political commentator * author * publisher * bookseller * radio presenter * blogger * Conservative candidate * former lobbyist * Jack Russell owner * West Ham United fanatic * Email iain AT iaindale DOT com
Nice job from Dizzy-but I think Darling has shot himself in the foot with the growth rate being 'revised downward' to 2-2.5% and a £4.5BN gap in the public funds.
Iain-are we heading back to 1978 where Tony was the new Wilson,Brown being the new Jimmy Boy Callaghan and Darling being the new Healy?
Apart from the opportunity for the ever compliant BBC, headlining the Labour spin on IHT. It seems an absolute nonsense for them to blatantly rip-off Tory policy and think that that wil be convincing to the electorate. Especially the IHT smoke and mirrors. Most people who would be effected by that will take time to understand the detail and will quickly see it's a con job.
I suspect this was a desperation move, not only to try and negate the Tories proposals, but to take attention away from the "Economy slowing down" admission(still very optimistic growth figures) and that he said that borrowing would be reduced in the next five years?? so if the Treasury is earning less and borrowing less, how will public spending be cut and/or taxes increased to meet this target? or is it just another load of Labour bullsh*T to deceive the electorate, City and IMF!
I think we are heding down a timewarp to the mid 70's:
Public Sector pay increases Decreased tax revenue Increased inflationary pressure ie borrowing. Increased borrowing or tax increases. Decreased investment in skills and private investment.
It like Callaghan in 1979-trying to buy off the voters.No amount of smoke and mirror policies, figures that are a fudge,and public spending pledges for 2010 can turn this spin into substance.
Still with Flanders and Crick spinning for Labour anything is possible.
Andy Burnham is now saying on Newsnight that the Govt now knows the number of non-doms and how much they earn .... but last week they didn't"! Astounding!
The changes to Inheritance Tax announced by Alistair Darling are deeply cynical, as Dizzy has written.
My long winded explanation follows. It was written before I read Dizzy.
Married couples and partners in a civil partnership have always been able to leave any amount of money and assets to each other free of Inheritance Tax.
Money and/or other assets left to anyone else attracted Inheritance Tax at 40%, after the first £300,000.00, which was tax free. This tax free slice is known as the nil rate band. Clever married couples and civil partners left £300,000.00 outright or on trust to their other heirs on the death of the first to die and the rest to their surviving spouse or partner. Thus, when the surviving spouse or partner died another £300,000.00 nil rate band became available for the heirs.
The change Darling has announced is to allow the transfer of the nil rate band between spouses and so if the wife or partners dies first, without leaving any money to heirs, then his or her nil rate band transfers to the survivor. There is absolutely no benefit for those clever people who did what I suggested and left £300,000.00 to other heirs, on the death of the first spouse or partner to die. Yet, Darling has “dressed this up” as a great concession.
Meanwhile, he was busy penalising those who have set up their own businesses by removing Capital Gains Tax tapering relief.
George Osborne and Cameron need to point out that Darling has really changed very little and Inheritance Tax will still “bite” in the same way that it did before. Therefore, it remains a tax on the middle classes. Whereas the Conservative proposal for a £1,000,000.00 nil rate band were a genuine attempt to restrict Inheritance Tax to the very wealthy.
Third question for David Cameron to ask Gordon Brown tomorrow at PMQs (the first two will be about the lack of an election).
“The widow, whose husband died last year and left £300,000.00 to other people and the rest to her, will be expecting to leave £600,000.00, free of Inheritance Tax, to her children or other heirs, when she dies. Can the Prime Minister assure her that she can do this?”
When the PM replies in the negative the next question is.
“Why have you dressed this up as an Inheritance Tax cut when it is nothing of the sort? ”
Listen to yourselves. Diverting AGAIN, counter acting the message again...Poor auld Caulton must be working OT.
Hang on, so last week IHT was pegged at 300K and YOU were telling everyone that this was too low. Now you are saying that it was actually technically at £600K, which captures well over 90%+ of all inheritance.
MAKE YOUR SO CALLED MINDS UP. So are you saying that IHT was at 600K already so there was no real need to make it £1m.
SO ON THAT LOGIC....Tory fools, this means your proposal of £1m is actually £2m, so now you are actually giving a tax break to the very rich..
Id drop this line if I were you, it was a pretty poor attempt at COUNTER MEASURE MEDIA SPIN, but Id be very careful, Tax break to those with £2m.
More importantly, those who were getting IHT at 600K, were those with expensive fancy Tax lawyers, and were technically using a tax loop hole, I’d also be very careful of praising the ingenuity of those tax loopers, not good PR.
Cannot believe the BBC news at 10 (No10, more like) actually span the line that this IHT gig is a cut. Anyone could have achieved the same outcome by using a lawyer. Now it's just automatic.
£2 million very rich? Where on Earth do you live, Somalia?
My parents are worth well over £600,000, and my mother was a part-time teacher and my father a junior officer then junior to mid-rank management until they retired. Hardly the stuff fortunes are made of.
Why should they not be allowed to give their money to who the hell they please? They paid tax as they earned it. They cost the country very little, and brought up three offspring who cost the country little, none of us unemployed for more than two weeks, working hard and paying taxes. No kids out of wedlock, no grasping hand out for tax-payers' money.
Oh, and it wasn't a tax loophole. It was perfectly legitimate and the clear intention of tax legislation as it stood. It was simply allowing each person a £300,000 limit; it would be bizarre and irrational to force married couples to reduce thir limits, or for the first to die to be forced only to give to their spouse.
If you don't understand, I suggest you don't broadcast your ignorance if you want to be taken seriously.
Are yes, scratch the surface and the right wing nutters duly deliver a good old fashioned rant, whatever next abortion, drugs (whoops, that Cambo and Gideon’s territory).
Some more advise. Don’t say “fox shooting”, that too would be bad PR for Tories.
Anyway, which is it, this is you big pitch, was IHT 300K or 600K last week. Also I don’t think telling the population of the UK that £2m isn’t considered rich, that too would be a PR disaster
Last week this notion of a 600K limit wasn’t mentioned. In fact you were all saying that the 300K limit was derisory. Now all of a sudden it was already 600K. To mention another THQ favourite line, duly delivered by every loyal poodle Tory blogger and MP.. “””Rattled”””.
this new change by Darling simply rewards those people who are not clever enough to hire an accountant and lawyer. As some of my friends are accountants and lawyers who specialise in helping clever people, I can now look forward to lower quality Christmas presents. Thanks a bunch Darling!
For as long as I can remember Labour Chancellors (and some Tories) have been making unrealistic projections of growth in the economy and later revising them downwards.
The unrealistic projections are always in the 3% to 4% bracket and they are always revised down to 2%.
Gordon Brown's tax 'concessions' are always devious and do not lend themselves to instant analysis on the floor of the house.
Next time Brown* pulls one of these stunts, Osborne might want to forego the instant response and say, 'The summary the House has been given is clearly incomplete and on past form almost certainly misleading. We will respond only when we have studied the full implications.'
------------
* I ignore Darling for these purposes, as I prefer to deal with the organ grinder rather than the monkey.
Good to know there is one tory honest enough to tell the truth.
All this tory tosh about helping ordinary people! - it was the rich who were most set to benefit from the sperm lottery. Once a buch of tories, always a bunch of tories.
Anonymous, your accusation regarding the bunch of sperm from which my mother's ovum CHOSE me disgusts me. It's the politics of envy in its worst form. Many parents regard £2m as a decent sum, but not spectacular, and have probably selflessly exercised a degree of restraint in not having too many children (thereby diluting the "pot") Away and think about birth control tax breaks for the "poor"! Furthermore, iain, I'm getting sick of having to type in a different Polish swearword every time I want to put people straight
The BBC once again falls hook, line and sinker for the IHT scam. When are they going to get some decent business reporters on board, i.e. people who have worked in business?
They repeatedly failed to cotton on to the scam about the allowance transfer issue, and are still spouting that "some people already do this with clever tax plannning and trusts".
Clever? It is one of the first things an accountant or lawyer tells you when you make a will.
This will cost £1.4 billion? Rubbish!
Any ideas how we could find out the percenatge of estates who pay IHT without currently taking advantage of the allances transfer? Would the Office of Newlabour Statistics have a breakdown?
Furthermore,"anonymous" what's your problem? Even if I do spend my share of the £2m, Brown will take 17% in vat anyway (unless I'm a bit clever and put it through my company's books), and then hand it over to the graspers.
It becomes obvious that blundering brown was in such a state over the resurgent conservatives that he had no time to think through much of what Darling announced as the number one fall guy!
The IHT spin was a typical Brown Sauce ploy as we've all seen much of this behavior during the last ten years.
The real evidence of undue haste was the removing of Capital Gains Tax tapering relief and replacing it with a single fixed rate. That is a completely idiotic thing to do as it should have been obvious, even to his thickness, that small businesses and our valuable entrepreneurs would be really damaged. It does appear that the bulk of what Darling announced is something like a Far Eastern copy of a Rolex watch - looks the same, but doesn't work!
Vienna, mine's called a "Rollex"but the "l"s are very close together and it works just as well as the Swiss rubbish ones. One small detail, though. The tapering relief was brought in by "Daddies" (HP now Dutch!) Brown in order to help small businesses and entrepreneurship. This is the rmoval of a benefit, not a cut in itself, and has been done to prevent abuse by clever accountants. He did the same a few years ago by giving Stamp Duty exemption for commercial properties in areas af special need, and then withdrew it after a couple of years, presumably because the policy had helped re-generate some areas, and was now over-inflateing capital values there.
Either way John T, removing 'tapering relief' will do small business no good at all and will deter entrepreneurs at a time when they should be actively encouraged.
Even worse however, is the revelation in the DT today of another raid on pensions that was glossed over by Darling yesterday. The report states:
Middle England faces a £2 billion raid on its retirement funds as a result of Alistair Darling's raid on top-up state pensions. *** The move, condemned as "a new stealth tax on retirement", was hidden away in the small print of his Pre-Budget Report.
The plan is to rake back hundreds of millions from the pensions system to pay for higher spending and tax cuts. advertisement
To do this, the Chancellor is hurrying forward a cap on the value of the new state second pension, or S2P, formerly the State Earnings-Related Pension (Serps) scheme.
Millions of middle income earners are part of the scheme, which can be worth up to £6,000 a year. However, the maximum pension will be based on an annual salary of £35,000, irrespective of earnings or National Insurance contributions.
The curb was first planned to help meet the costs of the commitment to restoring the link between the basic state pension and earnings.
The cap was expected to be introduced in 2012 or 2015 but Mr Darling has brought it forward to 2009. If the restoration of the earnings link is held back until 2014, the total loss to S2P pension holders will exceed £2 billion.
****** Just great, - that affects me and other pensioners that have no way of fighting back. Now this is something that Dave Cameron should be getting his sharp little fangs into, particularly after the last pensions fiasco.
It appears that those who haven't the courage to give thmselves even a pseudonymous identity also don't have the imagination to see that some people might run their lives outside the "government approved, one way of living". Nor do they seem to know the bounds of inheritance tax.
For a start, the other (or same? With anons, how do we know. Just part of the dishonesty of some of the left) anon said "very rich", as did I.
You, disingenuously, translated that to simply rich in a blatant ettempt to say I was wrong. There is no way at all that £2m makes someone "very" rich, even if it's in liquid assets. A person with no dependents might be considered rich, but a couple (as my parents still are) would really only be called comfortably off.
Now consider that my parents live in the home counties, in a house they bought 25 years ago mortgage paid off of course) for a family of 5. The could only just afford it at the time, and we did not live a profligate life. That is their prime asset, and in itself worth more than £600,000. Then my father, knowing his pension might not be good, invested any spare money he did have (some of it inheritance from his working-class parents) and so has no need to rely on sticking his hand in other people's pockets in retirement. In other words he is responsible. They don't have hundreds of thousands sitting in the bank they can throw around. They have maybe a million worth of estate, which is not a lot when the house they live in is so valuable.
Why should they have to pay any of that to the state from which they took the minimum possible, and to which both gave years of service, just in the event that they die young?
As it happens they are both in fine health, and I hope they spend most of it before they go where it will do them no good.
I think, in fact, if you lefties start calling a retired part-time state-school teacher and middle manager "very rich", that would be the PR disaster.
(Is it hte same one? Why is it you can't think of a name?)
The £300,000 limit is still there, and it is still derisory. Nothing has changed since last week. They have just pointed out to people that couples can combine the limit. They are still each passing only £300,000 on to the people they wish to inherit after they are both gone.
Are you really unable to understand that, or are you being dishonest like Darling is? Maybe that's why the anonymity.
vienna woods, I hope entrepreneurs have their minds on more important matters than taper relief when they are starting their businesses, but I take your point that it won't do them any good. Pensioners do have a way of fighting back - in the ballot box, and would have my support if I thought that the changes to the state pensions - indexing rises with earnings - were being abandoned. I don't think they are, but again, I fully appreciate that all people who feel they lose out will feel angry at each turn. Dick Dale, I hope you don't think I'm courageous because I identify myself - I think such adjectives belong in different spheres (not the covers of political tomes either, for that matter!)I'd just like to point out that the cost to the taxman of Darling's policy will be substantial (no dopubt contested, because we can't know exact figures) The entire cost, whatever it is, will arise because people no longer have to be financially on the ball in order to benefit from their full £600k allowance. My parents fall exactly into this area (both former public sector workers), although many of their peers don't have sons who can advise them like you or I can. I think that's a good thing, and please don't dismiss me as a "leftie" - Cameron is going to have to win me over if he's going to romp home with a hung parliament next time around.
32 comments:
Nice job from Dizzy-but I think Darling has shot himself in the foot with the growth rate being 'revised downward' to 2-2.5% and a £4.5BN gap in the public funds.
Iain-are we heading back to 1978 where Tony was the new Wilson,Brown being the new Jimmy Boy Callaghan and Darling being the new Healy?
Apart from the opportunity for the ever compliant BBC, headlining the Labour spin on IHT. It seems an absolute nonsense for them to blatantly rip-off Tory policy and think that that wil be convincing to the electorate. Especially the IHT smoke and mirrors. Most people who would be effected by that will take time to understand the detail and will quickly see it's a con job.
I suspect this was a desperation move, not only to try and negate the Tories proposals, but to take attention away from the "Economy slowing down" admission(still very optimistic growth figures) and that he said that borrowing would be reduced in the next five years?? so if the Treasury is earning less and borrowing less, how will public spending be cut and/or taxes increased to meet this target? or is it just another load of Labour bullsh*T to deceive the electorate, City and IMF!
Fox Shot!
Geezer
I think we are heding down a timewarp to the mid 70's:
Public Sector pay increases
Decreased tax revenue
Increased inflationary pressure ie borrowing.
Increased borrowing or tax increases.
Decreased investment in skills and private investment.
It like Callaghan in 1979-trying to buy off the voters.No amount of smoke and mirror policies, figures that are a fudge,and public spending pledges for 2010 can turn this spin into substance.
Still with Flanders and Crick spinning for Labour anything is possible.
Andy Burnham is now saying on Newsnight that the Govt now knows the number of non-doms and how much they earn .... but last week they didn't"! Astounding!
Lies or incompetence? Or both?
Burnham is really struggling with this.
Now Burnham is blaming world economic events for the reduction in growth forecasts. Took him a long while to get to that one!
Now Flanders is spinning the Labour line about Tories wanting lower growth. Running true to form!
diablo
"Now Flanders is spinning the Labour line about Tories wanting lower growth. Running true to form!"
Yes I saw that to-and Crick was just awful.
By the way just for clarification:
Increased inflationary pressure ie private individual borrowing.
Increased Government borrowing or tax increases.
Ian, you sure put a rocket under Ed Vaizey - three posts on his blog today!
http://edvaizey.mpblogs.com/
The changes to Inheritance Tax announced by Alistair Darling are deeply cynical, as Dizzy has written.
My long winded explanation follows. It was written before I read Dizzy.
Married couples and partners in a civil partnership have always been able to leave any amount of money and assets to each other free of Inheritance Tax.
Money and/or other assets left to anyone else attracted Inheritance Tax at 40%, after the first £300,000.00, which was tax free. This tax free slice is known as the nil rate band. Clever married couples and civil partners left £300,000.00 outright or on trust to their other heirs on the death of the first to die and the rest to their surviving spouse or partner. Thus, when the surviving spouse or partner died another £300,000.00 nil rate band became available for the heirs.
The change Darling has announced is to allow the transfer of the nil rate band between spouses and so if the wife or partners dies first, without leaving any money to heirs, then his or her nil rate band transfers to the survivor. There is absolutely no benefit for those clever people who did what I suggested and left £300,000.00 to other heirs, on the death of the first spouse or partner to die. Yet, Darling has “dressed this up” as a great concession.
Meanwhile, he was busy penalising those who have set up their own businesses by removing Capital Gains Tax tapering relief.
George Osborne and Cameron need to point out that Darling has really changed very little and Inheritance Tax will still “bite” in the same way that it did before. Therefore, it remains a tax on the middle classes. Whereas the Conservative proposal for a £1,000,000.00 nil rate band were a genuine attempt to restrict Inheritance Tax to the very wealthy.
Third question for David Cameron to ask Gordon Brown tomorrow at PMQs (the first two will be about the lack of an election).
“The widow, whose husband died last year and left £300,000.00 to other people and the rest to her, will be expecting to leave £600,000.00, free of Inheritance Tax, to her children or other heirs, when she dies. Can the Prime Minister assure her that she can do this?”
When the PM replies in the negative the next question is.
“Why have you dressed this up as an Inheritance Tax cut when it is nothing of the sort? ”
WHAT !!!!!.
Listen to yourselves. Diverting AGAIN, counter acting the message again...Poor auld Caulton must be working OT.
Hang on, so last week IHT was pegged at 300K and YOU were telling everyone that this was too low. Now you are saying that it was actually technically at £600K, which captures well over 90%+ of all inheritance.
MAKE YOUR SO CALLED MINDS UP. So are you saying that IHT was at 600K already so there was no real need to make it £1m.
SO ON THAT LOGIC....Tory fools, this means your proposal of £1m is actually £2m, so now you are actually giving a tax break to the very rich..
Id drop this line if I were you, it was a pretty poor attempt at COUNTER MEASURE MEDIA SPIN, but Id be very careful, Tax break to those with £2m.
More importantly, those who were getting IHT at 600K, were those with expensive fancy Tax lawyers, and were technically using a tax loop hole, I’d also be very careful of praising the ingenuity of those tax loopers, not good PR.
It seems the Labour trolls are stupid as well as angry...
For anyone praising this government to accuse others of spin actually makes me physically sick.
Cannot believe the BBC news at 10 (No10, more like) actually span the line that this IHT gig is a cut. Anyone could have achieved the same outcome by using a lawyer. Now it's just automatic.
£2 million very rich? Where on Earth do you live, Somalia?
My parents are worth well over £600,000, and my mother was a part-time teacher and my father a junior officer then junior to mid-rank management until they retired. Hardly the stuff fortunes are made of.
Why should they not be allowed to give their money to who the hell they please? They paid tax as they earned it. They cost the country very little, and brought up three offspring who cost the country little, none of us unemployed for more than two weeks, working hard and paying taxes. No kids out of wedlock, no grasping hand out for tax-payers' money.
Oh, and it wasn't a tax loophole. It was perfectly legitimate and the clear intention of tax legislation as it stood. It was simply allowing each person a £300,000 limit; it would be bizarre and irrational to force married couples to reduce thir limits, or for the first to die to be forced only to give to their spouse.
If you don't understand, I suggest you don't broadcast your ignorance if you want to be taken seriously.
Are yes, scratch the surface and the right wing nutters duly deliver a good old fashioned rant, whatever next abortion, drugs (whoops, that Cambo and Gideon’s territory).
Some more advise. Don’t say “fox shooting”, that too would be bad PR for Tories.
Anyway, which is it, this is you big pitch, was IHT 300K or 600K last week. Also I don’t think telling the population of the UK that £2m isn’t considered rich, that too would be a PR disaster
Last week this notion of a 600K limit wasn’t mentioned. In fact you were all saying that the 300K limit was derisory. Now all of a sudden it was already 600K. To mention another THQ favourite line, duly delivered by every loyal poodle Tory blogger and MP.. “””Rattled”””.
this new change by Darling simply rewards those people who are not clever enough to hire an accountant and lawyer. As some of my friends are accountants and lawyers who specialise in helping clever people, I can now look forward to lower quality Christmas presents. Thanks a bunch Darling!
For as long as I can remember Labour Chancellors (and some Tories) have been making unrealistic projections of growth in the economy and later revising them downwards.
The unrealistic projections are always in the 3% to 4% bracket and they are always revised down to 2%.
Gordon Brown's tax 'concessions' are always devious and do not lend themselves to instant analysis on the floor of the house.
Next time Brown* pulls one of these stunts, Osborne might want to forego the instant response and say, 'The summary the House has been given is clearly incomplete and on past form almost certainly misleading. We will respond only when we have studied the full implications.'
------------
* I ignore Darling for these purposes, as I prefer to deal with the organ grinder rather than the monkey.
Well said john t.
Good to know there is one tory honest enough to tell the truth.
All this tory tosh about helping ordinary people! - it was the rich who were most set to benefit from the sperm lottery. Once a buch of tories, always a bunch of tories.
Anonymous, your accusation regarding the bunch of sperm from which my mother's ovum CHOSE me disgusts me. It's the politics of envy in its worst form. Many parents regard £2m as a decent sum, but not spectacular, and have probably selflessly exercised a degree of restraint in not having too many children (thereby diluting the "pot") Away and think about birth control tax breaks for the "poor"! Furthermore, iain, I'm getting sick of having to type in a different Polish swearword every time I want to put people straight
The BBC once again falls hook, line and sinker for the IHT scam. When are they going to get some decent business reporters on board, i.e. people who have worked in business?
They repeatedly failed to cotton on to the scam about the allowance transfer issue, and are still spouting that "some people already do this with clever tax plannning and trusts".
Clever? It is one of the first things an accountant or lawyer tells you when you make a will.
This will cost £1.4 billion? Rubbish!
Any ideas how we could find out the percenatge of estates who pay IHT without currently taking advantage of the allances transfer? Would the Office of Newlabour Statistics have a breakdown?
Furthermore,"anonymous" what's your problem? Even if I do spend my share of the £2m, Brown will take 17% in vat anyway (unless I'm a bit clever and put it through my company's books), and then hand it over to the graspers.
It becomes obvious that blundering brown was in such a state over the resurgent conservatives that he had no time to think through much of what Darling announced as the number one fall guy!
The IHT spin was a typical Brown Sauce ploy as we've all seen much of this behavior during the last ten years.
The real evidence of undue haste was the removing of Capital Gains Tax tapering relief and replacing it with a single fixed rate. That is a completely idiotic thing to do as it should have been obvious, even to his thickness, that small businesses and our valuable entrepreneurs would be really damaged. It does appear that the bulk of what Darling announced is something like a Far Eastern copy of a Rolex watch - looks the same, but doesn't work!
Vienna, mine's called a "Rollex"but the "l"s are very close together and it works just as well as the Swiss rubbish ones.
One small detail, though. The tapering relief was brought in by "Daddies" (HP now Dutch!) Brown in order to help small businesses and entrepreneurship. This is the rmoval of a benefit, not a cut in itself, and has been done to prevent abuse by clever accountants. He did the same a few years ago by giving Stamp Duty exemption for commercial properties in areas af special need, and then withdrew it after a couple of years, presumably because the policy had helped re-generate some areas, and was now over-inflateing capital values there.
Stephanie Flanders b 5 Aug 1968 was at St Pauls at same time as Kitty Ussher b. 1971 1st Sec. @ Treasury.Paulinas rowing together.
Either way John T, removing 'tapering relief' will do small business no good at all and will deter entrepreneurs at a time when they should be actively encouraged.
Even worse however, is the revelation in the DT today of another raid on pensions that was glossed over by Darling yesterday. The report states:
Middle England faces a £2 billion raid on its retirement funds as a result of Alistair Darling's raid on top-up state pensions.
***
The move, condemned as "a new stealth tax on retirement", was hidden away in the small print of his Pre-Budget Report.
The plan is to rake back hundreds of millions from the pensions system to pay for higher spending and tax cuts.
advertisement
To do this, the Chancellor is hurrying forward a cap on the value of the new state second pension, or S2P, formerly the State Earnings-Related Pension (Serps) scheme.
Millions of middle income earners are part of the scheme, which can be worth up to £6,000 a year. However, the maximum pension will be based on an annual salary of £35,000, irrespective of earnings or National Insurance contributions.
The curb was first planned to help meet the costs of the commitment to restoring the link between the basic state pension and earnings.
The cap was expected to be introduced in 2012 or 2015 but Mr Darling has brought it forward to 2009. If the restoration of the earnings link is held back until 2014, the total loss to S2P pension holders will exceed £2 billion.
******
Just great, - that affects me and other pensioners that have no way of fighting back. Now this is something that Dave Cameron should be getting his sharp little fangs into, particularly after the last pensions fiasco.
Anon 2:18am
It appears that those who haven't the courage to give thmselves even a pseudonymous identity also don't have the imagination to see that some people might run their lives outside the "government approved, one way of living". Nor do they seem to know the bounds of inheritance tax.
For a start, the other (or same? With anons, how do we know. Just part of the dishonesty of some of the left) anon said "very rich", as did I.
You, disingenuously, translated that to simply rich in a blatant ettempt to say I was wrong. There is no way at all that £2m makes someone "very" rich, even if it's in liquid assets. A person with no dependents might be considered rich, but a couple (as my parents still are) would really only be called comfortably off.
Now consider that my parents live in the home counties, in a house they bought 25 years ago mortgage paid off of course) for a family of 5. The could only just afford it at the time, and we did not live a profligate life. That is their prime asset, and in itself worth more than £600,000. Then my father, knowing his pension might not be good, invested any spare money he did have (some of it inheritance from his working-class parents) and so has no need to rely on sticking his hand in other people's pockets in retirement. In other words he is responsible. They don't have hundreds of thousands sitting in the bank they can throw around. They have maybe a million worth of estate, which is not a lot when the house they live in is so valuable.
Why should they have to pay any of that to the state from which they took the minimum possible, and to which both gave years of service, just in the event that they die young?
As it happens they are both in fine health, and I hope they spend most of it before they go where it will do them no good.
I think, in fact, if you lefties start calling a retired part-time state-school teacher and middle manager "very rich", that would be the PR disaster.
anon 2:23
(Is it hte same one? Why is it you can't think of a name?)
The £300,000 limit is still there, and it is still derisory. Nothing has changed since last week. They have just pointed out to people that couples can combine the limit. They are still each passing only £300,000 on to the people they wish to inherit after they are both gone.
Are you really unable to understand that, or are you being dishonest like Darling is? Maybe that's why the anonymity.
vienna woods,
I hope entrepreneurs have their minds on more important matters than taper relief when they are starting their businesses, but I take your point that it won't do them any good.
Pensioners do have a way of fighting back - in the ballot box, and would have my support if I thought that the changes to the state pensions - indexing rises with earnings - were being abandoned. I don't think they are, but again, I fully appreciate that all people who feel they lose out will feel angry at each turn.
Dick Dale,
I hope you don't think I'm courageous because I identify myself - I think such adjectives belong in different spheres (not the covers of political tomes either, for that matter!)I'd just like to point out that the cost to the taxman of Darling's policy will be substantial (no dopubt contested, because we can't know exact figures) The entire cost, whatever it is, will arise because people no longer have to be financially on the ball in order to benefit from their full £600k allowance. My parents fall exactly into this area (both former public sector workers), although many of their peers don't have sons who can advise them like you or I can.
I think that's a good thing, and please don't dismiss me as a "leftie" - Cameron is going to have to win me over if he's going to romp home with a hung parliament next time around.
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