Britain's two-tier justice system
There's a huge disparity between the lengthy sentences for the Zoom call environmental activists and greedy landowners repeatedly descending on London to demand inheritance tax breaks for themselves
In July 2024 five Just Stop Oil activists were sentenced to a combined total of 21 years in jail for participating in a Zoom call in which they discussed traffic disruption tactics aimed at highlighting the threat of climate breakdown.
They discussed plans to climb motorway gantries to demand action from the government, but they didn’t actually do it.
The "thought crime" of discussing these ideas was enough to see them locked up for years.
Meanwhile a bunch of entitled landowners have repeatedly descended on London to hold tractor parades because they’re upset at Labour government plans to slightly reduce the vast Inheritance Tax advantages of extremely large landowners.
The government isn’t planning to equalise Inheritance Tax rules so that landowners pay the same as the rest of us, they’re just slightly reducing the enormity of the landowners’ tax advantage to an additional £1 million per landowner.
This policy will clearly only impact landowners with huge estates because even after the planned changes to landowners’ Inheritance Tax thresholds, they’re still each being allowed to pass on a million pounds more than the rest of us tax free.
Even after this million pounds in tax relief, the advantages keep coming, because agricultural land is only subject to a 20% rate, rather than the 40% paid by non-landowners.
One of the main reasons this change is being made is in order to dissuade the mega-rich from buying up thousands of acres of farmland in order to evade paying Inheritance Tax.
The primary motivating forces behind these tractor protests are entitlement and greed.
They think they’re entitled to different rules to the rest of us, and a million quid worth of advantage each, plus a fifty percent discount on top, isn’t enough for them.
And they’ve not just talked about protest tactics in a Zoom call like the jailed JSO protesters, they’ve repeatedly snared up London traffic on their ways in and out of the capital, and brought central London to a standstill.
The contrast is remarkable.
People who discussed protest tactics for a selfless cause get jailed for years.
People who actually cause disruption out of entitlement and greed get no punishment at all.
It’s a two-tier justice system in which entitled landowners are treated with kid gloves, and environmental protestors are smashed with an iron fist.
This is a really good and really important post on a critical issue. For too long, fascists and their apologists have been allowed to intimidate and threaten democracy, together with vulnerable layers of society and (ultimately) the working class movement under the pretext that they are exercising "free speech" while Left wing students and academics are hounded and witch hunted as an "academic taliban," for being "woke" and left wing journalists face prosecuting and prison through weaponised defamation laws (SLAPP) and the National Security Act. The Police Courts and Sentencing Act was a watershed here and let's not forget that Starmer (the human rights lawyer - what a joke!) wasn't even going to vote against it until the cops attact the Sarah Everard vigil on Clapham Common. Next came the refusal of a Bristol court to find protesters against the act guilty and then all Hell broke loose. Fascists can mobilise with impunity and landowning parasites can prepare to starve the cities as part of a Trump and Musk supported fascist coup in Britain in the near future but environmental protesters get heavier sentences than for rape and armed robbery. As in the US the judicial and criminal justice system has been weaponised even before the fascists come to power meaning that we no longer have the rule of law but rather the rule BY law which is tyranny.
However if a farmer sells land with planning permission the gain can be £300 k in the north to £1 mm per acre in the south, normal farmland is £10 -,15 k per acre .This can be capital gains tax free if they roll it over and buy , guess what , farmland.
No wonder the price is unaffordable to farmers. And this loophole wasn't touched.