THE Government has “declared war” on rural communities according to Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick.

Asked about the inheritance tax rise on farms, he said on GB News: “The Labour Party, the government, have declared war on rural communities right across our country.

“This is an iniquitous tax. This is preventing family farmers from handing on their farm as they’ve always planned for their children and their grandchildren. It’s going to cause havoc across the countryside.

“We, the Conservative Party, have been opposing it tooth and nail, and we’re going to keep pressing the case in Parliament, urging the government that it is not too late for them to change course.”

During Breakfast with Isabel Webster and Ben Leo, he added: “the Labour Party could have taken action against wealthy city financiers buying large farms purely to reduce their inheritance tax bill, but they’ve done something quite different to that. They set the threshold at a low level.

“So this is affecting small family farms, the types of farmers up and down our country who have a couple of hundred acres, who are getting up first thing in the morning, working hard, trying to protect our countryside, our food security, they are the lifeblood of our rural communities.

“And I think these people deserve our respect, and they deserve the right to be able to hand their farm on to their children and their grandchildren.

“The Labour Party does not appreciate rural life. In fact, this is a whole pattern of measures that the Labour Party have brought in in their short term in government, everything from attacking the farmers to changing how buses work in rural communities, hiking the fares from two pounds to three pounds, you name it.

“They are hurting rural communities. We are going to stand up for them and ensure that we’re holding Labour to account in government…

“They’ve just said they’re going to scrap the rural services delivery grant, which provides money to rural councils, the likes of Lincolnshire and Herefordshire and Norfolk, where it is more expensive to deliver public services than in the big metropolitan cities. At every turn, Labour are hurting rural communities.

“I think that’s because Keir Starmer and his ministers are totally out of touch. The Environment Secretary is a Member of Parliament for Croydon. He didn’t even own any wellies. He had to get them bought by Lord Alli the other day.

“They don’t know about rural communities. They don’t appreciate them, and they’re hurting them. And so it falls to the Conservative Party, which has always stood up for our rural communities, to back our farmers, and that’s what we’re going to do.

“Just the other day, we held a vote in Parliament holding Labour MPs to account, particularly those who now represent rural communities and man and woman after man and woman, they went through the division lobbies and backed their party over the farmers going ahead with this iniquitous family farm tax.”