In the news

Anyone else find it at least a tad remarkable that the inheritance tax story has generated this much discussion here, to the exclusion of all else? Is there nothing else happening?

(Serious question, these days I mostly only expose myself to news via people talking about it, which I recommend for your mental health)

A lot of people’s estates will be in excess of the £325,000 so it probably affects more LFGSS members than you think.

I agree with your method for exposure to news.

Less than 4% of estates pay IHT but perhaps LFGSS is far from typical.

I think that anything could generate loads more discussion on here (LFGSS being full of smart, politically active people) except that people seem to get irked at discussion getting to long or too serious unless it's in a dedicated thread. It doesn't take much for it to all kick off: just one person needs to say that the truth is very obviously X.

And I totally agree about your news filter, especially during a Trump presidency. I will wholeheartedly embrace anything that means I don't actually have to listen to the fanta-coloured wankstain actually speak. I don't know whether that's mentally healthy or Olympic levels of denial.

denial

You're denying the MSM's increasingly obvious and desperate efforts to portray business as usual as the only possibility, which, incredibly enough the first time round, extend to sanewashing the likes of Trump. It drove me absolutely spare that they hadn't all started carrying on like Jonathan Pie, at least a little bit.

I didn't expect the talking heads to all start sounding like Owen Jones or Matt Taibbi, but the sheer absence of humanity allowed to escape the corporate blobs, rapidly colonising what's left of our excuse for a culture, was at least a bit surprising, and thoroughly demoralising.

I think Cory Doctorow was totally on the money when he said years and years ago, we don't have to wait for AI - it's been around for ages in the form of corporations. They ultimately don't answer to humans in any meaningful sense; they just relentlessly pursue their goal of profit while poisoning everything they touch, just like the thought experiment AI turning the world into trillions of paperclips.

This is how we get huge organisations devoted to making vast numbers of people ignorant enough to vote for an individual who so thoroughly and obviously epitomises almost everything profoundly wrong about us. Because money should be the measure of all things, and the saturated hues of plastic corporate branding have saturated our world to the point that tiny flecks of it are literally everywhere; from the dirt under our feet to the 0.2% of our actual fucking brains which is plastic now.

So yeah, deny with blessings.

Lol 😂

This is how we get huge organisations....to the 0.2% of our actual fucking brains which is plastic now!

Chapeau! Delightfully put.

I've never talked about this before but I was raised in a farming family, as my father and grandfather had been, though, curiously, not the same farming family. We had a number of acres, some hectares and a few roods with the rest being square perches. Mostly pseudo-arable with some pig husbandry and a bit of cow wifery. My late brother (taken far too young in a threshing debacle) had been to agricultural college for a week and was able to bring in some more modern ideas but otherwise things were much as they would have been a century before. It was a family farm in the truest sense. Even the chap who came round every night to de-mud our boots and put the goats to bed was known as 'Uncle Bertie'. I also had a real Uncle Bertie who was something in the city, something else in the country and altogether indescribable when abroad.
Looking back now it seems an idyllic way to have been brought up. We weren't rich though we did have a lot of money and beyond that we had something much more precious than our varied portfolio of investments, we had a sense of community. With us at the top, the way nature intended. I clearly remember my Mother, when she would return from a month or two in London saying that the metropolis was all well and good but she couldn't wait to be elbow deep in a cow again. I later discovered that she was having an affair with the vet and the implications haunt me to this day.
Anyway, I hope this provides some context to the recent debates.

Well reading this boiled my piss today, has an impact on everyone not just farmers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly0pjedj0zo

Utter gold. Thank you

Udder gold, surely?

You milking this?

Thank you all for cheering me up.

The cream of Lfgss will turn on you

I think this number tells you how much people are moving things around, to avoid it.

Turn you on.

who's she wanking off under that sheet

Was Uncle Bertie one of the Kensington Woosters? Has Great Aunt Hermione forgiven you for that thing yet?

There I was, thinking your eloquence was merely photographic, I have half a mind to @ you. Actually, I have half a mind.

The conversations about farming and IHT on here have been interesting. I saw a post on bluesky tonight by someone claiming to be a farmer so I checked the writers assertions and they seem to stack up..

The average farm size in the UK is circa 88 hectares, but nearly half of all farms are smaller than 20 hectares.

The average cost of farmland in the UK per acre seems to be circa £11,000.

So an 88H farm (217 acres) would be worth £2,387,000.00, therefore under the £3m family cut off.

If a farm costs £3.5M the family gets taxed on £500K and small farms who hit this threshold get 10 years to pay it off at no interest.

But remember half of farmers in this country only own 20 Hectares or less.

And the next time the Tories are in they'll sell off all the land and food production goes to zero

Fertile ground for it.

I think the bigger issue was no iht on farm land so cunts bought the land and the value went up. No more tax avoidance the land value goes down as you can't build on farming land...

Every article I've read on this has put price per acre between £7k and £9k?

I think the OG took the higher arable farm average so worst case scenario

https://tinyurl.com/3dp8dv63

The point of the piece was that the noise is being created by the super rich, and the IHT policy was introduced to catch the likes of Dyson and Clarkson who hide their money in farms