Scorched Earth
Labour’s war on sustainability
News Flash: Politicians can be right pricks.
When President George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001 his staff discovered that as a joke, (Yeah good one, but I wouldn’t open with it) members of the outgoing Clinton administration had removed all the letter ‘W’s from the office keyboards. (To be fair. Not the worst thing Bill and Hillary have ever done.)
And on taking power in 2010, the Tories not only found a gaping black hole in the UK economy, (A real one this time), but also a note, left for them by Labour’s Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Liam Byrne. It said, ‘I’m afraid there is no money.’
Outgoing administrations often leave a little booby trap to trip up, befuddle, or irritate their successors.
Most of the time, like in the examples above, these can be a bit annoying, but basically petty, silly, and pretty harmless. Occasionally however they can have more serious, longer term consequences. Like Gordon Brown’s vindictive introduction of the 50% income tax rate in the last weeks of his myopic government.
We are still living with the consequences of Gordo’s squint eyed spite today.
But none can beat the actions of an increasingly desiccated, cadaverous, and crumbling, Joe Biden, who in the dying days of his palliative care presidency, has taken this type of trolling to a whole new level.
Biden seems determined to bequeath quite the muddled mess to his successor.
By starting World War III.
Biden is attempting to ramp up the Ukraine War by allowing Ukraine to use American long range missiles to strike into the heart of Russia.
We can debate the finer points of this all End of Days long, but it’s clearly a significant escalation, and one that is calculated to provoke a response.
Like a crazed madman in an 80s action movie, Biden has decided that he can’t abide the idea of a world which outlives him. Especially one containing his two worst enemies.
No, not Trump. That’s just politics. Part of the game. The ones he really hates are The Betrayers.
Obama. And Kamala.
And if the kid sniffing ghoul has to destroy the world to get his revenge on them, then so be it.
The other eight billion of us are just collateral damage.
But every (mushroom) cloud has a silver lining. And the good news for Vladimir Putin is that if he does decide to retaliate with an all out nuclear strike on Ukraine, and its allies in the West, he can save himself the price of a couple of ICBMs.
There’s no need to destroy the UK.
Because Sir Keir Starmer’s devastatingly ruinous Labour government seems determined to do that job for him.
I’m not saying Prime Minister Keir Starmer doesn’t know what he is doing.
But no one has been this out of their depth since Ellie Simmons.
In just four short months Starmer’s government has introduced a policy which they themselves have claimed would kill 4000 old people.
He’s started locking up nanas for Facebook posts while throwing open the gates of prisons, releasing ever grateful drug dealers, thieves and rapists onto our streets.
He’s desperate to gave away Britain’s last strategically important toe hold in the Indian Ocean, to a country allied with our greatest geo political rival.
And if that wasn’t enough, his Chancellor, the Nobel Prize winning economist, astronaut, super spy, and philanthropist, Rachel Reeves, has taken time out from her day job curing cancer and hunting down ivory poachers in the Congo, to deliver Britain’s Worst Ever Budget.
Yes. Worse than the Liz Truss Mini Budget. Even if her successor Sunak immediately dumped all the good bits, like tax cuts, and ridding us of hateful IR35 rules. While keeping all the stupid parts, even more public borrowing, and price controls.
Reeves has introduced a series of fiscal measures so self delusional and destructive that pretty much the only person to publicly praise them so far has been Xi Jinping. General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.
And it’s not just our old people, our global influence, and our economy that Labour seems hellbent on killing off.
Now it’s coming for our farmers.
Look. I’m not suddenly going to start pretending to be a country bumpkin, some salt of the earth, rustic type.
As much as I complain about living in the capital. I’m an urbanite. For me Regent’s Park is the great outdoors. Hampstead Heath is pretty much the Outback.
I believe the best way to experience the countryside is by flying over it, driving through it, or whizzing past it on a train.
That way you can look out of the window and marvel at the beauty, majesty, and wildness of it all.
Without having to walk about in it, smell it, or get any of it on your shoes.
Besides the countryside is racist now apparently. And I’m no racist.
So it would be sad, pathetic and wholly unconvincing of me to suddenly claim, out of absolutely nowhere, that I’m actually some sort of earthily authentic, son of the soil.
Which I guess is why it was sad, pathetic and wholly unconvincing when Starmer did it.
Claiming all of a sudden that he wasn’t a toolmaker’s son after all. But in fact grew up on a farm.
Really Sir Keir? We’ve seen more convincing rebrands from Jaguar.
(What exactly was that BTW? The ad looks like Netflix has just recast the Teletubbies)
The farmers, as if you didn’t know, are up in arms about new rules, brought in by Rachel Reeves manure pile of a budget, to ‘reform’ Inheritance Tax.
I don’t want to get into too much detail.
Because a.) Maths is boring. And b.) Maths combined with qualifying thresholds, percentages of farms affected, and amounts raised per hectare, (whatever one of those is) is double boring. So I’ll skip it.
Of course not everyone is as slapdash as me. So here comes BBC Verify with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play to get to the bottom of it all.
Keen to avoid accusations of partiality and bias, the unimpeachable ‘Fact Checker’ was careful to consult a completely trustworthy and dependable ‘independent tax expert’ to determine exactly how the sums add up.
And who could be more independent than their impartial pick, Dan Neidle?
Non partisan tax expert by day, left wing activist, and member of the Labour Party’s National Constitutional Committee, by night.
The BBC simply can’t help itself can it?
And no. I have no idea what Labour’s National Constitutional Committee does. But from its Stalinist name I’d suggest that it probably involves punishing party members for stepping out of line, or daring to have an independent thought.
(Just looked it up. And what do you know? I absolutely nailed it!)
Anyway, Dan Neidle, has ‘Verified’ that gifted cellist, and renowned stunt pilot, Rachel Reeves, Britain’s first ever, and best ever, female Chancellor of Exchequer, and author of the popular Harry Potter series of books, is correct in her sums, while the farmers, are wrong.
It’s hard not to conclude that BBC Verify is a bit like a slurry lorry.
Full of shit.
Many on the progressive left are defending Reeves on the grounds that you would have to pay Inheritance Tax on an equivalently valued house, so why not on a farm?
And this I think gets to the central vindictiveness, disingenuous logic, and wilful misunderstanding employed so often by the left.
The reason ‘why not?’ Is pretty simple, straightforward and clear.
A farm is not a house.
It’s a false equivalence. They are different things.
Much in the same way that a difference of opinion is not ‘hate speech’. An alternative perspective is not ‘disinformation’. A public sector pay rise is not ‘an investment’.
And a man is not a woman.
Why has Labour targeted farmers in this way? And why, in an already vicious, pernicous and graceless budget, did it single them out for their own special punishment beating?
Let’s be honest. It might simply be an oversight. Scheming Treasury mandarins managing to pass off one of their pet policies on a new naive Chancellor, while she was distracted elsewhere, busily scaling Everest (Again Rachel? Do you never stop?!!), painting the Sistine Chapel, or whatnot.
But it’s also worth noting that British Farmers represent everything that the modern Labour Party hates.
White people. Men. Tradition. Self reliance. History. Pride in hard work. Personal achievement. Sacrifice. Duty. Family. Self reliance. Entrepreneurialism. The countryside. British culture. (yes!! We have one. And it’s great.)
And muddy, mucky chaotic nature, as opposed to their sterile, victimised ‘Environment’.
No wonder the Labour Party are hellbent on the destruction of our farming communities. With the Guardian reframing them as greedy ‘hoarders’, a selfish, welly booted impediment to fixing our broken NHS.
But if you think that the cash leached from British farmers through these spiteful new rules, would make a difference if chucked into the NHS money pit, I’ve got a banana taped to a wall to sell you.
In fact this time I did run the numbers. If you pumped an extra £500m into the new expanded £200bn NHS annual budget, it wouldn’t even touch the sides.
£500 in extra funding wouldn’t last a year, a month, or even a week. In fact it would be used up and exhausted by 10pm. On the very first day.
Clearly another motivating factor behind this land grab is the self immolating programme of self destruction we call Net Zero.
Our politicians seek to re purpose much of England’s green, but peasant land, into parking spaces for Chinese manufactured solar panels.
I’ve talked about Net Zero a lot recently. So let’s not get into it here.
But suffice to say. We already know an efficient, environmentally friendly way to turn sunshine into energy for human use.
In fact we’ve been doing it for thousands of years.
It’s called farming.
A worthless pursuit according to Labour Party grandee John McTernan who suggests it ‘is an industry we could do without’.
To be fair. Labour thinks this applies to pretty much all of them.
Except of course the Grievance, Grift and Racism Industries.
Each of which it actively and eagerly subsides with our hard won wages.
Well great news John.
Thanks to Starmer, the only thing farmers will grow from now on, is the profits of asset stripping Satan suckling succubus [NB this is satire and is clearly labelled as such] multinational investment company BlackRock.
Which is set to make bank out of bankruptcy, as Starmer invites it to capitalise on the misery his own government’s tax policies will no doubt bring to Britain’s farming community, and the rest of our economy.
It’s easy to see Labours attacks on farmers, small businesses, home owners and private landlords, as different and separate battles.
But really, they’re not.
The Labour Party is actively targeting middle class asset holders.
Inheritance Tax is simply one of their preferred methods, a tool they can use to actively prevent social mobility. A way of putting asset acquisition out of reach of regular people, by resetting the wealth of a family with each generation. Stopping you passing on the fruits of your hard work and achievements to your kids.
Remember, owning property, building capital, creating a cross generational store of family wealth is not for the likes of you.
Stay in your lane, little people.
I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it is hard not to conclude that the plan, the agenda, and the mission of this entire elite class is to impoverish the rest of us to the extent that we become solely reliant on the extended state for our every want and need.
And with the government spending 45% of the entire wealth the UK creates each year, (our GDP), while employing nearly six million workers in the public sector, and keeping twenty three million people on some form of benefits, it seems it is well on the way to achieving that goal.
One by one, they wish to take away our wealth, agency, independence, and freedoms until we are powerless, neutered and impotent.
A bovine bio mass of thoughtless, voiceless, and helpless supplicants, forever and always indentured. Dependent on the largesse of our bloated, sanctimonious, and self serving state. Permanently in debt, and in its debt.
Starmer claimed that under his leadership the tall poppy punishing Labour Party had changed, become trustworthy, safe, and honest. That it would pursue growth, build our economy, and champion ambitious ‘working people’.
But it has not been defanged, it is a snake, fork tongued, twisted and vicious.
Watch now, as Starmer’s Labour Party sloughs off its fake centrist skin, to reveal the glistening socialist scales of injustice beneath.
*****************************
Thank you for reading Low Status Opinions.
Please do subscribe.
It’s free, unless you don’t want it to be, and it really helps this Substack to grow.
Alternatively, you can Buy Me a Coffee Here. 👇
Thanks so much. See you in the comments.
All the best
LSO




My weekly touchstone of sanity 🤩 - thank you!
I share every bitter thought of yours about this "Government", but doubt that I could write as humorously. There was just one stellar achievement of the ravishing Reeves that you omitted - the onetime chess champion, apparently, so stellar that no one can find any trace of it. She seems to have a knack of doing wonderful things that no one else can recall.
As for the farmers, they are unique in having a factor of production (land) that has a value out of all proportion to its financial profitability - because land has many non-farming uses. Farms are also usually in family ownership so ownership is concentrated in one or two hands, unlike a company with hundreds or thousands of shareholders. So, on paper, they are very wealthy, but the cash flow generated does not reflect that wealth. Taxing that wealth will reduce farm size, reduce scale economies, and demotivate the sector. It would also encourage corporate farming (hello Blackrock) ... ah, that explains it!