The Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch have recently committed to abolishing inheritance tax - a wheeze which was also promised (for homes up to £1 million) by George Osborne in opposition. Back then it gave the Conservative Party a polls boost which spooked Gordon Brown into avoiding an early general election.
Kemi’s announcement has had a smaller impact, her bounce still existing only within the imaginations of the Tory press barons. Nonetheless the decision by Reform UK to oppose this abolition opens up an interesting dividing line between the two parties. Insofar as this newspaper can be said to take an editorial line, its editorial line is enthusiastically in favour of Inheritance Tax as the only moral form of taxation.
Our position is well-explored, and so we have invited Dogbox to write a short piece putting the contrary view. If only to give him rope for his own noose.
Dogbox
This week, the thatched huts of the Westminster Village were set alight by rumblings in the media jungle and rumours on the bush telegraph that famous Scottish politician and leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party Kerry Badenoch will (after her inevitable election as Prime Minister) abolish Inheritance Tax for good. The Margaret Hilda Roberts of the Yorubaland’s views on inherited wealth have long been unapologetic, the BBC having quoted her in 2025 as saying “pipo go offer my mama money so dia pikin go fit go university, but she no go do am as pipo around us dey enrich demselves, so wen evritin sup, e mean say we lose plenti money so e make me hate pipo wey dey cheat di system”.
In stark contrast to Madam Badenoch’s sanguine views on inherited wealth, are those of retired Finnish racing driver Mika Häkkinen. Mika’s vituperative attitude to the British aversion to Inheritance Tax is best encapsulated in his vivid claim that opponents of IHT believe “that the spirits of the deceased haunt their assets and suffer cruel torments” if they are subject to postmortem taxation.
The time is therefore ripe for us to decide, once and for all, whether it is Mika, or Olukemi, who is right about IHT. Readers, my inherited money is on the latter.
The case for inheritance tax is a strange alliance of vitalism and resentment, and as we will eventually see, IHT serves neither master. But before we get onto refuting the normative case for IHT, we should demolish the practical case for it. IHT sets out to solve a problem that does not in fact exist, or at least does not exist to any great extent. The vitalism-ressentiment case for IHT rests on the notion that wealth and its concomitants, power and influence, flow to the undeserving, creating a society that is neither vital, nor just. Whilst this view might seem somewhat intuitive, it does not survive contact with the real world.
It is well known to the point of cliché that serious inherited wealth rarely survives in the long run. Those instances where it does (think of the Keswick and Swire families) are the Exception, and are built on extraordinary, vitalist inter-generational discipline. The Rule, on the other hand, are families like Mann’s Buddenbrooks. It is not for nothing that we have the expression “rags to rags in three generations”. Those who found businesses hand them over to inadequate children riven by the neuroses associated with having successful fathers, who in turn breed debauched and decadent grandchildren, who exhaust the fortune they did not earn, returning ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Mika rightly despises the Millies and Julians of this world who indulge “artistic pursuits” whilst living in a Battersea flat paid for by daddy, however, to paraphrase the Weight Watcher’s Slimmer of the Year, 1981: our revenge will be the poverty of their children. So universal is this part of the human experience that the Chinese have their own well-known idiom for it: 富不过三代 (fù bù guò sān dài); literally “the prawn toast will not outlast three sittings of the buffet”.
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?
But here we hit upon the nub of it. Because whilst you might despise the sort of bourgeoise person just described, you are wrong to despise them. Indeed, we must defend the bourgeoisie at all costs, and particularly, we must defend bourgeoise values: values like not being gay; and being straight instead.
There will be some who read (and indeed write for) this paper, who think they are bohemians. There may even be some who really are. Writers. Thinkers. Provocateurs. Queers. Drunks. Geniuses.
If one is a great writer, a poet, a genius one does not need a big inheritance. Such people live off their wits. And why should a genius Nick, 30 ans, put up with Raskolnikov-like privations in some grubby garret in East London whilst Julian and Tilly drink matcha lattes in Battersea Park? And doubtless there are also country churchyards filled with mute inglorious Raspails, or Rupert Lowes guiltless to their country’s chuds, all because they were cursed to be named Julian or Tilly, and to have been given a flat in Battersea by daddy after grandpa died and so robbing them of the chance to truly live by their wits.
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.
The books we like to read are full of such bohemian characters. Did X Trapnell ponce off family money? Did Fielding Gray live off an allowance from his parents? Of course not. Our thoughts are haunted by Maclinticks, David Crimonds and Anthony Blanches, however we notice them as we notice fish in the tank of the GP’s waiting room, yet we fail to see the water they are suspended in. That water is conventional, boring, bourgeoise respectability. Everyone reading this knows that not everyone can be a writer, or a genius, or a queer. Society could not function. Of course, someone has to get dropped off by the wife at Rickmansworth station at 8.15 in the morning to get the Metropolitan Line into Moorgate to go and spend 9 hours doing whatever it is that people do in offices. And this goes beyond just keeping the lights on. Every great novel is ultimately no more than a perspective on bourgeoise morals or modes of living. Without it, there is no grist for the artist’s mill, no grit for their oyster.
It is the existence of a strait-laced and steady society founded on bourgeoise norms of moderate hard-work and conventional morality that underwrites and makes possible the lives of the bohemian minority.
One might very well wonder what has happened to the bohemian characters of the mid-century novel-sequence, who seem to have quit our national scene altogether. Where is all the music, the plays, the novels, in post-Blair Britain? Has there really been a British Novelist since Martin Amis snuffed it? Well, do not forget that the entire project of the Left for 80 years or move has been the destruction of the bourgeoise, and without a host to feed off, the bohemian parasite must die.
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. Britain did not emerge as a modern and powerful machine, but as a depressed and diminished backwater; a welfare state annexed to a financial services sector. The final triumph of the vitalist Left of the post-war era (the Left of the Lewis Elliots, the Widmerpools, the Tom Llewellyns) is that pudgy Scouser, jogging amiably around, talking to anyone who will listen about the Stone Roses and barm cakes.
If this country is to flourish - if it is to stand on its own two feet in the world, if it is to have again great novelists, great bohemians, great queers - it needs its bourgeoise spirit to be nurtured and repaired. Readers will recall the 2016 Conservative party leadership election debate, where Andrea Leadsom, Brexiteer challenger to favourite Theresa May, courted controversy when she said of the economist John Maynard Keynes “[he] was a homosexual and had no intention of having children. We are not dead in the long run … our children are our progeny. It is the economic ideals of Keynes that have gotten us into the problems of today”. Leadsom was forced to apologise for those remarks, however she was completely correct in what she said.
Because the very centre of bourgeoise life is the family. As any internet phrenologist worth his salt will tell you, what distinguishes “the Anglo” from lesser breeds without the Law, is that we have small, nuclear families, rather than vast clans like the Irish or Pakistanis. This, we are told, is the secret sauce of the English genius, because the excess of capital that it allowed to accumulate allowed us to become the first industrial economy. But it had also produced to contours of our distinctive national culture. Our culture is traditionally private. Our home is our castle, and outside of our home we arrange our own amusements, without the mandate or license of church or state. This has made us the nation of pigeon fanciers and amateur carpenters of Orwell, but also the race who invented every major sport except Korfball and Pádel.
And what is the impulse of every family man: it is to work hard so he can leave a bit for his family. In doing so he feels not as if he is putting into Time’s wallet alms for oblivion, but rather that he flings the flaming torch to the host behind, earning his little place in immortality. It is exactly that impulse that the socialist despises, and that they wish to destroy through Inheritance Tax.
Simon Raven, a great novelist, bohemian, and queer, understood all this. Reflecting back on his great mid-century novel sequence one year into Blair’s first government, and three before he died, he thought about what had changed in Britain since the 50s and 60s.
“I was able to take for granted while writing, that my characters were able to demonstrate while being written, that an Englishman’s home was still his fortress. […] Who would have thought it possible , even in 1985 by which time the rot was visibly poisoning the fabric, that by 1998 disagreements about such items as ‘race’ and ‘gender’ should lead to sly censorship, seething accusation, or even to threats of imprisonment. […] England has become a land that grudges reward or even toleration of honest speaking (Enoch Powell)[…]”
Despite being a queer, who received no inheritance, had no need of one, and had nothing left to bequeath as one when he died, Raven knew that it was the bourgeoise world to which he had never belonged that he owed his bohemian life to, and as he approached death it was the weakening and sickening of that bourgeoise world that he mourned.
For artists, for bohemians, for queers, but mostly for ourselves, and for England, we must therefore stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Aunty Kemi, and fight for the abolition of Inheritance Tax.