Thousands of farmers gathered in central London on Tuesday in the biggest show of opposition to a policy announced by Britain’s Centre-Left Labour government since it won power in July.

Angry at inheritance taxation changes outlined in last month’s budget by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, protesters carried placards reading, “No farmers no food”, while a procession of tractors drove past Parliament, voicing a broader sense of grievance among some of those who live in the countryside who accuse successive governments of betraying their interests.

The change under Reeves’s plan applies to people who inherit agricultural assets worth more than £1 million, about $1.3 million. They were previously exempt from inheritance tax, but will have to pay it at 20 per cent — half the standard rate — from April 2026.

The tax would be payable in instalments over 10 years interest free, and would still exclude many estates worth less than £3 million because of various allowances, including for married couples. Government figures suggest that 73 per cent of farms would be unaffected.

But critics say that the end of the exemption will lead to some families having to sell farms rather than passing them on to the next generation. The protest against what some call the “tractor tax” follows a demonstration in Wales where Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke last week.

Britain’s farmers tend to be less disruptive when protesting than some of their counterparts in continental Europe. However, Tuesday’s demonstration has some echoes of one held in 2002, when a previous Labour government was in power and hundreds of thousands of people gathered in London to protest plans to ban fox hunting with dogs.

“I think the industry is feeling betrayed, feeling angry,” Tom Bradshaw, president of the National Farmers’ Union, told Sky News, adding that “the human impact of this is simply not acceptable”.

In a statement, he said that the inheritance tax change “not only threatens family farms but will also make producing food more expensive”.

Less diplomatic was TV personality, Jeremy Clarkson, who has made a series of shows about life on his farm in Oxfordshire. In an opinion article in The Sun, he suggested that the government wanted “to ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers”.