Kemi Badenoch’s conference speech rehearsed the argument that Andy Burnham’s economic policies were warped by his “nostalgia” for the 1970s, unlike her own forward-looking programme for “a better tomorrow” (Tories accused of prioritising rich voters as Badenoch lays out inheritance tax cut plan, 7 October).
She appears not to see that her preference for a lesser-regulated capitalist market economy, with lower public expenditure, taxes and national debt, coupled with “tough love” welfare policies, is itself harking back to arguments that have circulated for centuries.
Admittedly, her position is not as extreme as the one espoused at the beginning of the 19th century by the leading political economist David Ricardo, who argued that Great Britain would be happy and prosperous if the “evil” of the national debt was extinguished completely, and the country embraced a system in which trade is left “perfectly free” and taxation reduced to a bare minimum.
His own “tough love” proposal was to scrap the Poor Laws, as they encouraged overbreeding by the working class, thereby depressing market-determined wages.
Terry Peach
Chester
Kemi Badenoch says “people who work hard and save should be rewarded for that effort” and regards inheritance tax (IHT) as unfair double taxation on people who have already paid tax on their earnings. In fact, most IHT revenue is driven by inherited and asset-derived wealth, which expands through unearned capital appreciation and is untaxed during a person’s lifetime.
Badenoch has elsewhere called IHT immoral. The real moral injury is borne by all those low-paid, hard-working people who face a choice between heating or eating, and for whom acquiring sufficient wealth in a lifetime to leave money to their children is an unimaginable dream.
Penelope Turton
London
