Dodgy Dave? He just put his family first

‘Nonsense!” That was the view on the David Cameron tax row from the early-morning queue in the Co-op. It was ten past seven yesterday, and I was buying the papers. Dennis Skinner may have called the Prime Minister “Dodgy Dave” in the Commons, but the Co-op queue was having none of it.

“You want to give your money to your kids or the government’ll fleece you furrit,” said a Northern lady with a weary grin.

“Anyone with any sense is busy giving what cash they can to their children and grandchildren,” added a handsome silver sage.

Many thousands of words have been written castigating the Prime Minister over his tax affairs. The opinion at the Co-op is: “Shut up, nobody’s bothered.”

Few have the means of Mr Cameron’s mother, Mary, but if they did, they too would be making a gift of £200,000 to their offspring – giving it and praying that they soldier on for another seven years so their children are spared paying a whopping amount of inheritance tax.

And why not? In the Co-op queue, people know that you can work hard, buy a house and save all your life, but if you need to go into a care home, the plague of locusts will descend and confiscate your building society book. Everything – savings, house – will be stripped to pay fees that subsidise the charges of those who never saved.

So why wouldn’t you go about the eminently sensible business of pregiving your house and your money to the people you want to have it? That’s exactly what Tony Benn did. The veteran Socialist left a £5 million estate to his children and used “legitimate tax-planning strategies” to minimise death duties. The Benn children already had part-ownership of their parents’ house after their mother’s death. The Milibands did something similarly tricksy with their fancy house in Primrose Hill. If tax planning is good enough for prolier-than-thou Marxists, it must be socially just, mustn’t it?

I belong to the first generation of Britons who know for sure that our children will never be able to afford to buy somewhere like their family home. Not unless they take up banking – or robbing banks – that is. Himself and I will do our damndest to give the kids enough money to put down a deposit on a gerbil cage off the A14, even if it means downsizing ourselves to a mousehole in Mousehole and handing over any cash seven years before we shuffle off this mortal coil, penniless.

It’s called doing right by your family. Just ask the queue in the Co-op.

‘If you’ve any sense, you give what cash you can to your kids’