Best Of

Before I start my work day... I just wanted to chip in very briefly on the IHT and farms issue.

When I was a fund manager, two of my older colleagues bought farms. Partly this was because they were obsessive fans of shooting small birds out of the sky ("the humane harvesting of organic free range produce" claimed one). But mostly it was to enable them to take advantage of the inheritance tax break. This will - of course - have pushed up the price of farmland, because people like my colleagues will have acquired farms solely for tax reasons.

I am not a fan of exemptions. Why should passing on a shoe shop to one's daughter be subject to inheritance tax, but not a a corn field? And why should a town house be subject to tax, but a farm house be not.

On the other hand, inheritance tax is easily dodged by the wealthy and the well prepared. The use of trusts, gifts, and ensuring assets are held by corporate bodies is such that if you don't want to pay IHT, you don't need to.

I would therefore abolish it, and replace it with a very small (say 0.1%) gross assets levy.

Aren’t there already exemptions on the tax system where it makes sense for society to have these exemptions?

For example I believe in the UK that children’s shoes (and clothes?) are VAT exempt.

Should all clothes not suffer VAT? We are happy that there is a good reason why there are different treatments.

If exempting farmers and farms from IHT serves a benefit to society by keeping together farmland to ensure sizes are cost effective to manage then that is surely good as it keeps a healthy industry going.

Maybe a better approach would have been to exempt owner occupier farmers so that those tracts of farmland owned by wealthy individuals as an asset that were leased out and no activity by owner would be taxed but not family farms.

I agree with OGH junior.

Abolishing IHT altogether and introducing a very low rate assets tax would be a simpler and less objectionable way to deal with the distortion that the exemption of agricultural land from IHT created, compared to the policy that Labour introduced.

Imagine the screaming from the large landowners. IHT is bad enough: an asset tax! Mon dieu!

Cutting IHT to a level payed by the monarch and on public sector pensions eg 0% could be payed for by reducing the carbon capture and storage budget by 50%.

No it could not. The money wasted on carbon capture and storage is a lump sum amount, whereas IHT is income every year.

Much as I dislike the decision to waste time and money on CCS, your making yourself look like a twerp to set off capital expenditure against recurring taxation.

Interesting exercise if you type the favourable rating for the 3 main party leaders into Electoral Calculus as their voteshare but leave the other minor parties at 2024 levels.

You end up with Reform 242 seats, Labour 181, the Tories 90 and LDs 75.

So Farage could be PM of a minority government with Tory confidence and supply. At the moment however Reform is still polling clearly below Farage's favourable rating and below the Tories and Labour still, even if up a bit on July

https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=N&CON=21&LAB=23&LIB=12&Reform=28&Green=7&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=&SCOTLAB=&SCOTLIB=&SCOTReform=&SCOTGreen=&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2024

Why do you persist with this utter nonsense?

And on topic Kemi has a real opportunity to take advantage of the awful early months into Starmer's government, and it is telling that Starmer and Reeves are taking a real hit in the favourable ratings but it was entirely predictable when they told the country their manifesto was fully costed when it clearly wasn't

They boxed themselves in to get elected, and are unable to use the best means of raising tax through income tax, vat, and NI

I really am dismayed how bad they have been and certainly far more Corbyn than Blair in character