Sting’s children won’t be getting their paws on his £180m fortune. Like Nigella Lawson and Anita Roddick, the Body Shop founder, the Police frontman declared not long ago that his six offspring will have to make their way in the world bereft of endless royalties from Don’t Stand So Close to Me. (Although it’s hard to see Nigella’s insistence on not letting money “ruin” the children in the same light now that we know, courtesy of last year’s fraud trial involving her ex-personal assistants, that she and Charles Saatchi spent £10,000 on VIP Glastonbury passes for their respective kids. Maybe tough love is different for the super-rich.) Anyway, Sting apparently doesn’t want to leave his kids with “trust funds hanging like albatrosses round their necks”, which is admirable. It’s just that secretly, so many parents couldn’t agree less.
Be honest: it’s natural to want to leave your children whatever you can, perhaps especially if it will never be anything like enough to ruin them. Legacies are a last act of love and protection from beyond the grave, viscerally tied up with the biological imperative to see your offspring survive and thrive – even if it is at the expense of other people’s.
George Osborne understands the selfish gene all right, which is why, in this week’s autumn statement, he yet again chipped away a fraction more at the principle of inheritance tax (this time by freeing spouses to inherit savings in Isa accounts tax-free; in the budget it was inheriting unused pension pots tax-free, and before that raising the inheritance tax threshold). This stuff is wildly popular. It might even offset the generational injustice of the austerity years a bit, if wealth is transferred within families from elderly people largely protected from cuts to the more exposed young. (Although only their own young, obviously. Not anyone else’s; not the neediest, as might have happened via taxation.)
And thus will wealthy families consolidate the wealth they already have; thus will they build an ever-higher wall between their lucky children and those whose parents can’t magically solve all their problems. Just because an instinct is natural doesn’t make it right.
Yet what’s striking about the politics of inheritance is that it stinks of defeatism. A society obsessed, as ours is starting to be, with inheriting wealth is surely one that has lost confidence in itself; that no longer believes in the ability to earn one’s way out of trouble, that contemplates the future and gloomily can’t see it ever being as good as the past. This is about grown adults reaching the embarrassing, infantilising conclusion that actually they really need that albatross, thanks; that looking backwards, not forwards, is their best hope.
Too many middle-class parents are now plugging the gap between the kind of upbringing they had and the kind they can afford – even on professional salaries – to give their own children, either by drawing down on family reserves, or guiltily factoring future legacies into an otherwise impossible equation. One in four families with children at private school has grandparents chipping in to pay the fees; grandparental help with house deposits is increasingly common. As a result, the Bank of Granny and Grandpa isn’t just paying out, but sometimes pulling the strings in decisions about how the money is spent, an awkward shift in family dynamics.
Meanwhile older parents worry about whether to keep their money for their own dotage – what if they need expensive nursing care? – or hand it over now, to tide the kids through a rocky patch. The estate agents Savills said recently that it expects so-called “downsizing” house sales to rise by almost a third over the next five years, partly as a result of baby boomers who did well out of the property boom selling up to help their children. This is a fearful circling of the wagons: but what’s new is the speed with which debate is moving on from the inheritance of property to cold, hard cash.
It was an overheated housing market that first turned death duties toxic, back in the mid-2000s. Too many southern swing voters saw the price of fairly ordinary homes ticking up towards the threshold at which they would have to pay something considered the preserve of the “proper” rich, and protested. Yet by smoothing the inheritance of pensions and Isas, Osborne is no longer just helping people who have become accidentally rich on paper but not in pocket. He’s creating incentives for the cash-rich too to shelter wealth in places that they now know won’t be raided after death.
By encouraging families to recycle their money in this way, the chancellor is tacitly delaying the onset of what may be an inevitable slide down the ladder for the western middle classes, faking the good times for a little bit longer by stretching out the proceeds of the last boom. It’s a conjuring trick rather than a real answer, and a strictly time-limited one at that.
Osborne might argue, of course, that he simply thinks it immoral for thrifty people who have worked and saved all their lives to pay yet more tax on what is already taxed income. (Although on that logic VAT in shops is arguably immoral, as is council tax, and pretty much everything but income tax itself.) But 96% of people who died last year did no such thing, because, however thrifty they may be, most people just don’t leave enough to reach the £325,000 threshold for inheritance tax.
The 4% who did pay, however, poured about £3bn into the public finances. Scrap this tax and it’s basically a choice between paying more tax somewhere else, or crummier public services. Which is why, at least in boom times, people grumpily accept the case for death duties; but in tougher ones they’re balking.
And that’s the point. Obsessing about inheritance – and feeling the need to make populist gestures on it – is a warning light flashing on the dashboard. In a healthy society parents would have the confidence to say, like Sting, that the kids will cope fine on their own; grown-up children would have the confidence not to live off past glories. But we don’t. Instead, families look ahead, shiver, and huddle together against what feels like a hard winter coming. It’s only natural. That doesn’t make it right.
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