Governing parties in their death throes thrash about, grasping for life rafts and hunting through old lists to recapture the tried-and-tested vote-winners of yesteryear. The campaign by more than 50 Tory MPs and the Telegraph to abolish inheritance tax is a prime example. Didn’t it work its magic once before, when George Osborne spooked Gordon Brown out of calling an election in 2007 by promising a £1m threshold? Surely, that means it will work again in the Conservatives’ hour of desperate need?
This time, Labour is not spooked. Far from it. Nothing could be more comic than the multimillionaire Nadhim Zahawi leading this campaign, the man whose only memorable moment in his brief chancellorship was being sacked for failing to declare an ongoing investigation into his personal tax affairs. A party of zillionaires campaigning against a tax that only the likes of them need to pay looks like clueless insouciance. It shows how far their feet have drifted from terra firma. Yet again, their trusty Telegraph has led them madly astray – as it always does.
True, people think inheritance tax is the second most unreasonably high tax after council tax, according to research by More in Common. Both arrive as bills, making them visible in a way that other taxes are not. Even though a tiny percentage of estates pay the tax – in 2019-20, it was fewer than 4% – there is a deep and irrational sense of injustice about “taxing the dead” and “double taxation”, even though much of the money accumulated in a property that has multiplied many times in value will never have been taxed in the first place. So will this abolition plan fly? If Rishi Sunak does seize this idea masterminded by Zahawi, Rees-Mogg and the Telegraph, this government will be walking into a death trap of its own making.
What’s more, the myth that Osborne’s plan was a win for the Tories in 2010 is deeply questionable, according to Labour’s pollsters. Prof Tim Bale, an expert Tory party analyst, agrees that the ploy in 2007 didn’t “do as much for George Osborne as everyone seems to think”. Prof Rob Ford, a political analyst, adds: “That’s not what caused the shift in the polls at that time.” He tells me that people hate the tax. But the optics of Tories sheltering their wealth would see “Labour’s campaign ads writing themselves”, Ford says.
Labour will shrug this off – as it has done with many of the government’s desperate gestures and culture war diversions. The current system could be reformed in all kinds of ways: loopholes could be closed for the Duke of Westminster, get-outs ended for farm land. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has suggested replacing inheritance tax with a lifetime gift tax. Alternatively, the tax could be levied on recipients. Or it could be abolished in favour of wealth taxes (though when the Telegraph campaign points out that Sweden abolished inheritance tax, it forgets to mention that the Swedish top tax rate is 57%). Labour’s sternly disciplined messaging has prevented the party from being tempted off-piste; it is relentlessly focused on the cost of living, the NHS, public services and its “fairer, greener” plans.
While the current government tinkers and fidgets, Labour seems more like a serious party of government. “‘Stop the boats’ has got them nowhere,” says Ford, as immigration falls further down the public’s list of concerns. When even xenophobia fails to deliver, the Tories really have lost their last refuge.
Meanwhile, in the serious world, Keir Starmer addresses the GMB conference on Tuesday. The union, rightly interested in protecting its members, was alarmed at Labour’s commitment to block all new oil and gas development in the North Sea. Starmer needs to persuade the GMB that his pledge of £28bn a year to be spent on the party’s green prosperity plan will create far more good jobs, suitable for those same workers in Scotland. This will be the start of a huge off-shore and on-shore wind expansion, with new nuclear plants and factories making the turbines that are currently built abroad. It needs green steel and giga battery sites, as well as home insulation in a dash for clean energy by 2030.
Labour’s promised fair pay agreements across every sector will boost earnings, just as the minimum wage did in the government of Blair and Brown. A union such as the GMB, admirably confronting the likes of Amazon, will find organising far easier under a Labour government, which will oblige every employer to allow union recruiters into every workplace. You can expect a steep rise in union membership. Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow business secretary, makes a strong case for blocking any further oil and gas development. There will be no repeat of Thatcher’s brutal programme of deindustrialisation. Labour is reindustrialising – and it’s all green.
The Tories have tried to claim the £1.5m donated to Labour by Dale Vince, the green campaigning founder of Ecotricity, has shaped its anti-oil policy. Vince is a funder of Just Stop Oil – and why not? A tussle within the shadow cabinet over the sharing out of this £28bn is inevitable. Though the Times claims “Starmer may pull the plug” on the green agenda, those close to him say he has never been more adamant about green investment, inspired anew by Joe Biden’s epic green investment fund that will power the US economy. They insist there is no sliver of distinction between Ed Miliband’s net zero climate programme and Starmer’s pledge that all borrowing for investment will be green.
The Tories have meanwhile vacated the green arena, badly misled again by Telegraph phobias into thinking that it is unpopular as they strive to appeal to their vanishing “red wall” seats. Their instinctive ideological aversion to all things green is a major error: Ford says he’s surprised by “how well green plays right across the board”, from Green party local election successes in Tory seats, to strong support for green industrial investment. By focusing so much on the prejudices of old people, the Tories risk forgetting at their peril that millennials are the biggest age cohort in more than half of all constituencies – and young people want green investment.
The contrast between Labour’s policy seriousness and the Tories’ endless chasing of quick populist wins could hardly be stronger. Bring on Zahawi’s comic attempt to avoid inheritance tax for all his cohort. Labour isn’t worried, nor diverted from its plans for government.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
