#STATES WITH INHERITANCE TAX HOW TO#
Instead of focusing on those wealthy enough to afford the best accountants to advise on how to minimise their tax liabilities, policy-makers should focus on the broader experience of the public. Those who point the finger at the super-wealthy and claim that their privilege is somehow an argument for state seizure of assets simply aren’t paying attention. If their interests are his, he would have to think again about the old “death tax”. Indeed, these are two groups – the new middle class and the young – that Keir Starmer, desperate to move from the hard-Left ideological tendencies of Corbyn and co, claims to stand for. Moreover, when a new generation of young people are finding it increasingly difficult to emulate the achievement of their parents by buying a home, political parties should be wary about placing any more obstacles in their way. But to want to leave your children as much wealth as possible is not remotely immoral it is a fundamental, shared instinct that stretches back as far as humanity itself.Īnd that instinct is as vital among the “new” middle classes as it has always been among the wealthy. Supporting the confiscation by the government of a large proportion of a dead relative’s property is considered virtuous by those who, even today, regard private wealth as distasteful. In other words, he feared that such an offer might prove irresistible to voters.Īs with too many issues, some Labour thinkers see the argument over inheritance tax not as an economic one, but as a moral one. A promise by George Osborne to his party’s conference that, as chancellor, he would scrap inheritance tax altogether, persuaded Brown not to seek his own mandate after all. In 2007 it even led to Gordon Brown bottling the early general election he was planning to hold in order to take advantage of his honeymoon period as the recently installed prime minister. It’s a debate that has haunted the Labour movement ever since. Being gifted money earned by other people was immoral, the writer suggested, and the wealth gap between rich and poor could only be closed by the state taking everything your mum and dad left you. In the 1990s, one article in a Left-leaning magazine made the case for a 100 per cent rate of inheritance tax. But clearly, the party has not yet caught up with this reality. Many of them will be Labour voters who believe in equality and the greater good. Inheritance tax is increasingly affecting ordinary, lower middle class families, especially in the South East.
This sort of dynamic fundamentally alters the nature of the debate. Decades later, these hard-working grafters are now considering another exercise that their own parents could never have contemplated: working out how much of a cut the government will take of their estate before their children can benefit from it. But things have changed drastically in the past 40 years.Īn entire generation of Britons raised on council estates began, in the 1980s, to embark on an adventure their parents could never have contemplated: home ownership. There was a time when the topic of inheritance tax was relevant only to policymakers and those fortunate few who were wealthy enough to be affected by it.
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