What dreadful timing! The week before Glastonbury, which comes but once a year, and there’s some rather unfortunate news for Sir Michael Eavis.
It seems Eavis, founder of the hippie field gathering turned middle-class mecca, may be plotting some light tax avoidance. In October last year Eavis, 89, showed some cold-blooded business acumen with a distinctly un-hippie vibe. He passed his shareholding in Glastonbury Festival Events Ltd to his daughter Emily, while three quarters of his shares in Glastonbury Festival Limited went to a family trust. Last year, by the way, the festival made £5.9million profit before tax (thanks to a couple of years of sunshine and the need to rebuild “vital financial reserves” post-Covid), while the whole thing is worth anywhere between £150m and £400m.
Eavis and Glastonbury are — in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 55 years — by-words for socialist principles. Raised in a working-class Methodist farming family, Eavis has maintained working for social good is what “gets me up in the morning”. As he told the BBC in 2018, he is more concerned with his legacy being “what I’ve done for humanity than what I’ve done for myself”. He refers to “my socialism,” in interviews. And this is the festival, lest we forget, that became synonymous with the chant “oh Jeremy Corbyn”.
Yet Eavis made his financial moves not a moment too soon in October 2024. The next month, Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered her first Budget, which laid out plans to bring in an inheritance tax of 20 per cent on family businesses on their value above £1 million. Nobody can put an exact number on the hundreds of millions Glasto is potentially worth in the eyes of HMRC, but if Eavis lives for another three to seven years, that death tax bill will steadily decrease.
Glastonbury and Eavis “have always been, and will always be, happy to pay their due tax” a festival spokesperson said.
Still, it’s more than a little awks given Glastonbury has traditionally been a place for the public to vent their displeasure over subjects such as rich people doing tax dodges. In 2011, campaigners targeted U2’s headline set over the band’s decision to relocate part of its business from Ireland to the Netherlands for a more beneficial tax arrangement. More beneficial for Bono, obviously, not Ireland’s schools and hospitals. Four years later Bono defended the arrangement and said the band were “just trying to be sensible about the way we’re taxed”. Nothing screams rock more than the word “sensible”.
And then, of course, there’s Jeremy Corbyn, the sleep paralysis demon of everyone not on the hard left. Eavis hailed Corbyn, made an appearance on the Pyramid Stage in 2017, as a “hero”, yet Corbyn famously plotted to increase inheritance tax (how scurrilous to want better for society!).
Is Eavis’s financial planning not a little hypocritical? Socialists are not supposed to engage in dynastic hoarding
Is Eavis’s prudent financial planning not a little hypocritical? Socialists, after all, are not supposed to engage in dynastic hoarding. Items of sentimental value can be passed down the generations, but keeping big ticket items (businesses for example) in the family is the polar opposite of wealth redistribution. Accumulating wealth is a filthy, capitalist business. Far better to pass it back to the Government to fund schools, housing and healthcare.
Eavis wouldn’t be the first socialist to preach redistribution in the streets but do estate planning on the balance sheets. Labour politician and committed democratic socialist, the late Tony Benn, infamously avoided a large inheritance tax bill. Benn, who died in 2014, donated his personal effects to the British Museum under the acceptance in lieu scheme, which conveniently grants a juicy reduction in inheritance tax in return for bequeathing stuff to the nation.
Maybe it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a wealthy socialist to forgo inheritance tax loopholes
To bastardise Jesus, maybe it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a wealthy socialist to forgo inheritance tax loopholes. It’s easy to both espouse and live by socialist principles when you don’t have inherited wealth — or wealth to pass down to your children.
Eavis, to be fair, has always put his money where his mouth is. Glastonbury gave a huge £5.2 million for charity in 2024 alone, with the money going to its long standing partners Oxfam, Wateraid and Greenpeace. Keeping the companies in the family will allow this charitable work to continue whereas a corporate buyout upon his death could put that all at risk. Eavis personally donated land and building materials in Pilton to create Maggie’s Farm, a development of 39 affordable homes to “serve the local community in perpetuity”.
A charitable interpretation is that he thinks we would be no be better off as a society if Starmer and Reeves get their hands on his inheritance. A less charitable one is walking the walk is harder than talking the talk.
India Block is a London Standard columnist
