Labour's tax onslaught is coming for your Sunday lunch

Telegraph

16-03-2025

Tucking in to roast lamb for your Sunday lunch may soon become a political statement – a cry of resistance against the progressives' onslaught on all things ovine.
We are certainly a sheep sodden country – they have shaped our most loved landscapes from the Lakes to Devon, Snowdonia to the Peaks, for centuries.
According to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, there were 21.2 million sheep in the UK in December 2023, a reduction of 5pc on the previous year.
In 2024, the Welsh flock stood at 8.4 million, or a little over 2.6 sheep per person. Even these prodigious numbers are down from their peak – there were over 12 million in the 1990s.
There remain around 70pc more ovines in the principality alone than in the entirety of the United States. If the US enjoyed the same sheep density as Wales, it would harbour over 4.1 billion of the creatures against its actual headcount of around 5 million. If wealth were still measured in terms of sheep, we would remain vastly richer than our American cousins.
But all are not fans of our woolly friends. How many ovines should be allowed to reside on our island is fast turning into a faultline in the culture wars. As so often this started as a fringe issue, but the question is now being debated at the heart of government.
A little over a decade ago, environmental journalist, George Monbiot, in his book Feral railed against the sheepish menace. His beef was that overgrazing ovines were denuding our hills and turning our uplands into desolate wasteland with close to zero biodiversity.
Writing in The Spectator, Monbiot opined, 'The white plague has done more extensive environmental damage than all the building that has ever taken place here… Britain is being shagged by sheep.'
Today, ovinophobia has gone mainstream. The Climate Change Committee (CCC) was set up under the last Labour government in 2008 when Ed Miliband was previously in charge of pushing us towards net zero. Its statutory remit is to make recommendations on how we can reach that sacred goal by 2050 – last month, it issued its seventh carbon budget.
Farming is in the CCC's sights as they claim it is the fourth highest emitting sector in the UK, accounting for 11pc of all greenhouse gases. Agriculture's total emissions are down by 12pc since 1990, but its share of total emissions has gone up by more than 50pc – a consequence of the precipitous decline of British industry.
Nearly half of agricultural emissions are the product of ovine and bovine flatulence, with a further 14pc emanating from livestock waste and manure. So for the green lobby, something must be done about us nasty carnivores. For the Monbiots of this world, lamb eaters are wrecking the environment both on a local and a planetary scale.
The CCC's carbon budget sets out a plan to cut our meat consumption by a quarter and reduce the UK's number of cattle and sheep by 27pc by 2040. But the details are still bleaker news for ardent carnivores.
By 2050, lamb and beef eating is planned to be down by 40pc. The sheep wrecked uplands, or so the thinking goes, can then over time be afforested and returned to their virginal state.
How is this change going to come about? The report is a little hazy about the details. Farmers will indubitably face the brunt of this solemn mission. The imposition of inheritance tax on agricultural land will certainly not be the last rural tax raid.
It is hill farmers, the custodians of our sheep, who will be hit particularly hard. It is their lower value land which will be earmarked for rewilding schemes.
The report is explicit about this, as it expects lowland pastures' stock densities to go up by 10pc. Since this rise comes alongside an overall fall of over a quarter of total livestock numbers, it equates to a truly startling proposed reduction of sheep in our uplands.
But consumers too can expect plenty of government-sponsored nudging. Producers of ready meals will be cajoled to substitute plant-based fakery and lab grown meat for the real thing. Calls for a levy on red meat, along the lines of the sugar tax, will become increasingly vocal. The shopper will be faced with reduced choice and higher prices.
But hill farmers have a potential ace up their sleeves. Britain's Muslims eat much more meat than the national average, and specifically much more lamb and mutton. Muslims make up around 6.5pc of the population of England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics.
But they account for 30pc or more of lamb and mutton sales – 60pc of halal consumers eat lamb each week, whilst only 6pc of the general population do.
A green levy on meat sales would vastly disproportionately hit Britain's Muslims. Surely this is an argument a self-proclaimedly progressive government would find it hard to counter. A tax on lamb would be a tax on our minorities.