The Daily Express today steps up its long-standing campaign to abolish Inheritance Tax. Political editor Macer Hall has also set up a petition on the Downing Street website calling for abolition of Death Tax in Gordon Brown's final budget next month.
Death Tax is a pernicious tax that primarily hits people who have recently suffered trauma and loss. Due to the meteoric rise in the value of property in the UK over the past ten years, IHT now hits a majority in middle England. It is double taxation of the worst order that strikes at vulnerable people who have lost a loved parent or child. Death Tax hits people who have paid taxes, managed businesses, created employment, bought their own homes, and seek little more than to ensure that their families are independent from the State. Death Tax is wrong.
With good (and costly) financial advice IHT can be addressed. The super-rich tend to hold their assets off-shore in formats that will not be subject to IHT. But, you can't hold your family home in an off-shore tax shelter. So, those who really suffer are the families of people who die owning little more than a home in a desirable location.
Around the world attitudes to Death Tax is changing. In some US states including Florida, and in Portugal it has been abolished. Its time for it to go in the UK too, a case that I argued publicly at the Conservative Party Conference in October 2006.
My speech, in which I also spoke in favour of of David Cameron's Disraelian principles of "sharing the proceeds of growth" and "promoting General Well-Being" was reported in a leader article in the Express last October.
