Labour is conducting an assault on rural Britain with cruel family farm tax

Before last year's general election, Keir Starmer looked farmers in the eye and promised he would protect their way of life. A year later and this Labour government is conducting an assault on rural Britain. It started with the Family Farms Tax, the deeply damaging inheritance tax policy in Labour's first budget that threatens the very existence of family farms, passed down from generation to generation.

I have spoken to countless farmers across the country since Rachel Reeves announced her changes to Agricultural Property Relief, and they all tell me the same thing - they don't think the Labour Party understands that farming is not just a job, it is a way of life and a deeply rooted tradition.

My grandad was a farmer. I saw up close how much work it was. Early mornings, late nights. There is no day off, no free weekend. Yet farmers do this hard work for little reward and they pass the skills, the knowledge and, crucially, the farms to their children - as their parents did before them.

Labour are destroying this tradition. But we shouldn't be surprised. Barely a single Cabinet minister has ever run a business, and few have even worked outside the public sector or a trade union.

Labour's ministers do not understand what it means to be self-employed or to risk everything on a harvest or a herd. They certainly do not understand what it takes to run a farm or the critical land management our farmers undertake.

Once sold, much of this land will never be farmed again. It will be covered in solar panels under Ed Miliband's net zero obsession, or used for housing developments imposed by Angela Rayner's centralised planning regime.

The Conservative Party has always stood with Britain's farmers and rural communities. We know that farming is about family, land, heritage and food. It is about producing high-quality, sustainable produce and maintaining the country's much-loved landscapes.

Unlike Labour, in government we committed to grow 60 per cent of our food at home and introduced the first ever UK Food Security Index.

As the Business and Trade Secretary, I constantly stood up for British farming. I negotiated Britain's entry into the CPTPP free trade area of 11 countries in the Indo-Pacific, a deal that the NFU described as "far more considered and balanced" than previous trade agreements.

I am an MP for a rural constituency in North West Essex and I know that farming is the backbone of this nation and must be cherished, and without it we cannot eat. By contrast, Labour are risking the country's entire food security for less than 0.01 per cent of total government spending.

Labour's Family Farm Tax is cruel, unnecessary and fundamentally wrong. It must be scrapped immediately. If this government will not listen, then the next Conservative government will act.

Kemi Badenoch is the Conservative Party leader and the MP for North West Essex