If You Thought the Farmers’ Inheritance Tax Raid was Bad, Wait Till You See What its Proponents Have in Store for Us Next

Rachel Reeves’s recent ‘farmers’ Budget’ highlighted one key individual driving the policy: academic Arun Advani. His flagship policy of capping agricultural property relief originated in his academic research and has been pushed through NGOs and think tanks before being adopted as Government policy – referring back to those same sources as support. The network operates as something like an Academia-Charity-Government Complex (borrowing from President Eisenhower’s coinage of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex).

The Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick is not the only ‘influencer’ operating in this ‘complex’, matching up their own interests with Government policy. Another such figure, who entered Parliament at the last election, is Torsten Bell, previously of the Resolution Foundation. So is the Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) since 2011, Paul Johnson, whose ‘advice’ is not as independent as it seeks to present itself.

The revolving doors between academia, government and industry became apparent during Covid, along with the lack of ‘independence’ between Sage, academia and the pharmaceutical industry. Something similar operates in the field of policy, particularly economic policy. As an example, the Treasury Committee of the Commons sought advice from four expert witnesses in its examination of the final budget of the Conservative Government: alongside the Chief Economist of KPMG, these happened to be Advani, Bell and Johnson. Let’s start with the ‘economic Neil Ferguson’, Arun Advani.

Advani’s specialism is tax: in particular, how to get as much of it out of us as possible. Before his appointment at Warwick he worked as a research economist at the IFS.

He is a whirlwind of activity. Amongst many other things, he is now on the advisory panel of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, the body instituted by George Osborne in 2010 to provide ‘independent’ forecasts on Government finances and forecasts (independent, that is, of the Treasury – the OBR is still funded by Government). He is one of the two Directors of CenTax, the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation, whose mission is to “improve public understanding of tax policy and help to design a better tax system” through “peer-reviewed academic research, agenda-setting policy reports and impartial comment and analysis”. He has been involved in the Green Alliance and the Wealth Tax Commission.

Another of Advani’s passions is to promote the study of “the Dismal Science” (Thomas Carlyle’s description of economics) in schools, through his charity Discover Economics, of which he is Chair. It claims to have “engaged” with almost a thousand schools to date, nearly a quarter of secondary schools in the U.K.

Part of the online engagement is the section Meet an Economist, comprising short profiles and interviews of student and professional economists. Those selected are notably ‘diverse’, another obsession of Advani. One co-authored paper published after the Summer of Floyd looks at the proportion of economics research related to race and compares it to the fields of sociology and political science, finding it wanting. “So what can economics do for racial justice?” it asks. Another co-authored paper (for the IFS) notes that ethnic diversity among academic economists is increasing over time. The share of (non-white) ethnic minority academic economists doing research and teaching has increased from 19% in 2012-13 to 24% in 2018-19. This is higher than in U.K. academia generally (17% in 2018-19) and in the U.K. population (13% among individuals aged 25-64 as of 2011).

However, “attainment gaps” exist in representation of black students, degree results (minorities being 11% less likely to get a First) and academics at Russell Group universities. The unquestioned conclusion is of course that ‘barriers’ must be understood and tackled.

Advani is obsessed about taxing us, and is fond of quoting the statistic that £35 billion of tax in the U.K. was not collected in 2018. The rhetoric of course is about the ‘unfairness’ of this. This level includes both the (illegal) evasion and an element of avoidance that HMRC classifies as “unlawful”; the fact that it is not illegal is indicative that some element is debateable, i.e., matters on which HMRC takes a (maximalist) view but have not been decided in law. However, as Advani notes in this paper, the U.K. tax gap is stable and rather low by international standards: 5.6% compared with 16.4% in the U.S. and 10.6%-12.9% in Canada. The targets of closing this tax gap would, of course, largely fall on the self-employed in sectors such as hospitality, construction and (Advani highlights) agriculture. The guise of ‘fairness’ is useful for challenging natural opponents of the regime.

Advani has hit the headlines recently as a result of the ‘tractor tax’ in Labour’s budget as he has repeatedly pushed the idea of capping agricultural property relief. In a co-authored report for the IFS, he blatantly states that: “It is not clear that protection even for small farms or businesses is a sensible rationale at all.” He has even suggested that farmland could be transferred to state ownership as a solution: “Longer payment periods would allow the effective tax rate to be lower, as would the state taking part-ownership of land and becoming the landlord to tenant farmers.”

The Budget brought immediate anger from farmers and many others who saw behind the proposals an attack on vital food production and a way of life. The Government’s cause was not helped by its admission that it had not undertaken an impact assessment of the measures, and that the Treasury estimate of the number of farms under the £1 million threshold (72%) was more than double that used by DEFRA (34%). Reeves’s quoted estimate was that ‘only’ 550 farms would be affected. Ministers initially justified the ‘reasonableness’ of the proposals by reference to Advani’s reports for CenTax and the IFS. Meanwhile the BBC has run cover for the Government by citing CenTax on BBC Verify (which is of course circular), and even giving Advani airtime on its Countryfile programme.

With the ‘tax gap’ being hard to close, and given the political difficulty of raising taxes in a sluggish economy, it’s not surprising that Advani is a leading advocate of another solution – a wealth tax. He was one of the three ‘commissioners’ on the Wealth Tax Commission, set up in 2020 to produce a series of research reports about individual wealth in the U.K., suggesting ideas as to how a wealth tax could be implemented. Economics associate professors had to keep busy while their students were banned from universities. The representation of lawyers (Advani’s fellow two ‘commissioners’ are both) is indicative that this is a serious legislative proposal – a strategy for implementation more than an academic talking-shop.

As well as academics, the commission included two contributors each from organisations I will look at next: the Resolution Foundation and the IFS.

Torsten Bell was one of the higher-profile new Labour MPs elected in July. He was parachuted into the safe seat of Swansea West at short notice, incurring some anger from local party activists who were expecting their council leader to be selected.

Bell read PPE at Oxford and went on to work at the Treasury, before working as a Special Adviser to Alistair Darling during the financial crisis of 2008. He was subsequently Labour’s Policy Director under Ed Miliband (it is rumoured that the ‘Ed Stone’ was his idea). His twin brother Olaf (they have a Swedish mother) is a EU Director at the Foreign Office. According to the New Statesman, “no pair of brothers enjoys greater influence in Whitehall” (this was before Bell’s election).

Between his Labour stints, Bell ran the Resolution Foundation. This was set up in 2005 by insurance tycoon Clive Cowdery and is largely funded by Cowdery’s Resolution Trust (which also funds Prospect magazine). He has made a considerable fortune from what is known as ‘consolidation’ in the insurance industry – buying ‘closed’ funds, aggregating them to reduce costs, and selling on at a profit. He is on his third round of doing this. He was also a Director of the anti-Brexit group Best for Britain, and is on the governing council of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a New York think tank started and funded by George Soros. In a interesting Scandinavian parallel with Bell, his mother was Danish.

Inequality, wealth and taxes are at the heart of their advocacy: “The Foundation’s established work programme focuses on incomes, inequality and poverty; jobs, skills and pay; housing; wealth and assets; tax and welfare; public spending and the shape of the state, and economic growth.”

This report, for example, highlights:

One might hope that huge passive gains from wealth would have brought with them higher tax revenues. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been the case. … While household wealth more than doubled relative to national income over the past half-century, the revenues raised from wealth taxes have failed to follow suit.

Wealth taxes in this context are the extant taxes on assets: capital gains and inheritance tax and stamp duty. “Household wealth in Britain now stands at more than six times national income, largely due to passive gains on existing wealth” (emphasis mine). The report falls short of calling for a wealth tax per se, but like much of the think tank’s research, it provides groundwork for one.

At a time when the quality of MPs appears historically low, Bell is a notable exception. Running an organisation such as the Resolution Foundation is much more powerful that being a backbench MP; he has already been appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Cabinet Office (the heart of Number 10). He has, of course, been a vocal defender of the ‘tractor tax’ measures. Expect him to rise rapidly.

Paul Johnson is another Oxford PPE economist who has spent his working career between the IFS, civil service and regulators. He is a regular media presence as an independent commentator on key fiscal events such as the Budget. He has run the IFS since 2011.

The IFS claims to be “the U.K.’s leading independent economics research institute”, and holds itself to be resolutely non-party political. During the period 2015-2021, it was the second most quoted think tank in Government policy documents after the progressive Joseph Rowntree Foundation; the Resolution Foundation was in fifth place and the IPPR in sixth. (The Conservatives were of course in power for the entire time.) As we have seen, however, it is happy to put out research by obviously Left-leaning professors such as Arun Advani.

The IFS itself is largely tax-funded, through several sources (individual departments and the Economic and Social Research Council, an arm of the Government’s U.K. Research and Innovation). In 2023, public money amounted to 73.5% of its funding. Most of the remainder is from charitable trusts, the largest of which last year were the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Nuffield Foundation. Interestingly, even USAID made a small contribution.

The IFS should probably itself be described as radically orthodox; for this it can come under fire from hardline Leftist organisations such as the Progressive Economy Forum: “The claim of ‘independence’ explicitly refers to no links to political groups. Crucially, however, this does not prevent political bias.”

It is correct to state that that political bias is real; maybe we can take some small comfort from the fact that outright neo-Marxists may object. But nonetheless the academy has a Leftist bias, even if the wilder shores of cultural ideology are less obvious in economics than some subjects.

A recent research paper from the U.S. has even managed to demonstrate correlation between political ideology and research output. In order to get around the fact that most economics professors do not state party affiliation, the researchers used a large database of public donation information and petition-signing as a (pretty sound) proxy for political positioning.

Do the methodological conventions of academic economics, such as formal modelling, quantitative analysis and peer review successfully filter partisanship from academic economics research? … We show that empirical results in several policy relevant fields in economics are correlated with the predicted political ideology of the author(s), with predicted liberals (conservatives) reporting elasticities that imply policies consistent with more interventionist (laissez-faire) ideology. … For example, we find that going from the most Left-wing authored estimate of the taxable top income elasticity to the most Right-wing authored estimate decreases the optimal tax rate from 77% to 60%.

It should be the goal of any social science to approach as value-free a position as possible, even whilst acknowledging that it is impossible in practice. In reality, consensus Leftism operates across the board. It is not surprising that this results in quantifiable differences in supposedly hard research outputs; it is more surprising that some academics are demonstrating the fact. In areas such as wealth and tax policy, advocacy wears the coat of academic rigour.

Johnson will soon be leaving his long-standing role at the IFS; he was recently announced as the next provost of Queen’s College, Oxford.

The drive to a wealth tax

There is no shortage of think tanks and compliant academics pushing similar policies; for example the IPPR (largest donor: Soros’s Open Society Foundations) recently published a paper on ‘Big Wealth’, which takes the need for a wealth tax as a given, but also states (somewhat chillingly) that “the relevant policies for tackling both the quality and quantity of wealth must very much include, but in no way be restricted to, tax”.

Labour stated before the election that it had “no plans” to introduce a wealth tax. Then again, it had “no plans” to modify agricultural property relief.

Nothing we have seen in any of these reports or statements challenges the fundamental reasons as to why Government spending is at an all-time high outside wartime, and whether it could be reduced. It is, rather, a baseline from which spending will only increase owing to the Net Zero agenda, increasing health and welfare payments and the need for other infrastructure investment (a passion of Torsten Bell). With the political will and economic possibility of more cash coming from taxes on income and spending, the focus will be ever more on wealth.

The difference is between traditional ‘wealth taxes’ (such as capital gains tax) and a ‘wealth tax’: levelling a fixed charge on capital assets without any gain being realised. The motive for the changes in agricultural property relief could be many things, from political ignorance of the reality of family farms, to a visceral hatred of the class enemy (the word kulak has been used much in the last few weeks). One thing it is, though, is a method of bridging a debate from wealth taxes to a wealth tax: an alteration which on the surface is a just a modification to the current tax regime, but which has the effect (in some cases) of being a direct tax on assets (particularly land). Whatever happens, it has set an agenda.

Which brings us back to Arun Advani. In this podcast, he sets out his case in superficially reasonable terms (and to unquestioning hosts, the most incisive question is “Why is it not happening?”) A wealth tax of 1% on assets over £10 million would, he claims, affect only the richest 22,000 people in the country, and raise some £11 billion. What he does not say is that the U.K. deficit for 2023-4 was £41 billion, and gross debt £2.7 trillion. And bad though the Conservatives were, this is before Labour’s plans have got going. You can be sure that if a wealth tax were introduced, it would likely extend rapidly.

The cosy questioning of the expert witnesses in the Select Committee is comprehensible in the light of the shared assumptions of its participants (politicians included). The purpose of this has not been to scare you about the prospects of a wealth tax (though you should be), but to give one example of how policy is generated, how ideas are normalised and how consent is manufactured by an interlinked network of academia, think tanks and Whitehall. The Blob is too innocent a name; it is a Hydra.

Mat Brown is a writer and former investment banker. He writes about politics, geopolitics and culture on the substack Dogmatic Slumbers and is working on a book on Armenia. This article was first published on TCW Defending Freedom.