I’m not sure we really disagree about all that much.

You seem to agree that inheritance tax is justified, but that it’s important for parents to be able to leave their children something. Which indeed is my position.

Where we seem to fall-out is that you apparently think that the demands of (luck) egalitarianism demand that I levy a huge inheritance tax, and allow only tiny amounts to be passed on to children.

I’m going to leave it as an open question what I think about this in the abstract realm of philosophical thought experiments.

As for real-world politics, what I’m primarily concerned about now is not having the threshold made higher a-la-Tories, when spending that supports the poorest is going to be cut and Osborne says “we’re all in this together”.

Would I like to see it lower Actually, yes. How low? I don’t know, exactly. But right now the priority is keeping the existing threshold, not trying to lower it.

What I’m not about is imposing stringent egalitarianism on an unwilling, unconvinced public. What I want is for the public to be happy with – perhaps even demand – high levels of inheritance tax.

Utopian? Perhaps. But if we don’t dream, we never change anything for the better.

As for the point about equality as a relative thing Peter covers half my answer.

Giles, you are like my girlfriend Beth: you only care about inequality insofar as the people at the bottom are badly off. Once they are well-off, you/she don’t care whether other people have trillions. We might say that you really care about poverty, and that inequality is just a problem when coupled with poverty.

Peter and I are more hardline egalitrians. We tend to care about inequality in itself.

But then, I’m with Peter ultimately: that’s a theoretical debate; in the world we live in now, the best bet we have for alieviating the plight of the poorest is to deal with inequality and attempt to level up. Maybe one day we’ll get to the point where the “poverty” and “inequality” issues come apart.

But we’re not there yet, not by a long shot.

Money buys you a lot more than a can of beans; go spend a day at a spa, being physically pampered, mentally relaxed and eating good food if you don’t believe me (cost c. £80)

Peter – but presumably at some stage in the next century we`ll be able to draw a line under the redistribution of wealth by providing the poor with a simple minimum. At that stage we can stop worrying about how much someone else has?

I don’t agree (I’m a Rawlsian, and hence a relatively strict egalitarian), but that’s not really relevant to this thread, and I’d rather (and I’m sure Paul would rather) that we didn’t really get into that sort of thing.

But yes, if we’re social minimum theorists, at some point in time we won’t need to redistribute any more than is necessary to provide whatever it is we set the social minimum at. But, especially in the context of a discussion about current UK tax policy, such observations aren’t very helpful, as we’re nowhere near the stage where extra money won’t make any different to the poorest people in society (if you told me or my work-mates that if they got a raise, it wouldn’t make a difference to their lives, they’d look at you like you’d just grown another head).

Replies forthcoming tomorrow or maybe tonight.