Kemi Badenoch's Conservative conference speech positioned inheritance tax cuts as a forward-looking programme for "a better tomorrow," contrasting her vision with what she called Andy Burnham's 1970s nostalgia. Two letter-writers in the Guardian dismantle this framing from different angles, and both land punches. Terry Peach, writing from Chester, traces Badenoch's intellectual lineage directly to David Ricardo, the early 19th-century political economist who argued that Britain would prosper if the national debt were extinguished, trade made "perfectly free," and taxation reduced to a bare minimum. Ricardo's own "tough love" proposal was scrapping the Poor Laws on the grounds that they encouraged overbreeding among the working class, thereby depressing market-determined wages. The parallel to modern Conservative welfare rhetoric is not subtle. Penelope Turton, writing from London, attacks the specific mechanics of the IHT argument. Badenoch's claim that inheritance tax represents "unfair double taxation" on earnings rests on a factual mischaracterisation: most IHT revenue is driven by inherited and asset-derived wealth that expands through unearned capital appreciation and goes untaxed during the owner's lifetime. The tax hits windfalls, not wages. Badenoch has called inheritance tax "immoral." Turton inverts this: the real moral injury falls on low-paid workers facing heating-or-eating choices, for whom accumulating sufficient wealth to leave anything to their children is "an unimaginable dream." The policy would widen the gap between those who inherit wealth and those who must earn it from zero. The structural issue is straightforward. Cutting IHT primarily benefits the top few percent of estates — those above the existing threshold — and does nothing for the vast majority of households that will never trigger the tax. Framing this as a reward for "hard work and saving" conflates earned income with passive asset appreciation, two fundamentally different economic processes. The Conservatives' rhetorical strategy is to collapse all wealth into a single moral category: deserved. But inherited wealth is, by definition, not earned by the recipient. The policy is a dynastic wealth-preservation mechanism dressed as meritocracy. It generates nothing new; it entrenches existing concentrations. What Peach and Turton together demonstrate is that there is nothing novel about this programme. Lesser regulation, lower taxes, smaller state, tougher welfare — these arguments have circulated for centuries. Calling it "a better tomorrow" while reaching for Ricardo's playbook is not forward-looking. It is nostalgia for a different decade than the 1970s.
