On Inheritance Tax
And A-List Watch!
On Gideon Osborne’s podcast ‘Political Thinking’ he recently gave an illuminating insight in to the dysentery of British politics. On the topic of The Chancellor’s Autumn Budget, Gideon posited that the best move politically for Hunt would be flush all of the ‘fiscal headroom’ recently afforded to the Exchequer by falling borrowing costs by ploughing it in to the NHS. The reasoning being that this would checkmate Labour politically – if you wreck the fiscal headroom they cannot make a political offer in the Manifesto to increase spending.
Remarkably, both Gideon and his co-host Mr Balls agreed that this was unlikely to actually improve the functioning of the NHS. This analysis is quite correct – massive increases in spending and staff numbers since 2019 have not produced an increase in medical productivity. George knows that the money would be frittered away on Biscuits from Home but his reasoning is purely political. We should be glad that the founding of UnHyurd Magazine did not predate the coalition – or I have no doubt that Osborne would have been cast as a ‘Centrist Nietzschean Superhero’ a la Messr Macron.
Hunt has opted to use this fiscal headroom differently – proposing to halve inheritance tax. This gives me mixed feelings. Morally, I believe inheritance tax is a good thing. It is repulsive to me that the transfer of unearned wealth to the progeny of the privileged is considered more of a problem by the MbM media than the 50+ marginal income tax rate suffered by the graduate class. I personally dislike young people who spend their 20s-30s leeching of their wealthy parents while dressing up their NEETDOM with fruitless charity work, academia or godawful ‘artistic pursuits’. It is grossly unjust that such individuals will never suffer from the vagaries of the rental market while talented, hard working lower-middle class people are relentlessly tormented by PAYE and bandit landlords because of an accident of birth. To each according to his ability.
The networks of privilege afforded to White privately educated people allow them to avoid the worst of ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ when it comes to moving in to a graduate career, inheritance (and direct transfers) is another insulation against the sharp end of mass immigration. Don’t worry Millie, Julian, Daddy has sorted out that flat in Battersea for you. You won’t have to rent in Plaistow. And once you’ve kids of your own, back to Oxfordshire. This sliver of people is who Soonak is attempting to appeal to with his new strategy to ‘shore up’ that ‘Blue Wall’ – a new political category invented by disingenuous polling grifters/scam artists in 2021, who saw a Bella Wallersteiner selfie on Twitter and decided that the average person in Amersham was a spaniel owner who wanted the Tories to import millions of North Africans while keeping taxes low.
The half-colonels who supported UKIP, the majority of people in these constituencies who voted out in the referendum, the local association in Beaconsfield who tried to deselect Dominic Grieve – they have all disappeared into smoke in the mind’s eye of ‘the Pollsters’. I don’t deny that there are pig ignorant, deranged people in the Home Counties but it’s frankly insulting to imply that there are enough of them in my corner of England for this to be a winning political strategy.
What is the practical calculation regarding inheritance taxes, politically, before the post-war consensus is dismantled? In a polity where the egalitarian principle is ruthlessly enforced, taxation on unearned wealth is spent in a comically evil fashion. Social housing for illegal immigrants in central London who use their largesse to violently rob 20 somethings who pay ½ of their income to share a bedroom. Police officers who attack you in the streets for PWW (protesting while White) and turn a blind eye to racially motivated sexual trafficking. In a multi-racial society, there is also the question of who owns the money. Along which boundaries is inherited wealth being redistributed?