In 1941, Lord Stamp, his wife and his eldest son died when their house was hit by a bomb.

His son entered the record books as the man who held a peerage for the shortest time in our history. British law directed that, whatever actually happened, their deaths would be presumed to have occurred in order of seniority. When Lord Stamp’s younger son inherited the estate, in addition to losing his parents and elder brother, he had to pay two sets of death duties.

History often repeats itself and it pays to learn the lesson first time round. When I was in my 20s, the Labour Party under Harold Wilson was in power.

My father, suspicious of their intentions, approached our landlord’s factor to transfer his tenancy of Rawburn to me. Hill farming, after doing well in the 1950s, was in the doldrums. Tenancies were easier to get then than they are today. Memories of farms going untenanted in the 1930s may have been in the factor’s thoughts but I was granted the tenancy anyway.

The Labour Party did attempt to introduce a wealth tax at the time. To everyone’s surprise it backed down. Maybe the fact that it only held a three-seat majority in Parliament was relevant.

However, the chancellor, Denis Healey, who denied ever saying that he would squeeze the wealthy until the pips squeaked, did say later ‘you should never commit yourself to new taxes unless you have a very good idea how they will operate in practice’. In five years of government, he never managed to draft a wealth tax that would yield enough revenue to offset the cost of administration and the ensuing political unpopularity.

It seems that the leopard hasn’t changed its spots. John McTernan, the Labour Party policy adviser who wrote in The Daily Telegraph in 2016 that tax avoidance is an expression of basic freedoms, recently stated that ‘family farming is an industry that we can do without. We can do to them what Margaret Thatcher did to the miners’. Possibly others in his party might have similar views but keep them to themselves.

It hardly needed Mystic Meg to see that, after years of poor government, the Tories would lose the next election. I claim no credit for second sight but, having experienced the unexpected many times, I took advantage of recent changes in agricultural law and assigned the tenancy to my son in 2023.

While I was aware that it now had a financial value, as we intend to farm for the foreseeable future, that value had no place in my thoughts. I never considered that now it would be regarded as part of my estate and therefore liable for IHT. The saleable value of a secure tenancy of a 650-acre farm like ours would certainly be a seven-figure sum.

Paying off inheritance tax at 20% over 10 years would, in effect, amount to at least a £30/acre increase in rent over that period, only to a different payee. This would be in addition to the extra tax due because of other recent changes in business property relief.

In our own business the transfer of assets has been under way for some years. Since the Autumn Budget this has assumed greater urgency. I suspect that the collector of taxes won’t be any kinder to me then he was to Lord Stamp.

The changes introduced in the Autumn Budget are only part of our problem. The other relevant factor is the enormous difference between what a farm sells for and what a farmer can pay for it with expectation of profit. In my column last August, I mentioned a talk about land values given by Peter Clery to the Scottish Agricultural Valuers in 1990. He suggested that the value of land should be five times gross output. As farming fortunes varied, so would land prices.

The calculation based on a wheat price of £200/tonne and the Single Farm Payment would value good arable land at £5000/acre. Hill land that produced a lamb, a draft ewe and received relevant subsidies would be valued on the same basis.

Peter Clery, now retired, was again in print in November 2024. He suggested that an alternative basis for valuing land was 20 times its rental value, which is a method I have been familiar with all my life. Claire Simonetta, in a recent Farmer’s View, outlined how farmland in Switzerland is valued.

However the sum is calculated, it is at the most, for reasons which are well known, half of what land makes in the market.

Profiting directly from farming it is impossible.

In contrast to Britain, land prices in other food-producing countries, although increasing, are realistic. Good cropping land in Australia sells for about £3000/acre and can return 2% to 3% return on investment. In America and Eastern Europe, a return of 3% to 5%, compared to 0.5% in UK, is possible. In Australia, there is no IHT on farms. In New Zealand, land was at one time liable to tax on death. Many long-term farming families had to sell up and very little tax was actually raised. Furthermore, the very wealthy had structured their operations to avoid paying the tax, so it was abolished.

On the assumption that the changes in the Budget will be with us for some time and the taxmen won’t turn down such a nice little earner, what do we do? We must find a better solution than transferring our assets at a time which impacts our farming business and our wellbeing. It may not even work if luck deals us the hand it dealt Lord Stamp.

In addition to increasing the tax-free threshold, a basis for negotiation must be that, if a farming business continues after death, land owned by it should be taxed at agricultural value. The value of a tenancy should only be taxed if it is sold.

Neither solution in a panacea or for farmers as good as it is now. It would be simple to administer, would avoid government climbdown and would still give the Inland Revenue something if hadn’t had before.

Anything other would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.