One of the more interesting Political developments of the last week – the non-election aside – has been the silence on the Left about the moral case for inheritance tax after George Osborne’s passionate (and popular) argument for raising the threshold to £1 million. Rather than engage with the principles behind the Tories’ argument, most of the attacks on the policy have been on technical grounds – whether the sums add up or not – not whether the principle is fair.

 

So it’s worth reading Will Hutton put the philosophical case for inheritance tax forcefully in the Observer. His argument is that the tax does go against some of the most basic human instincts, as George Osborne argued last week, but that the benefits of the tax make the trade-off worth it. His conclusion is that: ‘Britain could soon become one of the few civilisations in history with no effective taxation on inherited wealth, with incalculable effects on opportunity, social mobility and fairness’.

 Have a read here.

Update
And now you can also read our own Will's piece on the issue here.

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