Penny-pinching politicians fail to realise inheritance tax is so much more than a financial burden

The Daily Telegraph this week launched a campaign to abolish inheritance tax once and for all.

It is a pledge the Tories should put at the heart of their manifesto if they want to convince voters that a Conservative Government can be trusted to put the interests of hard-working families first.

The Conservatives know they need votes, and fast. Labour is miles ahead in the polls and Tory voters are fed up because their party has delivered very little of what it promised.

It’s now more than 15 years since

George Osborne stood up at the Conservative conference and declared: “For this party, lower taxes aren’t just for Christmas. They are for life.”

The speech was credited with spooking Gordon Brown into abandoning plans for a snap election and the Tories went on to win power in 2010.

A crucial election is now once again looming, and Tory backbenchers are looking towards an inheritance tax cut as a means of winning back the public.

Liz Truss, the former prime minister, alongside more than 50 other MPs, also want the tax scrapped outright to prove the party really is low-tax after years of a creeping tax burden not seen since after the Second World War.

Experts and politicians are often baffled when polls reveal that the British public deeply dislikes inheritance tax. After all, they say, very few families end up paying it and it raises a relatively small £7bn a year for the Treasury.

But this misses the point entirely. The true burden of inheritance tax is not so much a financial one, as an emotional and administrative one.

For the families who have to pay it, or prove they do not have to pay it, it comes at a time when they are grieving and requires a great deal of advice and paperwork. There’s a host of exemptions and allowances that can be interpreted in several ways but can cost or save you thousands of pounds.

As we report today the wealthy pay much less of the tax because they can slash their liabilities by employing the very best advisers. It is the unsuspecting middle classes who are truly at risk – especially now inflation has soared.

What many fail to understand about the public’s hatred of inheritance tax is that it is not about the money.

Sure, in theory it should only affect the rich, but Britain understands that it is not truly a tax on wealth, but has mutated into a callous and opportunistic tax that serves only to add misery, anguish and resentment to grief. It’s a tax that leaves virtually everything you have ever worked for at the mercy of the taxman. It’s not compassionate, it’s not fair and now, thanks to inflation, it’s dragging thousands more into its net.

Mr Osborne’s speech back in 2007 saw him pledge to “take the family home out of inheritance tax”. The promise was to increase the-then £300,000 threshold to £1m, but it has risen only slightly to £325,000. To his credit, Mr Osborne did introduce the extra £175,000 allowance for primary residences, but his successors have rendered it all but meaningless by keeping the thresholds frozen while house prices have rocketed.

That’s why merely cutting the tax or pushing up the thresholds will not do. It has to be scrapped completely to save families from the unacceptable fear and administrative burden that inheritance tax provokes.

Do you have a view on inheritance tax? Please write to us with your stories and let us know why you think it needs to be killed off