HQ from Wiltshire to Singapore?
I do believe he is. pic.twitter.com/glrAvJJpML
— Kevin Maguire (@Kevin_Maguire) November 4, 2024
And in Dyson’s case, as with most billionaires who use UK land for subsidies and as a tax shelter, that would be few crops, if any. Notably, as Topple also pointed out:
among estates that benefited from Agricultural Relief between 2018 and 2020, less than half (44%) of individuals had received any trading income from agriculture at any point in the five years prior to death.
Only 10% of all beneficiaries of agricultural relief received an average of more than £10,000 per year in agricultural income over the five tax years prior to their death.
Apparently, he owns the biggest farming company in the UK:
James Dyson owns 36,000 acres of farmland and the largest farming company in the UK. Completely unmentioned in this piece, of course. pic.twitter.com/qG6Lra1VMN
— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) November 4, 2024
But he doesn’t look to be using all that much of his land for that. Specifically, Dyson opined how he’d produced:
40,000 tonnes of wheat, 9,000 tonnes of spring barley, 12,000 tonnes of potatoes, 29,000 tons of sugar beet and 1,250 tonnes of year-round strawberries, as well as rearing 2,000 sheep and 800 cattle.
However, this actually isn’t a lot next to his enormous tracts of land. If you take just potatoes for instance, it approximately means he was using just over 640 acres of his enormous land holdings to produce them. This is because, if you take the average middle producers’ rate at 46 tonnes per hectare, 12,000 tonnes is just 260 hectares, or roughly 644 acres.
In reality, it’s the likes of Dyson who’ve harmed those family firms and farmers through pushing Brexit and his land-banking racketeering:
Millions like Dyson and Jeremy Clarkson have for years bought farmland to avoid tax.
This land-banking drives up the price of farmland, making it more unaffordable for regular farmers.
No one should tolerate the crocodile tears from those who practice legalised theft. https://t.co/01kRPPzaBE
— Minesh (@min_esh) November 4, 2024
What’s more, some of those chickens are coming home to roost:
James Dyson says Reeves’ budget is ‘spiteful’. But it’s not half as spiteful as sacking thousands of British workers and exploiting cheap labour in poor countries.
— David__Osland (@David__Osland) November 4, 2024
Days after the election in July, Dyson announced plans to axe jobs for more than a quarter of its UK workforce.
The fact is, Dyson is the archetype of the profiteering capitalist class. He wanted a hard Brexit and batted for Liz Truss and Kwarteng’s disastrous economy-wrecking mini-budget. Now, he thinks a 20% inheritance tax on his immense land wealth is a step too far.
But Dyson is as much a farmer and a voice for them as the Times is a source of genuine, honest journalism. Because at the end of the day, both serve the interests of the billionaire capitalist class; both are full of bullshit.
Feature image via the Canary
