The Daily Telegraph, where I worked for a decade, is campaigning for IHT elimination.
50 Conservative MPs, including former prime minister Liz Truss, support it.
British politics, media, and society are shown by that campaign and its potential effects.
Experts have little impact.
This insight won’t surprise most readers, but it’s worth making. IHT is popular among Westminster policy wonks and economists, especially on Twitter.
Inheritance hurts social mobility and economic efficiency in my technocratic tribe. We’d prefer the state transfer huge wealth than let it pass to children who may already have considerable economic and social advantages.
Charts support our arguments. Since “double taxation” is usual and unremarked on elsewhere, arguments like “it’s double taxation” infuriate us. VAT-rated products are double-taxed. It’s life.
I’ll skip over other clever points. Our opinions don’t matter. IHT advocates like myself seldom sway public opinion.
We’re all afraid of dying, but the thought of leaving something for our loved ones is so powerful that it doesn’t matter whether your estate isn’t at risk of IHT. You still despise that tax and want it reduced.
Politicians and journalists know that sentiment’s power. Thus, they and the public feel safe dismissing IHT specialists.
Tax and expenditure debates are skewed against Labour.
Abolishing IHT will cost the Treasury £7 billion in tax income. 1p of basic income tax raises around that. Money matters.
Despite their ostensible commitment to sound money and balanced budgets, many Conservatives are noisily demanding this large, costly, and unfunded tax reduction. In the country’s major right-of-centre paper, which has always advocated for fiscal responsibility. (I wrote Telegraph leaders about this.)
This implies what? First, IHT feeling dominates politics. Second, the 2023 Conservative party lacks a defined political or economic theory and may not be the party of sound money. Third, public financial discourse is biased towards Labour.
If top Labour MPs demanded £7 billion in unmet expenditure promises for 4% of the population, they would be heavily criticized. To avoid such criticism, the Starmer agenda is based on Labour avoiding “unfunded” programs. Labour strategists silently angry about the IHT campaign’s double standards are right.
However, they’ll have to live with this distorted discourse into the election, which may result in Labour delivering a more controlled and austere public finances than the Conservatives.
Newsprint matters.
The Telegraph campaign may win. I predict the Conservatives will pledge IHT before the election and use it to fight Labour till polling day. If so, the Telegraph will win its campaign.
Whether the causality is so direct (some of the finest newspaper campaigns demand an outcome that was going to happen anyway) doesn’t matter. The “legacy media” giants still shape politics. Newspapers have lost their ferocity because to declining print revenues and fickle internet readership. But they matter.
