Funding the Inheritance Tax and the Stamp Duty reduction via taxing non-domiciles

As I have blogged previously, Gordon Brown really should have pulled his finger out and done what he promised back before 1997 and taxed non-domiciles. Now George Osborne has promised a tax of £25,000 per annum per non-domicile and will use that to scrap inheritance tax on the first £1,000,000 of estate and scrapping stamp duty on the first £250,000 of a property. Now Alistair Darling and the BBC are saying it won't work, to be fair Jon Snow on Channel 4 news is pressing Alistair Darling hard on this issue and pushing the non-domicile tax evasion point. Alistair Darling is just repeating the same points over and over again and looking rather shifty.

If you want some figures to attack the BBC biased coverage then take a look at Iain Dale's Diary: Labour Wrong-Footed over Inheritance Tax Funding#links#links.

The claims and counter claims on this matter will run and run and I will be very interested to see how the Daily Mail and the Sun in particular cover this tomorrow. The decision on editorial line will be vitally important and so I expect Gordon Brown and his henchmen have already been putting the pressure on the editors of these two papers (Paul Dacre and Rebekah Wade) to not go overboard praising the policy and to give the Labour claims more fulsome coverage. We will see if the big clunking fist gets his way on this one or if he has something else to increase his stress levels over.