Labour is planning a “devastating” multi-billion pound inheritance tax raid which could affect farmers and family business.
The party is considering scrapping two exemptions – agricultural and business property relief – that currently allow farms and businesses to be passed down at death without their families paying the divisive 40pc charge.
It is part of a plan to scrap a number of tax reliefs in a “loophole” closing exercise which the party believes could raise as much as £4bn, according to the Times.
On the grounds that I think a bourgeois society is a good society. Let that wealth tumble down the generations. An increasing portion of the population – those who make it themselves and those whi inherit – not reliant upon politics, politicians and the State is a good thing.
I think a bourgeois society is a good society
Me too, but Rishi, Jeremy, Sir Keir, and all the other prospective parliamentary lamppost ornaments have decided we’re getting an impoverished Third World shithole society instead.
This is from the party that told us they want to stay close to the EU and aligned with them and didn’t even investigate whether or not they could put VAT on private school fees, so what chance they’ve given any thought to the 2nd and higher effects of this policy?
Interesting argument, and at first look I like it. Dukes with serious acreage, a private power supply and thousands of workers with pitchforks and bows puts a limit on government power.
But when you look at some of the heirs to Goldsmith, Ford, Miliband you wonder if 100% IHT is a good idea.
If I was Sir Keir I’d ask Tony Blair and Catherine Rimmer for the right answer.
How long before Murphy claims credit for this? It’s another tax hike which won’t affect him personally.
If you look back at the heritance rules for different societies in the past they often entail passing a farm onto just one son or an arranged marriage with a person from a neighbouring farm so that big farms do not get piecemealed into lots of tiny inefficient farms, too small to run efficiently. Agricultural and business Inheritance Tax reliefs are intend to avoid this… for in the longer term lots of tiny farms and businesses will generate no tax at all.
I suspect the Labour party is casting around for fresh tax revenue and all the easy, sensible, targets are long gone.
One of the background reasons for the Oirish tattie famine was their cultural prefernce for subdividing family farms into smaller & smaller plots rather than passing it on to 1st son, rest of brood being kicked out to military/clergy marriage elsewhere as was the practice in the rest of the UK empire which had the same potato disease but no famine.
Can’t get blood out of a stone. After all the Tory tax rises and allowance cuts, there ain’t much leeway to tax. People would rather spend more time fishing than working if they’re not receiving most of the benefit.
Jeremy Cunt seems to think we work for HM Treasury.
It’s worth looking at the proposal through the lens of the EU/WEF/Monbiot ban-agriculture-now policy
Me, I wouldn’t abandon APR and BPR but I would put a cap on them – say one million £ each. I’d cap the annual gifts out of surplus income allowance at, say, £50k per annum. I’d increase the fiddly little exempt annual gifts out of capital. I’d get rid of the loony £175k for owner-occupied housing left to direct descendants and raise the IHT threshold to £500,000 instead. Finally I’d reduce the IHT rate from 40% to 10%.
When I’d finished this grand design I’d review it asking one question – would it be wiser just to scrap IHT altogether rather than fiddle with it like this?
How about an attack on transaction taxes? Say, raise the threshold for Stamp Duty Land Tax to a million £? Brief the papers to say it’s “for the young”. Again, for comparison: just scrap it?
Stamp duty on shares: scrap it saying it’s to reduce the tax burden on pension savings.
Pay for all this by mass sacking of government employees and reductions in their pensions.
Come to think of it, whether there are tax reforms or not, indulge in mass sacking of government employees and reductions in their pensions.
I like our approach here in Canada, where there is a “deemed disposition” at death, with capital gains taxes owed on the capital gains of the estate, NOT the total value of the estate.
Dukes with serious acreage, a private power supply and thousands of workers with pitchforks and bows puts a limit on government power.
I’d say that’s about the level to be looking at inheritance tax; to stop a particular individual / family becoming so powerful they threaten the state. Yes, I know it’s fun to think of the Duke of Doodah chasing the establishment into the sea, but that’s only because we don’t like this particular establishment.
It may well raise £4bn – the first time. But once you’ve sold the estate to pay the taxes, there’s no estate left to pay any taxes with any more, so in Year Two the revenue drops to zero.
“but no famine”: it got pretty near to famine in the West Highlands. It’s easier to get emergency rations to people who live near the water’s edge, though. It’s also helpful if they will migrate to the cities for work.
And – here I speculate – the landlords may have been keener to help since their tenants didn’t routinely boast of wishing to slit the landlords’ throats and the throats of their wives and children.
DM – And – here I speculate – the landlords may have been keener to help since their tenants didn’t routinely boast of wishing to slit the landlords’ throats and the throats of their wives and children.
It’s mental how angry people get when you invade their country, steal their land, and treat the natives like arseholes.
Still, I prefer the old fashioned militant paddies to the tiresome woke perverts they are now.
Trimming a farm to 60% of its value and leaving something economic is a big problem. On top of that having to sell 40% of the farm to pay inheritance tax means finding someone to buy that uneconomically small bit. It’s not going to be to another farmer, more likely a developer who would sit on it hoping to get planning permission some day.
It’s mental how angry people get when you invade their country, steal their land, and treat the natives like arseholes.
Paddy got a soft deal. Let’s deal with the real world. Let’s say us Anglo Saxons had ignored that soggy rainswept island to their west. It wouldn’t have stayed uninvaded, would it? Paddy didn’t have a culture could have supported a military would prevent that. So it would have been French or Spanish. They’d prefer that? One thing they wouldn’t be now is an independent nation. Or be using that comedy language of theirs.
Perhaps, but unless you are prepared to exterminate the local Irish population, install your own populace and live with the consequences, you end up getting into a never ending insurgency against a hostile populace without a means to win or withdraw.
The British weren’t prepared to do that and partition was only ever a temporary half-measure that should have been time-limited from the start.
One of the background reasons for the Oirish tattie famine was their cultural prefernce for subdividing family farms into smaller & smaller plots rather than passing it on to 1st son, rest of brood being kicked out to military/clergy marriage elsewhere as was the practice in the rest of the UK empire which had the same potato disease but no famine.
Is this a RC thing? France has had something of the same problem, although I think there may be legal reasons for it.
The English insurgency against the Norman invaders seems to have died down.
The Shetland population is around 1/4 lower than when the potato blight arrived (source: graphic in the SI Museum).
There’s a menu from the time which seemed to involve swapping herring for potatoes in meals, but a lot emigrated anyway. The west of Ireland couldn’t do fish substitution:
By contrast, Ireland lacked the quality of curing and, despite bounties, high tariffs on salt made attempts at improving curing for commercial fishing difficult. Mr. Curwen, M.P., argued in Parliament that “The complete repeal of the salt duties ought to take place, were it only for the sake of Ireland. …. Let this tax be repealed, and the same would be the case in the south, and every man might then have a herring to his potatoe.—If the salt duties were abolished, where we now drew one million from the sea, we might draw many millions.” (Curwen 1822)
BiS – Let’s deal with the real world. Let’s say us Anglo Saxons had ignored that soggy rainswept island to their west. It wouldn’t have stayed uninvaded, would it?
It depends how real you want to get. I don’t think a mob of angry, pitchfork and firebrand-toting Hibernian peasants circa 1800 would have been placated to know how good they had it. And it’s when you’re confronted by agitated tribesmen that shit gets as real as humanly possible.
Ungrateful bastards.
Chris Miller – Is this a RC thing?
I don’t think Catholic England had the same setup, so probably not. More of a Celtic thing, possibly?
Sucks how the fair distribution of land leads to poverty and death tho.
Didn’t the Carolingians and Merovingians split land roughly equally between sons? IIRC that’s what led to the fall of the Carolingian empire, as we call it, when Charlemagne’s sons fell out and nearly the end of the HRE, until Conrad suggested the title went to Henry the Fowler who then scrapped that tradition.
JG – Yarp. And exterminating conquered tribes is easier to say than do.
Most people throughout history – even the ones who were up for rape ‘n pillage fun – didn’t want to butcher everyone they saw.
Mass murder is a real buzzkill, it involves you having to kill people you don’t want to. Crying old ladies, children screaming for their Mammies, the disabled, that sort of thing. And people you’d probably rather have alive and working for you to make you richer.
In more enlightened times, (1296) Good King Edward stopped the sack of Berwick after witnessing a pregnant woman being disembowelled with a sword. Exterminating people just isn’t something we do. It’s something horrid foreign types do.
The reason Scotland got its name was that it was invaded by murderous Irishmen. But let’s romanticise the Irish, shall we, and ignore their depredations throughout the Dark Ages.
And not just the Dark Ages: the last large-scale Irish killings in Scotland probably took place in the 17th century attempt to perform a genocide of Campbells.
Let’s say us Anglo Saxons had ignored that soggy rainswept island to their west.
‘old on a mo, it was the Normans who invaded Ireland (after the example set by the other Norsemen from different parts of Norse-land), not the Angles or Saxons.
Is this a RC thing? France has had something of the same problem, although I think there may be legal reasons for it.
It’s a European thing. It’s the blight of this country as well.
Splitting the inheritance equally between the children is in the Napoleonic Code, exported to loads of countries Boney invaded. In France, it’s almost impossible to get around even if one of the brood is an obvious wrong ‘un.
‘Mass murder is a real buzzkill’
Well, yes Steve. Looking at Tuchman’s ‘Sand Against the Wind’, where she mentions how the good old Japs adopted the Three Alls (kill all, burn all, destroy all) policy against the terrorists. In one district of Hopei, they killed 4500, burned 15000 houses and deported 17000 people to Manchuria. So even the Japs weren’t prepared to kill the lot.
And of course I must mention Niall of the Nine Hostages, who raided poor old Britannia to get some heads to decorate his palisades. So even if the Normans’d left the Irish alone, I’m sure they’d have still enjoyed raiding the English.
As for splitting inheritance, I’d always understood that avoiding it was one advantage that the Christian liberators of Spain had over the Muzzies. The Church was absolutely determined to make sure that it, not those Mahometan heretics, dominated Spain, so they were always ready to legalise the local thug marrying his sister or stealing all of the land to make sure he had as big an army as possible to fight the foul foreign fiends.
Unless you can shoot me down in flames here BiS?
The hoirish have always been somebodies bitch.
Toytown Austria-Hungaries these days.
May have been in the past, Boganboy. Since, they seem to have adopted the Code Napoleon. I’ve an idea that was during the mid C19th when Spain was going through one of its rare periods of democracy. Although odd, because they hadn’t long before had the French ejected by the Brits after a long & disastrous for the Spanish, war. Although one does suspect their political class harboured more than a few afrancesados who’d collaborated with the French.
Example of the situation now is a small flat in Torremolinos. Was the property of the grandmother until she died. Three sisters & a brother jointly inherited. But they couldn’t agree to what to do with it. So one sister currently lives in it. The mother of my amiga. When she dies, my amiga will jointly inherit the mother’s quarter share with her two sisters & brother. Since the flat’s worth about 90k, she might cop 5k if they ever agree to sell it. Although since she’s notionally living with Mum, maybe she’ll claim squatter’s rights.
There’s exactly the same situation with a family I know in France. The house next door belonged to the grandparents. They both expired & three brothers & sister have never agreed what to do with it. So i’s sat empty for 20 years & is steadily falling down because none of them will accept responsibility for the maintenance. Again, when their parents die, two sisters & a brother will inherit a third share of a quarter.
I had the misfortune to marry a Frenchwoman. Thank heavens we’re divorced. Although maybe not. Since she’s an only child, she inherited best part of 25 mil. If she’d have predeceased me… Oh the temptation.