Ryan Bridge: Labour should steer well clear of an inheritance tax

Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

I'm always a little bit paranoid about what governments are planning and what kind of taxes that they're scheming up, and if you look at the UK, which is of recently elected governments, one of the few that sort of has a mandate and is actually functioning.

I mean, look at France or look at the lame duck president in the United States. However, if you look at the UK and Keir Starmer, they are talking about, and it is just muffles and quiet secret little meetings that have been reported in the press, the potential for an inheritance, fiddling with their inheritance tax.

They have one, we don't. On Heather's show yesterday they were speaking about with Geoff Nightingale about the potential for our Labour Party to introduce one.

I hate the idea of it. In the UK it's 40% and they paid £7.5 billion in death duties last year, which is a huge increase and this is largely because property prices have gone up.

Governments all over the world are running out of money and they're running out of ways to tax people, and this one's quite appealing to a lot of them.

If you look at the UK in particular, the number paying death duties is expected to jump from 33,000 this year to nearly 44,000 by the end of the next parliament.

That is a very tempting number for a government that needs new ways of finding revenue. And this is obviously the, the post war baby boomer generation now approaching, you know, the average life expectancy.

So look out governments all around the world will be looking at ways to tax us more. I'm not saying it's going to happen here, obviously there was a hint on Heather show yesterday that, that Labour might be planning something.

I don't like the idea of this, I think keep out of our business, please.

If somebody is dying in your family, the last thing you want to think about is the 40% you got to pay to the tax man, right?

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