Nice to see a half-hour "Real Story" programme on BBC1 this week about the evil Inheritance Tax, even if they did get their facts a bit wrong - holding a house as "tenants in common" is not, so far as we know, anything to do with setting up a Discretionary Trust although both are effective ways of avoiding or limiting Inheritance Tax.
Now that the average house price in London is £285,434 against an Inheritance Tax threshold of £285,000, yer Mr.Average Cockney Sparrer will find 'isself paying a massive 40% of the value of his assets over that figure - or rather, his cockney sparrer kids will, as he'll be brahn bread (that's "dead" to the rest of us). Across the country 1.5 million households are affected, and the government profits by £3.6 billion a year. The Halifax have calculated that by the year 2020, even if the government keep raising the threshold slowly, 4.2 million households will be hit by a tax that was invented to penalise the super-rich.
(Incidentally, thinking of the super-rich, did we know that there are more billionaires in the UK than anywhere else? And that they pay only £15 million tax between them. And that £9 million of that is paid by one honest man, James Dyson? So how do all the others get away with it? I think we understand why they get away with it - "Retiring soon, Mr.Government Minister mate? How d'yer fancy a nice seat on the board?")
Inheritance Tax is immoral because it forces people to pay tax on their possessions, having already paid huge amounts of tax throughout their lives. It is immoral because it taxes people who are no longer in a position to dispute it, being dead. It is immoral because it forces the deceased's children to pay up, despite the fact that they had no part in the ownership or acquisition of the assets and in some cases may not even have know they existed. Of course they may benefit eventually from those assets, but they have to find the money to pay the tax first. Besides, most of them would probably rather have their mum or dad back, and are having to face up to this knotty problem at just the worst time in their lives.
And it's both immoral and cruel because it frightens elderly people, prudent, hard-working old people who have scrimped and saved and paid their taxes and built up a little security, and then find their final years blighted by worry about a tax burden they don't understand, weren't expecting, and may no longer have the mental firmness to deal with.
When someone like the Kray Twins send their emissaries round small firms in the East End saying "Nice little business you've got here. Pay us five hundred pounds a week or we'll break your legs!", we call it extortion. When the government do it, it's called Inheritance Tax. What's the difference?
And it's not just us ordinary joes who should be exempt. The tax was originally intended to break up the great estates of the aristocracy, but these days that's just what we don't want. Say what you like about the land-owning classes, they have done an excellent job of preserving the countryside and maintaining beautiful mansions and castles that would otherwise have gone to rack and ruin, or been turned into conference centres and health spas. We need these people to carry on living there because then they'll keep paying out for repairs and maintenance so that in a hundred years' time there will still be something of our heritage left. And although it's tempting to feel jealous because they live in bigger houses than us, frankly they're welcome. Can you imagine what it must cost to heat one of those things?
When you come down to it, the whole notion of tax is outrageous. We pay tax on virtually every human activity - driving, shopping, eating, going to the pictures, living in a house, having a holiday, working, not working, dying, trying to find out how a relative died (service families have recently been charged up to £600 for documents about their loved ones' deaths). What moral justification can there possibly be for the government to poke its nose into every tiny facet of our lives? How can they keep a straight face while intervening in even the most basic of human interactions? - if the GOS says to the bloke down the road "Come and mow my lawn once a week and I'll give you a tenner", you'd think that was just between the two of them in the sort of transaction that's been going on since the dawn of time, but there's Gordon Brown hiding in the hedge, up to his knees in fox poo, wanting his cut.
What an honest government in an honest society ought to say is "Look, it's going to cost umpteen squillion squids next year to pay ministers' and MPs' inflated salaries, keep hundreds of thousands of civil servants polishing their chairs, fly Tiny Yo Bliar all over the world to lick George Bush's arse, fight one or two completely un-winnable and unjustified wars, buy new bayonets for the army and a coracle or two for the navy, run hospitals that can't deliver the service required, beat teachers round the head for failing to educate children who have no intention of getting educated, invent loony schemes like teaching parents how to sing official nursery rhymes to their offspring, or impose ASBOs on the little sods so they can keep doing just what they like, fling the doors of our country wide open to crooks and beggars from all over the world while imposing a draconian selection system on respectable educated immigrants even when the rest of their families are here already, prosecute little old ladies for feeding pigeons, lock up old gentlemen for having a pen-knife or a cricket-ball in their pocket, invent schemes to charge drivers for using the roads they've already paid for twice or three times over, lie, cheat, chisel, obfuscate and generally run the country in the inimitable fashion we've all become accustomed to. Your share is umpteen thousand pounds. Please send your cheque to Gordon Brown". And that wouldn't be a tax, that would be a contribution. Mind you, the GOS would still object, because that would make him complicit in all the wicked and stupid things our government does.
Inheritance Tax has to go. Any political party that pledges to abolish it utterly and immediately should get our votes - and if the opinion polls are anything to go by, it will, as 73% are deeply opposed to it. New Labour, on the other hand, not only won't admit there's a problem (the idiotic Ed Balls MP, questioned by "Real Story", could only repeat (twice) that 94% of people weren't affected by Inheritance Tax and that nobody really minded it - both lies, of course, but since when was that a problem to New Labour?)
It has to go. It is no part of a just and honourable society to tolerate a government that hovers over our homes, ready to swoop on each dying breath and pick over our loved ones like vultures.
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