At least one Tory MP has got the hang of making difficulties for the Government.

At the moment, homosexuals have no claim on the property they share if their lover dies and they are not registered as a legal owner. Edward Leigh, the Conservative MP for Gainsborough, has tabled an amendment to extend the Bill’s provisions to brothers and sisters who live together. He said the Bill was unfair to other unmarried people who lived together – and was a “gay marriage Bill by any other name”.

A little sand thrown in the gears perhaps but little more. It’s all about inheritance tax…marriage changes who pays what and when. It would be rather simpler to simply abolish inheritance tax. The sums it raises are piffling (&#163 2-3 billion as I recall) in the overall scheme of things, less than 1% of revenue. The costs of the distortions it forces upon the economy are far greater than that. The rich don’t pay it as there are any number of loopholes. So it doesn’t actually reduce the power of inherited wealth, one of its justifications. In fact, there is an argument to be made that it increases such power. One way to get round it is to put the money into trust. The inheritors then cannot piss it all away, meaning that the capital cascades down the generations. If the dimwit grandsons of self-made men actually got their hands on the capital we’d see a lot more of them going bust, increasing the mobility between wealth quintiles rather than solidifying the structure as now. Its the medium sized estates that pay it, especially now that a modest house in London (seriously, a 3 bed semi-detatched in a London suburb) takes you over the threshold.
Little revenue, doesn’t hit the rich, excessive costs. Nah, just abolish inheritance tax and have done with it.