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.

Look at the UK, which recently elected Labour and Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister.

They are talking about the potential of fiddling with their inheritance tax.

They have one, we don't. On Heather's show yesterday we heard about the Labour Party in New Zealand weighing up whether 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 post war baby boomer generation now approaching the average life expectancy.

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

I don't like the idea of this. 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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