One of Tony Blair’s closest political allies has issued an explosive demand for the Government to scrap inheritance tax.
Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary and a leading Blairite “outrider”, claims that the tax, which brought in a total of £3.3 billion last year, is “a penalty on hard work, thrift and enterprise”. * * *
According to Mr Byers, scrapping inheritance tax – which, he argues, was originally meant to apply to the very wealthy – presents a “challenge” to Mr Blair’s successor but would send a “powerful message” to the electorate. The main signal would be that, even though Mr Blair had gone, the middle-class voters who helped to sustain Labour through three successive election victories had not been forgotten.
Inheritance tax, currently levied on all estates worth more than £285,000, [approximately $536,000 USD] has the scope to bring “millions within its net” because of “soaring house prices”.
Labour has dragged millions of people into the inheritance tax “stealth trap” since it came to power. It is estimated that by the end of the decade, the increased wealth of more than 4.5 million people will mean their estates are pushed above the inheritance tax threshold, which currently stands at £285,000 [approximately $536,000 USD].
Just four years ago, the number of estates over the threshold stood at just over two million – meaning, according to the Government’s critics, that Labour has ridden roughshod over its declaration before the 1997 election that families should not be drawn “unfairly” into the inheritance tax net.
