I was really disappointed in the Labour government for announcing this.
Why is everyone getting so worked up about it? Is it really this that has brought the Tories so many gains in the polls? They're planning to raise the threshold from £300k to £1 million, are there so many people who stand to inherit more than £300k and think that getting it all is the most important thing on which to base their vote?
Here's a link to an article on the mechanics behind the repeal of a similar tax in the US:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n11/runc01_.html
"how did the repeal of a tax that applies only to the richest 2 per cent of American families become a cause so popular and so powerful that it steamrollered all the opposition placed in its way? The estate tax was the most progressive part of the American tax system, because it rested on the principle that the wealthy few, if they were not willing to bequeath their money to charity, should not be permitted to pass it all directly to their heirs. It had been on the statute book for nearly a hundred years, and throughout that time it had been generally assumed that there was widespread support for the idea that unearned wealth passed between the generations, creating pockets of aristocratic privilege, was not part of the American dream. Because it was a tax that so obviously took from the relatively few to relieve the burden on the very many, there seemed no possibility that a sufficiently large or durable coalition of interests could ever be formed to get rid of it. Yet during the 1990s just such a coalition came into being, and not only did it hold together, it grew to the point where the clamour for estate tax repeal seemed irresistible [...}
The repeal lobby built its campaign around two forms of politics, one all too familiar, the other daringly new. The familiar tactic was to play on the sense many people have that the rich are not after all so different from the rest, if only because they hope one day to become rich themselves. A poll conducted by Time/CNN on the estate tax issue in 2000 revealed that 39 per cent of Americans believe that they are either in the wealthiest 1 per cent or will be there ‘soon’. Armed with this sort of polling evidence, the pro-repeal activists spread their net as wide as possible in looking for individuals who felt that the estate tax was going to be picking on them before too long. But as well as preying on people’s naive hopes and fears, the case for ending the taxation of inherited wealth also rested on a more surprising claim: that the estate tax was, however you looked at it, simply ‘unfair’. Whether or not the tax was likely to apply to you, the argument went, it should be obvious on basic grounds of equity that it shouldn’t apply to anyone."
It was written a couple of years ago but it ends with a bit that was, sadly, prescient:
"this is a tale about the power of narrative in politics, and the increasing ease with which individual stories can be made the be-all and end-all of political debate. [...] In the face of an endless readiness on all sides to heed the unmediated voice of personal experience, it has become harder to sustain the bigger picture needed for any plausible defence of progressive politics. This shifts politics, inexorably, to the right. In Britain, during the recent election campaign, the battleground for this newly personalised form of politics was not tax, but defence, immigration, terrorism, security and crime, where all the arguments were played out on Tory territory. In due course, when the Tories recover their nerve and the state of the economy starts to place Gordon Brown’s reputation under pressure, the argument will move on to tax."