Alistair Darling's pre-Budget report and Comprehensive Spending Review statement (part 2)

I have been putting off commenting on the puppet's first mini budget as it was so transparent. I remember the good old days when Gordon Brown presented a budget and it took weeks days to work your way through the small print. Why, sometimes the headlines were glowing with praise for days before somebody worked out "the catch" and there was always a catch. This time it took about 15 minutes to start to unravel the catches. You can read the experts opinions all over the blogosphere but I will confine myself here to discussing the headline announcement that, as the BBC have been promoting, "Chancellor Alistair Darling has doubled the inheritance tax threshold for married couples to £600,000." Wrong! There was no "inheritance tax threshold for married couples", there was a inheritance tax threshold of £300,000 per person. So what you did was make a quick visit to a decent solicitor or accountant to set up a relatively straightforward trust and hey presto you had a "inheritance tax threshold of 600,000 for a married couple. Now you wont have to visit and pay for a professional to set up the trust, I wonder if Alistair or his master will tell us how much this doubling will actually cost the country?