Inheritance tax is already paid by fewer than three per cent of estates, very few of them bequeathed by or to floating voters in marginal constituencies.
The money that it raises is scarcely more than the operating income of ITV or Tesco.
On one level, then, it would hardly seem worth the while of opposing an increase in the threshold to such a level that the thing would raise almost no money at all.
But before you think that I have come over all Liz Kendall, the question is therefore that of why George Osborne is doing this now, and of what else he is doing at the same time.
Expect an explosion of spite and cruelty in the emergency Budget to clear up the mess left by whoever was the Chancellor of the Exchequer during the last Parliament. Osborne is an astonishingly vindictive man.
As is Iain Duncan Smith, whose withdrawn parliamentary expenses card was tellingly not the front page news in every paper, or the lead item on every news bulletin. It ought to have been both.
Labour needs to be quite clear that, while not in principle opposed to significant reform of inheritance tax, it will oppose with all vigour any change to that tax alongside vicious measures against the neediest and the most vulnerable.
There are no votes to be lost here. Hardly anyone pays inheritance tax even as it is, few of those would ever vote Labour, few of them live anywhere where such a vote or not would ever make any electoral difference, and the Labour-voting section of the very wealthy, a phenomenon that has always existed, is really quite seriously leftish.
That is not always, in practice, the same as being fiscally altruistic when push comes to shove. But it does mean that they have nowhere else to go electorally. Anyway, they tend not to live in areas where Labour might ever have managed to elect anyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment