It's not so great really....

The reaction could have been compared to the congregation at a South London church when Jesus is mentioned. £1 million? They gasped? Praise be to the Holy Man Osborne who has come to deliver us from the opposition benches!

Well, looking at it, I'm not so sure why it's so amazing. The Tories aren't actually going to cut the overall tax burden but simply shift it onto something else. And it's not really that generous, either. If you look at the sums, it's only £3.1 bn to raise the threshold up to £1 million for Inheritance Tax, out of a total government spend of some £580 billion. That's not even 1%. It's pathetic, really. They probably loose that in a year from staff pinching paper clips.

Now, before people start jumping up and down at me saying I'm just attacking the Tories, I will make clear that it's miles better than anything the other two have come up with. Darling's response to Osborne was rather juvenile and, well, wrong, saying they hadn't done their sums properly and that there would be a deficit for the government.

So what?

Why is there this culture of thinking that the government is the best person to spend our wages for us? I can tell you straight, no one can spend money quite like I can, and I'd rather shoes and lovely dinners than some pointless computer system and child benefit for children who don't even live in the country.

So Osborne should have turned around to Darling and gone - even if the Non-Dom taxes don't quite cover it, it's not a problem. Much better is getting millions of people out of the hideous trap of having to sell the family home to pay for the next hair-brained scheme of our government, especially when so many young people can't get on the property ladder and so many others are in debt. Which is what that one-eyed bastard Prime Minister did when he was Chancellor. He probably takes money off carol singers when they come round collecting at Christmas.

UKIP, of course, want to scrap IHT altogether, and jolly well done I say.

Inheritance Tax is also currently charged at 40% on estates above £285,000 but, with increasing values of houses, more families with modest wealth are now becoming liable for IHT. As a result, there have been many justifiable calls for raising the threshold to, say, £500,000 or £1 million. There have also been suggestions to replace IHT with some form of wealth tax.

However, the small amount of IHT that is actually colelcted (£3.2bn per year) is evidence of the extent to which this tax is avoided by higher wealth individuals who can afford to pay for tax planning. Given this low yield, and since IHT is poorly directed and expensive to collect, UKIP's simple solution is to abolish it altogether with immediate effect.

People are already taxed on their earnings, and when they buy stuff, and smoke stuff, and do anything and go anywhere and when they earn money from shares and keep money in savings. So quite why people should be taxed again when they've actually managed to get enough money together after tax to buy a house and want to pass it on to their children is sickening. Bleugh. I don't see why other parties don't do it, but of course they are tied to this idea that to cut taxes and government spending is a bad thing when in fact anyone with a memory of 20 years back, or the capacity to read the newspapers or books will realise that cutting taxes is expansionary fiscal policy and thus causes an upturn in the economic cycle and thus more money for everyone! Yippee!

Praying on grieving families..I've just had a thought. Perhaps the reason the NHS is so shit is because politicians want people to die so they can get more money from the death duties? It would explain a lot.

Am genius, me. With great shoes. (have bought new ones. Grey suede mary-janes. lovely.