Tories need a strong leader to resist Labour’s socialist war on success
Do you own a home, and have you been saving throughout your working life in the hope of leaving your children and grandchildren an inheritance that might help them through difficult times?
And did you believe when you made your prudent decisions over the years that what you were doing was both practically sensible and morally right?
That you were taking responsibility for the well-being of your own family and so ensuring that they would not have to rely on the state for support?
If so, you may wonder why Labour – which speaks often of moral choices – is planning to make you its chosen target for punitive tax rises.
Not only does the government intend to confiscate a higher proportion of that treasured sum you had planned to leave to your loved ones, but it will impugn your character in the process.
You will have to understand that the inheritance which you thought was yours to hand down – which may indeed have been one of the principal motivations of your later working life – is not yours by right.
It is, in fact, a kind of theft from the society at large. Saving and investing to safeguard the future of your own family is not a virtue. It is a form of selfishness.
Investment may increase economic growth, but the only ethically acceptable use for that growth is to provide funding for those who have not saved and invested.
This is not a minor detail about tax policy. It goes to the very heart of the socialist worldview and its concept of human character. The fact that you were able and willing to make those decisions to work productively, to invest judiciously, and to take responsibility for your own family is a sign of your privilege.
Your capacity for doing these things means that you were unfairly advantaged in life’s great race perhaps by virtue of talent or higher motivation, or because you were encouraged by those who raised you to behave in this way.
In other words, the very fact of your willingness to take responsibility is a sign that you are undeserving – and so whatever wealth results from your actions can be justly seized by the state and distributed to those who did not have your good fortune.
There is a profoundly sinister assumption here: no one is capable of truly moral action because their supposed “moral” code is simply a product of the life circumstances with which they happen to have grown up.
If you were lucky enough to have the right genes, the right parents, the right community, then you might have the character to make responsible choices. But that is not really to your credit: you are just doing what comes naturally to you.
And those who do not make good choices are not culpable: they were simply not born with the resources that would make them capable of such behaviour. So if you fail, that is, in itself, proof that you are disadvantaged.
Clearly there are extreme cases of childhood deprivation and misfortune which might qualify for this kind of judgement – people whose early lives made it almost impossible for them to overcome horrendous liabilities.
But there are as many (if not more) examples of the opposite: those who survived appalling ill-treatment, neglect or impoverishment who have grown into proudly competent adults.
That is the nature of individual moral agency: the idea that human beings can make decisions about how to live their lives rather than simply being the products of their conditioning.
If you do not believe in this possibility, then you should see no point in liberty, or the democratic form of government which relies on the concept of free choice and individual responsibility.
What follows is that the only way those with the unfair advantage which allows them to live responsible lives can atone – can manifest the sort of social virtue which the Left finds acceptable – is to give the fruits of their success to those who have not had such good fortune.
Have you got that? The idea that security or success in life can be justly earned by individual effort and sacrifice is defined out of existence because the ability to make such efforts and sacrifices is unfairly distributed.
Hence, the only way to be blameless and worthy of consideration is to fail. Then we (who have not failed) must all share in the guilt because we have, somehow, been complicit in this conspiracy of unfairness.
It is this obvious absurdity which produces what might seem like the disproportionate anger and resentment that inheritance tax provokes.
The argument that Rachel Reeves appears to be making – that it is a tax which affects relatively few – is shamelessly opportunistic (meaning: “it won’t cost us many votes”).
It entirely misses the point which most people – even those who are, at the moment, unaffected – can see.
It is not simply that taxing the property of the dead is seizing money on which tax has already been paid, in some instances twice, but that it is a punishment for what is seen by almost everyone else in the country as admirable behaviour.
Maybe Labour thinks it has persuaded the country that collectivism is the greater good: that it trumps what they used to call “selfish individualism” in the 1980s.
If so, they have forgotten the first lesson of Blairite New Labour which made their return to power possible. It was the principle with which Thatcherism finally defeated the Tory Wets: no one should feel guilty or ashamed for succeeding by their own efforts, or for taking responsibility for their own families.
If you try to run a society on rules that contravene those basic human impulses, you will have to resort to totalitarian measures to sustain it.
In the current Tory leadership race, that argument has surfaced again as the New Wets – the Centre Ground army – try to pull the Conservative party back from an unequivocal commitment to the values with which it swept the board a generation ago.
Kemi Badenoch has over the past few weeks laid it on the line: the basic principles for which the Conservative party should stand are freedom, personal responsibility, and family.
That is much more than an election winning formula.