Abolishing inheritance tax will provide little relief

Editorial: Appealing to the Conservative base may be the PM’s best hope realistically, but it also means he isn’t even trying to reach out to the wider electorate – the young and hard-pressed families who expect to inherit little from their elders

Only 27,000 families are affected by inheritance tax (Dominic Lipinski/PA) (PA Archive)

For something that hardly affects anyone, and is in any case paid only after one passes away, inheritance tax appears to hold a strange fascination for the Conservative mind. It is as though there is something in the psyche that refuses to accept the maxim, “you can’t take it with you.”

Scrapping inheritance tax is an old favourite, and is often floated when ministers are searching for an eye-catching initiative that could, they believe, help them to win a looming, somewhat difficult, general election. Sometimes, as now, it smacks of desperation.

Taxes on the estate of the deceased are certainly unpopular, if not macabre, and every so often the Tory spin machine will seek to capitalise on this resentment and put out the notion of abolishing the levy, or radically increasing the threshold at which it must be paid. This is indeed happening again now, as Rishi Sunak seeks to create more “dividing lines” between his government and the opposition.