Inheritance

The Tories have pledged to revise the inheritance tax by increasing the threshold at which you have to pay from £300 000 to £1 000 000. Same old Tories.

I believe the inheritance tax is a good thing for several reasons, and I believe it should stay at £300 000. Those reasons, which you are perfectly fine to criticise, are:

1) By ensuring that money passed from one generation to the next is taxed (thus decreased) we ensure we do not end up allowing the creation of a rich, land based class of workshy people. If parents can pass all their wealth to their children we'd end up with Lords of the manor all over ago.

2) Morally I find it repugnant that some children expect an inheritance or that some parents feel obliged to leave one. I want my parents to live their lives to the fullest and not worry about leaving anything for me or my siblings.

There are many people in my family wasting their lives doing nothing desperately waiting for their parents to die so they can inherit the riches (and squabble over them with the rest of the family in acrimonious disputes that'll probably give all that inheritance to lawyers). By being forced to pay an inheritance tax this kind of behaviour can be discouraged (but sadly not stopped).

Money is nothing but paper and metal. Use it to enjoy life, not squirrel it away and waste it on ungratful kids. Sure leave a few thousand as a nice little present but when the figure gets to £300 000 or more we are talking silly amounts of money. If I die and leave that much money in my account when there's so much good it could do in the world now, I'd feel deeply ashamed of myself as I headed to Hell.

3) The inheritance tax might make a few people think twice when buying a home, worried the price might take them over that £300 000 threshold and thus force they kids or unmarried partner to have to sell the house if they died. This is a good way of keeping the massive inflationary pressures of the housing market in check.

4) There are plenty of ways around the Inheritance Tax.

5) I don't see the point of raising the limit. Either you should have the inheritance tax as it is or axe it. What is the point of just amending it? Oh wait... it's a bloody gesture to middle class voters. One day political parties might actually introduce policies for the greater good rather than as underhand attempts to gain power.

It doesn't raise that much money for the Government (£3 Billion pounds... there are plenty of cancelled projects filled with more money wasted than the Government gains from this!) so it's not like the Government has the tax to raise funds. It's more about benign social engineering. Now sure, I hate social engineering... but hey that's pretty much the Tories raison d'etre so I don't quite understanding what their issue is...