Time to correct Brown’s most shameful act – or we’ll deserve to lose

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Inheritance TaxBy Lewis Goodall

For me, the most shameful day in this Labour government’s life came on 7th November 2007. This was the day that Alistair Darling more than doubled the threshold on inheritance tax, for nothing more than shallow political manoeuvring.

Those, of course, were sunnier days; Brown was actually ahead in the polls (yes, I know it was a long time ago, but try and imagine), Cameron was on the ropes; talk of an early general election was on everyone’s lips. The leviathan that was Brown rode high, and with him, the prospect of a fourth Labour term was a tangible one.

And so a desperate Cameron and Osborne deployed their last chance saloon inheritance tax gambit. The words ‘The next Conservative government will increase the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million’ ushered the dawn of the Conservative revival from which they have never looked back.

Superficially, (and particularly to the wealthy media) such a package seemed attractive. Lifting those precious (and much talked of) hard working families’ property out of the ‘death tax’, who could argue with that? Certainly not Brown, who not a week later gleefully thought he had outmanoeuvred the Tories in a game of ‘raise the threshold’, increasing the limit to £600,000 (to be increased to £700,000 in 2010). What japes!

What a pathetically wasted opportunity. Brown could have come out fighting for what he must know is right. But instead of pointing out that Cameron’s measure would be a tax boon for the top six per cent of the richest people in the land, instead of arguing that if meritocracy is anything more than a meaningless sound bite then a redistribution on wealth is an absolute must, instead of fighting for that fifty per cent of people who literally own nothing in wealth or assets in our country, Brown folded and decided to shove wealth upwards. It was a callow and pathetic act.

And yet even now, if reports are to be believed it seems that even faced with appalling fiscal deficits, it isn’t the Labour party that has the guts to ditch the inheritance tax breaks. Brown and Darling are still too timid, too scared of the uber-wealthy and even the (now government owned) City to do what’s right and abandon the increase in the threshold.

The saddest thing of all is that the argument in favour of an increase was based on the idea that it would take the wind out of the Tories’ sails; instead the flip-flopping Brown looked weak and devoid of his own ideas. It was the beginning of the end of his hold on the political scene. We sacrificed fairness in the name of political game playing and Labour (predictably) came off worst.

Once again, the government should follow the Tories’ lead, but this time for the right reasons. Do it in the name of fiscal probity, but also do it for the millions who own nothing, for the society where the top one per cent of earners own twenty-one percent of the wealth, do it in the name of every child yet to be born whose life chances ought to be determined not on the wealth they inherit but on the quality of their character and do it for a Labour party who desperately needs something to fight for. If the government can’t, then we deserve to lose.

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