Friday 19th January
We all take inheritance for granted. But for most ordinary people it is a fairly recent experience. Two or three generations ago you were lucky if your parents left enough money for their own funerals, but now it is far more likely to be a house. And we are all involved, it is very hard to escape. Oh, unless you are poor of course. If you have had to rent all your life, if you are handicapped or been in poor health for years, if you have been on Benefits, or homeless even. Then you may well have nothing to pass on to your family but debts and a big funeral bill. But don’t worry there are plenty of loan sharks out there, in fact you may have even inherited a couple in any case.
And it is a hard and indisputable fact that in the current society we live in, those who have inherited wealth have a great advantage in life. Many middle-class parents are now buying their kids a flat when they go to University – no Student loans for these guys, and an almost guaranteed increasing asset. I have worked for a few ‘inherited wealth’ chumps. More often than not they haven’t a clue how to run things, they are simply sitting on a profitable company built up by Daddy or Grandaddy, without this inheritance they may well have struggled to ever make a success of their lives. So, with the twisted logic that although we know that Inheritance is inherently wrong and unfair – what do we do? We try to leave our own kids and grand-kids something so that they won’t have quite such a hard time of it as maybe we did. With the same logic that drives American to own guns (because there are so many idiots out there with guns) so we strive to leave our kids an inheritance.
In a decent society it wouldn’t matter what your parents had or did, everyone would have the same life chances. And it was far more like that in the Sixties. If you showed some intelligence you could get to Grammar school and receive a better education. You could go to University for free; jobs were much easier to get; you could do almost anything you wanted. It was the age of working class kids doing good. And now rapidly those avenues are one by one being shut down. Kids from poor families are disadvantaged now. And this hasn’t happened by accident. It has been Government Policy for years. As long as their voters have made provision for their future, as long as they have something to leave to their kids, as long as the trust funds are well-managed, as long as Inheritance tax allowances are generous – they can sleep safe in their beds.
But, of course, knowing all of this makes no difference. If you have kids you want to leave them something, and anyway you have struggled for years to buy your own house – what are you going to do with it? And so the pernicious effects of inheritance continue. And I am just as bad as everyone else. When and if I inherit from my own parents I will try to help my grandchildren – and I will leave at least one house to my own kids.