How can I hate Reform when they have abandoned the misguided pledge to scrap IHT? Something I alone have told them to do for 3 years? Robert Jenrick deserves immense credit for this. It is a sign of genuine political maturity that the party is now able to decisively reject a ruinous, unpopular and unnecessary Boomer handout. Our advice to Bobby has probably already been grasped, once you have crossed the Rubicon, you must conquer Rome; it is no use saying you’ll abolish the tax later on, the public don’t parse numbers beneath a headline. Instead, you should seize the nettle and take the logic of your argument to its conclusions: abolish income tax for the under-30s, as Orban gave the precedent for in Hungary, funded by a rise in the Inheritance Tax. This will immediately force Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch to argue on the same side in favour of entitlements against the youth. It will effortlessly give Reform 2 weeks of free coverage. I am a man of my word, Reform are now the only party standing in the way of abolishing the last tax paid by Boomers, they have my unwavering support.
Tony Blair’s son, Leo Blair who our system says will be richer than a 160 IQ Senior Wrangler born in Blackpool for no reason whatsoever. If Reform want to ‘sell’ this policy just print giant posters of Tony Blair’s family next to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed twenty something couple with tagline: Taking THEIR money and giving it BACK to YOU.
The defence of inherited wealth does not make any sense in the context of the British Right’s broader platform. The average age of estate beneficiaries in 2025 was 41 years old, while income tax and Educational usury are paid by workers in their 20s, the same people who rail against ‘Boomers’ and pretend to speak for ‘Nick 30 ans’ look like idiots or hypocrites when they spend so much time defending the biggest boomer tax break of them all. Taxes on economic activity, like the income tax, generally retard growth while taxes on assets do not, which is why, during the golden age of Capitalism, European monarchies levied a ‘tax on movable goods.’ The first-world countries which have abolished Inheritance Tax, like Sweden, have made up for it with massive income taxes which entrench generational and social inequality – this is why there are few Swedish self-made billionaires but plenty of Swedish aristocrats. The Left understand this, even though the right don’t, which is why the orthodox Gordon Brown New Labour tax policy is to ramp up taxes on individuals but cut inheritance and corporation tax. What the Left dislikes is independent individuals, inequality per se, so long as it takes the form of feudal custom and easily-regulated corporations, doesn’t concern them.
Last year, I wrote an article describing how the ‘British Online Right’ would cease to be a relevant force unless certain polemical lines were drawn in the sand. I predicted that Nick 30 ans, a meme which initially described how – white – pensioners and minorities are stealing money from young graduates, was rapidly becoming a series of floating signifiers, easily appropriated by the Conservative party. It was a controversial article but would anyone witnessing the spectacle of an account calling itself ‘Nick 30 ans’ praising Kemi Badenoch for being ‘strong on defence’ seriously argue I was wrong? The fact this person is not instantly dogpiled is a sign whatever was going on in 2020-21 is no longer happening. There is simply nothing you can get from an “anon” account in British politics that you cannot also get from Richard Littlejohn’s Daily Mail column: ‘I’m slightly racist but no eugenics thank you, I like private schools and hate inheritance tax, Tony Blair was a savvy operator, Kemi is standing up to Mr. Putin, Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.’
I don’t say this to argue with these people but in order to warn the serious people in Reform, who are too busy to run their own x accounts, that you should be very sceptical about enthusiastic young staffers trying to sell you the idea of an xdotcom intellectual scene with funky yutes on whom Reform can rely. There is nothing close to 2016, or even 2024, MAGA social media support for Reform. There is no Reform equivalent of Ricky Vaughan or Geoffrey Martin who can effortlessly dominate online discussions and ensure the party’s agenda is defended. The British Online Right, since late 2023, is a much older demographic, much more politically cautious and less independent of mainstream media (“The Prince of Darkness. It is known.”) There is a big difference between the small circle who originated most of the key concepts and memes in the early 2020s and the people who try to ‘popularise’ these things, while suffering from a greater emotional susceptibility to manipulation. Most of ‘the British Online Right’ secretly wish for it to be socially acceptable to support Kemi, and when Reform are in power they will be a thorn in the side of the party.
On a similar point, journalists who wish to write about this soi distant scene should be sensitive to how people who use the same words do not necessarily mean the same things. It is incredibly hard to write about Internet culture unless you are steeped in it yourself, the primary sources are ephemeral by nature; the benefits of doing so are so slender, the argument that you should ignore it and stick to the verifiable facts of the Lobby is a strong one. For example, I have long used the word ‘Meritocracy’ to describe my political beliefs (I can provide evidence that I used the term on x as early as 2017), several people in British public life also use this word because they explicitly share these beliefs and acknowledge me as the author of them. Some people in Reform also use ‘Meritocracy’ to describe themselves and, while we cannot name the influences which led them to that choice, they wouldn’t be associated with us. They have also never argued publicly for the Inheritance Tax.
Theresa May, David Cameron, Tony Blair and Vivek Ramaswamy have all used the term ‘Meritocracy.’ For reasons I’ve never quite understood, it is also associated with the self-help author Jordan B. Peterson. When these people say ‘Meritocracy’ they mean a feature of existing systems. I imagine this is the provenance of the word’s usage by Reform. What I and my associates mean by Meritocracy is an alternative system to Democracy, our principles are as follows:
Unfalsifiable moral claims about ‘rights’ (the divine right of kings, the ECHR etc.) be replaced by empirically verifiable metrics of achievement (biometrics, I.Q tests etc.) as the basis of the relationship between the state and the citizen.
Changes are implemented in society to remove factors which could be said to interfere with objective judgment of these metrics and to improve the metrics of society as a whole (Inheritance Tax, reduction in hours of labour-time, universal and selective education, eugenics etc.) Some of these will be tested in power and found not to work, they aren’t dogmatic but principle remains same: this is what ‘social policy’ becomes under Meritocracy.
The executive offices of the state simply become ‘the best’ individuals, the state becomes the property of private individuals, these individuals as sovereigns are in a permanent state of the exception standing above the law.
The succession to these offices to be managed by competition between these individuals which also serves as the superior replacement to ‘checks and balances’ preventing a single individual from dominating the rest and thereby recreating mass society. At present, this stage can only be implemented by Advanced Technology we are building in secret with the Top Minds of the generation.
‘The Absolute Freedom of the Individual’ posited by Stirner, Fichte, Nietzsche etc. therefore ceases to become an abstract claim but a material reality; the individual who rises to the top of the state is raised above nature and society to become a pure value-creating being.
By contrast, the Tory-inspired people use ‘Meritocracy’ to describe their desire to make civil servants political appointees, restore the ‘sovereignty of Parliament’, then allow the free market to determine social status with some very vague investment in ‘tech.’ Okay, so, Australia. Elections, the common law system and comprehensive education all remain alongside taboos against selective breeding. It is entirely in keeping with the ideas of the Tory intelligentsia c. 2017-22, the Charlie Kirk pre-Trump GOP, AFUEA!!!! memes about greasy Wops who want to steal our Gorgeous Falkland Islands and represents no ‘revolutionary’ political programme.
It is because of our fidelity to the total political programme of Meritocracy, as opposed to mere rhetorical flirtation, that we support the 100% Inheritance Tax. We cannot see how this programme can work without it and we can see no other programme capable of securing the future. The rest of this article shall defend our position in response to a commentator called Dogbox, who has written a droll critique of our views. This is an opportune moment to repeat J’accuse does not have a party line, anyone can submit an article disagreeing with the writers and see it published.
Inherited Wealth is still massively under-taxed. When you understand, which all people secretly do, that it is more like a benefit given by the state on random lottery basis than a ‘tax’, a 40% Inheritance Tax is like if the government bragged about only punishing 40% of crimes. People may avoid Inheritance Tax by the fiction of the ‘nil-rate band’, by taking out insurance policies using trusts, by relevant property and investment trusts which are practically IHT exempt and by the preposterous named dog exemptions to businesses and family farms. Only just under 5% of wills in Britain are subject to IHT which represents potentially trillions of wealth which must instead by stolen from taxpayers.
Dogbox begins by introducing us to:
“Mika’s vituperative attitude to the British aversion to Inheritance Tax…”
Is there a “British” aversion to the Inheritance Tax? I am willing to bet a statement like “people should only be taxed for money they haven’t earned themselves” is one of the few things which could unite Romford man and Dalston man in Anglo-Celtic fraternal agreement. None of the protests against IHT, despite the support of a famous and broadly popular celebrity, have moved the issue a jot. I’ve never met an “ordinary bloke” who after the obligatory “send them back”, “hangings too good for them” and “put the unemployed to work” finished off with a “And I think, I think, I think – I’ve paid into the system my whole life…”
Inheritance Tax abolition has always been the fringe cause of elderly, economically inactive, largely left-wing people living outside of London. It has been adopted by Kemi Badenoch, perhaps the least popular politician in British history. It is not a massively popular cause and nobody has won an election on this issue. Compared to the Income Tax, which affects everybody, student loans which are intuitively unjust and tariffs on alcohol, cigarettes and gambling I don’t think anyone cares about the IHT; and if raising the IHT were combined with abolishing some of these taxes, which is what I want to see happen, I think there’d be great popular support. Reform should realise now that they have crossed the Rubicon, they may as well enter Rome and adopt this platform.
“It is well known to the point of cliché that serious inherited wealth rarely survives in the long run.”
Therein lies the rub. Our objection to this custom is because we cannot sensibly reject the claims of egalitarianism, and the Foucauldian deterministic anthropology underwriting it, so long as the counter-argument exists which points to inherited advantages people did not earn and which are not part of their nature. So long as inherited wealth survives for a single generation, you cannot say that a genius like John Nash can achieve greater power than a totally unremarkable person who happened to be born to a billionaire. If this is the case, what exactly is the argument against Communism, or the destruction of ‘white privilege?’ That this would ‘decrease happiness in the long run’is another form of collectivism with vanishing rhetorical force for modern people. For those who adopt the course of bravado and say we don’t need to justify our opposition to these things with logic, there’s no evidence of a successful movement which has said this. Might makes right (in the naive sense… if Nietzsche was so strong why did he go insane?) is the credo of life’s losers. The promise of Meritocracy to the world is that any person of genius can eclipse the Rothschilds in a single life-span. Meritocracy is the only thing we are confident in defeating what some call ‘nihilism.’
Our case, therefore, does not “rest on the notion that wealth and its concomitants, power and influence, flow to the undeserving, creating a society that is neither vital, nor just” – Many people who inherit wealth also show themselves to be perfectly capable and many hereditary castes, like the German Junkers, were regarded as accomplished; it rests on the fact there can be no justification for hierarchy, the state, what the 18th century called ‘society’ as opposed to ‘nature’, except as a means for genius to achieve power and that the custom of inherited wealth undermines this. The talented people who inherit wealth can never prove that their talent wasn’t an accident of this wealth and so will always cower before revolutionaries who adopt this line of attack in favour of general social levelling. I came to my views on IHT partly by very careful observation of how ‘Wokeness’ affected people of my social background. The mere fact that people who inherit wealth are stupid is of no concern to us, we do not ‘resent’ the wealthy and if we desired it could’ve lived that life easily, our position is the result of logic that a radically Meritocratic society is the only one which can, under the conditions of ‘the Death of God’, justify something resembling civilisation and safeguard far more important things, like the continuation of European peoples.
As for whether this contention is valid, which Dogbox doesn’t touch on but which ought to be included in this piece; the argument capable of defeating “Communism” in purely logical terms is that of amoral self-interest which denies the authority of any objective morality. Inherited wealth has been defended in many ways but not one of its defenders says it derives from the individual willpower of the deceased, this is self-evidently preposterous. You cannot ‘you can just do things’ IHT, you cannot gigachad “what if I didn’t pay inheritance tax” it, you cannot “might makes right” it, once you are dead, you cannot do anything. Inheritance, even if you think it an essential and just custom, is indeed a custom, or ‘social construct’, a right reliant upon the state to be effective and willing submission to other people. A man who owes his position to inherited wealth can be rightly accused of owing it to other people and to society, it would be absurd for him, therefore, to invoke individual self-interest and the prerogatives of the stronger to defend his position.
“We can of course see this in the economic data. Countries without any form of taxation on death estates, like Sweden as cited by Mika, or Singapore, have broadly similar Gini co-efficients as yon far country. And as someone like Jacob Rees-Mogg would doubtless say to someone like Jeremy Vine, on some execrable day time television program, the wealthiest, who have the resources and wherewithal to structure their affairs so as to avoid IHT, don’t end up paying it anyway. Yet again the yoke falls upon the shoulders of our professional middle classes, whose wealth is tied up in immovable residential property: Times readers; Radio Four listeners; Rejoiners; adorers of Ottolenghi; Fathers of two; Cambridge graduates. Need I go on?”
What this means is that the average Swede, who is a professional worker and thus a taxpayer, can never make enough money to achieve real social mobility; while the people who own the assets in Sweden are much the same people who did so when Mrs Julie was published. Perhaps, if you are an effective altruist like Dogbox, the ‘Gini Coefficient’ excuses this but I am not an effective altruist; I believe the only justification of society is whether the talented can rise without limits on their power. The combination, replicated by all Social-Democratic parties in the 20th century, of abolishing the IHT while raising Income Tax, is what you would do if you specifically wanted to preserve a feudal power structure under the patina of Democracy. Abolishing the Inheritance Tax is the precise opposite of ‘bourgeois’ society. On these sinister lines, the aristocratic Highgate boy, Labour minister and (thrillingly) a queer Anthony Crosland vowed to ‘shut down every fucking grammar school’ and opened the comprehensives. This brings us nicely to the last part of Dogbox’s argument which is a brief, revisionist sketch of Britain’s postwar Labour movement which introduced the estate duty.
However, before this, we must briefly touch upon the obscurantist appeal to the magic power of the global super-rich to evade any tax imposed anywhere. This is not the case. The super-rich have to pay armies of lawyers to do this, move their residence at great cost, it is rarely successful and this is why they lobby so hard to influence the tax code. In fact, precisely because inheritance is more like a benefit paid by the state than a natural right, it is one of the easier things to tax. The super-rich themselves need the legal infrastructure of wills to settle disputes among themselves – as the ongoing punch-up among the Rothschild clan shows, these people quarrel; estates are made up of hard-assets like cars, homes and Rare Gemstones which cannot be moved to High Trust jurisdictions like Panama or Dubai with extreme ease. If someone tried to avoid IHT by moving all of their assets into some commodity like gold and storing it in a Hong Kong safehouse, there would be nothing stopping their heirs from stealing it by force, nothing to impose the Donkey Shelter bequest in the will upon angry nephews. It is much harder to avoid tax on an estate than it is to avoid tax on drug profits, education or income. The nature of inheritance means the state already has records of most estates. All that is lacking is the will and sufficient digitisation.
“Likewise, one does not need an inheritance to be a homosexual. Thanks to the Conservative Party, amyl nitrate is cheap and abundant, and so it is possible to sustain a life of debauched hedonism even on a relatively modest salary.”
I’m not really sure why ‘Dogbox’ spends so much of the rest of this article trying to insinuate that I am gay (I am a virgin.) He also seems convinced I am a ‘Bohemian’ (I am a virgin) or at least someone with Bohemian pretensions (I have a suburban Baptist fear of idleness and, even in the depths of unemployment, made sure to work, even uselessly, from 9-5), so I assume he is just unfamiliar with us. Now, there is an interesting tangent here about the housebound lifestyles failing to properly tax inheritance imposes upon the youth, and the historical correlation of this with a preponderance of “queers” as Dogbox campily calls them but the Sun is currently opposing our native sign. Why do people waste my time at such crucial junctures?
The Colour of Privilege: Immigration and the Inheritance Tax
In discussions about the Inheritance Tax, because no adult with an I.Q over 100 actually believes it is justified to leave random bequests untaxed while taxing income, you will often see right-wingers accuse you of ‘wanting all the money to go to darkies.’
While being forced to scroll the FYP, I witnessed this Kemi Badenoch fan append his cuck-fantasy about migrant criminals with a totally insane, madness mantra repetition of “refugees living in your parents house” which does not fit, stylistically, gramatically or logically, with what is otherwise a fairly standard Fascist post. There is absolutely nobody, on the political left or elsewhere, who wishes to solve the migrant crisis by a ludicrously over-complicated plot of forcing Boomers to sell their homes to Serco over three decades. It is like if he quote-tweeted a random crime video from Croydon saying “Yeah-he-he my fellow Anglorinos love living in the YOOKAY where all these BOMALIANS are living in Social Housing so that GB soldiers can’t execute a strong Indo-Pacific Tilt and stand up to Mr. Putin and beat Hamas.” This is because the individual is very clearly trying to give bog-standard, true Blue, BoJo4PM politics a dangerous, edgy air by tying them, however vaguely, to ‘racism.’
Dogbox, to his credit, does not stoop to this rhetoric but a tangent is needed to address it as it is so common.
I have taken to calling this Intersectional Nazism, or argumentum ad subsaharan, where every single political issue is somehow brought back to the presence of non-whites in Europe. In the days of Intersectional Communism, you were not allowed to offer simple solutions to one off issues without dismantling the whole architecture of oppression, and you had to accept completely unfalsifiable, utopian schemes like ‘anarcho-communism’ as the baseline against which everything else was to be tested. In Intersectional Nazism, ‘mass deportations’ play this role, as something which no right-winger actually advocates for in a meaningful way but which you are obliged to treat as their position simply because it is something they like.
For example, I remember arguing as a teenager with a once famous left-wing journalist online about the grooming gangs. They believed that the gangs were caused by patriarchy or some such nonsense and thus no solution could be offered to them besides ‘dismantling patriarchy.’ All well and good but I don’t see why I should wait 300 years until Mirpuri peasants are educated to be nice to women when we could just hang 100 people overnight and save ourselves a lot of fuss and bother. Similarly, I am not obligated to support blatantly stupid things on the basis of hypothetical mass deportations no right-wing party, certainly not Kemi Badenoch, actually propose doing.
I am not happy with the fact the government spends so much of our tax revenue on unproductive, malign strangers to appease the religious courts but this is a separate issue from how this tax revenue is collected. If you want these people gone, say so and perhaps devote more of your energies to affecting this than advancing the cause of a Nigerian lady who wouldn’t be allowed to hold office in most ‘civic nationalist’ countries. If the political decisions of the U.K government pertaining to where taxation flows in the budget mean IHT is bad, then I guess anyone who opposes ‘Abolish the Police’ is in favour of arresting people for hate crime laws.
The British government does not breakdown estates by ethnic background so there is no way to tell how much certain groups rely disproportionately on legacies. The anecdotal evidence strongly suggests most minority groups would leave their children more money, as a percentage of that heir’s income, than whites. Indians, Overseas Chinese, Jews and most Muslims are, like Dogbox’s Anglos, family-centred and communitarian groups. Their religions all stress filial piety and obedience to the ancestor over individual conscience. Africans are also communitarian but rarely build up intergenerational wealth because, for the most Anglo of the Anglo-Celts, you won’t get taxed twice when you’re dead but while you’re alive in the form of ‘the black tax.’ More on this later.
The flip-side of ‘work hard, study technology’ is that you have an uncomplicated right to inherit your parents wealth and steward it for the next generation. The structure of capitalism in India and the Chinese diaspora still favours 19th century style family dynasties like the Tata brothers over joint-stock companies. This was, of course, also a feature of the first wave of Jewish capitalists like the famous Rothschilds. Something we can measure, is that they are much more likely to stay at home for longer than whites.
This must, at some level, especially in places with low out-migration like Bradford or Rotherham, filter into a greater reliance on inherited wealth. The average Pakistani lives in a mutli-gen household, performs infrequent low-skilled labour and collects benefits. The income tax is not something he really has a problem with. Within this multi-gen arrangement, someone will own some tangible hard asset, like a shop or a house, which is used as collateral for other money-making schemes (the shop can act as a front for drug-dealing) These assets, and capital accumulated by benefits fraud, presumably need to be passed down to someone, not necessarily the son. Taxing them is a real portion of community wealth going out the door.
In fact Inherited Wealth and our refusal to tax it is central to the entire mass immigration model. Immigrants receive a 5 year amnesty on capital outside the U.K upon moving to Britain. Immigrants, typically, belong to the wealthier section of their homelands and exploit capital and educational status attained there, under far less egalitarian conditions, to gain an advantage over the white working class which is never accounted for by proponents of ‘Meritocratic’ immigration. You see this in educational credentials as well as wealth. People are now cottoning onto the fact that a degree in Doctorship from the University of Bangalore does not, perhaps, mean you will look after Nan as well as a British-trained nurse. In a “Meritocratic” immigration system, third world graduates would have their family wealth confiscated at entry.
I could definitely make the troll-argument one day that “actually existing mass deportations” would be banning all immigration from countries which lack an over 90% inheritance tax pursuant to detailed analysis of the receipts.
The jury is still out for empirical evidence but I’m willing to wager ethnic minorities across the socioeconomic spectrum rely far more on inherited wealth than all but the richest whites and that a great deal of the agitation to see the IHT repealed comes from Black Voices. Ethnic minorities and especially first-gen immigrants will massively benefit from the repeal of IHT. It will make it easier for them to move meaningful amounts of money into Britain and it will cement their economic position in the cities relative to poorer whites.
Kemi is, of course, a poster girl of inherited wealth owing everything she has in life to her family’s ill-gotten gains from Nigeria: another country which lacks an estate tax. Lord Richard Sunak, another favourite target of Anglo-Celtic polemics, owes his vast fortune purely to the fact his wife, domiciled in 0% estate tax caste-society India, inherited a vaster fortune. If the IHT were abolished and Sunak’s missus permanently domiciled herself in Britain, she would be several times richer than Arron Banks and Richard Tice despite never having worked a day in her life. Are the Saxons simply a natural slave race? Will they ever succeed in escaping from the need for guidance from canny Normans, who sail across Njord’s dominion upon the breath of Tyr, to propagandise the low-trust secrets of the mighty — that you can kill people and take their stuff?
Finally, there is an important cultural-aesthetic point about how third world sensibilities have warped discussion of the IHT, and wealth in general, on X.
We earlier mentioned the black tax. A huge amount of discourse about ‘intergenerational wealth’ is simply driven by random black people trying to explain to each other that you shouldn’t give half your salary to an uncle because he asked you to. In the black community, this is an individualistic development moving from a tribal society to one centred on individual households, albeit without the biological scaffolding to make it work. For a white man to engage in this talk, it is a regressive development. Most of the barboor jacket, bottle service, preppy gent, yacht club content you see on the FYP is produced and consumed by third-worlders having local variants of the Bounty Bar debates within their own communities you are not supposed to see. This unfortunately causes certain sections of white right-wingers, who in some of their core values are closer to third worlders than “third worldist” whites to become degenerate in their attitude to wealth by playing on shared aesthetics.
In countries with no real experience of Christianity, it takes 145 IQ to successfully argue that someone with visible material success might not be clever or virtuous. Third worlders do not understand how Tony Blair, Hunter Biden and Keir Starmer are widely regarded as morons despite being wealthy. Unlike the anti-banausic cult of the Ancient Greeks, third worlders do not seek leisure as a means to intellectual and athletic achievements. The purpose of wealth is leisure and the purpose of leisure is to do nothing at all. The average Indian cannot comprehend Wittgenstein giving away his fortune which is why they can only understand pieces like this one through the prism of ‘resentment.’ The goal of existence is unending bottle service and Emirates ‘The Residence’ after which you die and your children receive all of your money for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
The new wave of snobbery is the first social phenomenon I’ve marked where white people are not simply being replaced but actually adopting the mannerisms of third world populations. I am still, just about old enough to recall English people seeing it as a sign of vulgarity to talk about how much money you made in public. The contempt for “strivers” and worship of indolence is utterly foreign to European culture where children were expected to study in draughty rooms for 18 hours a day. Goethe defines our whole culture as striving. The Calvinist work ethic, which underwrites our culture far more than ‘the Hajnal line’, consists in the belief that the Elect will Strive joylessly to accomplish a calling given to them by God.
What are the psychological roots of the need to defend inherited wealth? Why is it that people are so dead-set on paying huge taxes while they are alive, in exchange for the assurance they won’t pay taxes when they are rotting in the ground? Why do Brits care more about the rights of corpses than teenagers? Why do people, who I know for a fact do not stand to inherit much, get so defensive about benefits given to strangers by zombies?
We have promised, however, to address the last, historical part of Dogbox’s article.
Indeed, we forget when we see our hermaphrodite Prime Minister Andeh, jogging across the finish line of a fun-run, his wrinkled female breasts swinging pendulously under his imitation-vintage Everton top, that the Left was once a vitalist movement. In 1945, the Left saw a tired country, wearied by war, and sought to replace the modest and irrational Edwardian British state, with a chromium machine, powered by the white heat of technology and science. That machine first destroyed the working classes, substituting their Christian dignity for sluttish dependence. Then it came for the bourgeoisie, first taking their freedoms, and then increasingly their wealth. Great and vital men designed this machine – men who had been Beach Masters at Anzio, men who had won all the glittering prizes. They tried to synthesise a vital new Britain- a modern Britain that could stand up for herself in the world. But as we know, their failure was total.
I cannot stand the myth of ‘Old Labour’ and will not traffic in them. What good existed in Attlee’s Labour existed because the Fabian Society still held, among their ranks, Eugenicist Liberals like Beveridge and not ‘brassy Northern matrons.’ It was, interestingly enough the Liberal tradition who invented the IHT in Britain, J.S Mill, the paragon of ‘bourgeois’ society, argued that bequests be taxed more than incomes. The presence of this faction in the policymaking part of New Jerusalem gives it a very different texture to the Labour Party which took power with Wilson, shaped by Roy Jenkins’ “Civilised Society.” For example, it is wrong that “Christian dignity” was targeted by the welfare state: Christian value-judgments were built into much of its early texture: in, for example, the requirement until 1974 that social housing tenants had to be ‘of good character.’
But assuming Dogbox’s lazy summary is correct, can we say that they failed? The Estate Duty was brought in in 1949 and over the next two years Britain’s TFR skyrocketed. Nobody missed the old stately homes and nobody protested the change outside outside of the world of Tessie Buttock’s hotel, the Captain’s Table at the Royal Hotel and The Old Gang. A recent piece of writing I enjoyed was Dan Hitchens profile of Roger Scruton. Scruton himself isn’t interesting to me and doesn’t become more interesting in the piece. What is interesting is the depiction of the world of the Grammar School generation and the sad contrast it makes to the fate of a Scruton born in the same circumstances today.
I believe the answer to the utterly mystifying passion for abolishing the IHT lies in the fact nobody today knows what it is like to live in a rich and progressive country. If you were a normal, middle class person in 1958 with a teenage child who had, via grammar school, become the first in your lineage to go to university — proper universities where the porters cleaned your shoes — why on earth would you care about “being taxed twice” or the other tedious slogans belched forth by the pro-necromancy party? Your child’s social mobility would be mirrored by the general mobility of the world, they would be doing things you could never have dreamed of, like travelling by intercontinental, supersonic planes to different continents or having sex with lots of other attractive young people. You would understand what all successful stewards understand, that you have less to offer your children than they can win for themselves, because you had done your job and left the world a better place.