Fair game?

At the start of the month George Osborne appeared to pull off a masterstroke. The shadow chancellor announced, if elected, he would lift inheritance tax (IHT) thresholds to £1m and abolish stamp duty for first-time buyers in homes worth up to £250,000. To do this he wants to charge non-domiciled individuals (non-doms) £25,000 and he said the move would raise £3bn.

Advisers to non-doms in the City were stunned, but muted by the size of the levy. After all, a £25,000 charge was unlikely to be enough to scare people away. The non-domicile policy works, they claim, and London has been phenomenally successful at attracting wealthy foreigners. Research by the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEP) suggested that non-doms were highly mobile. Yet the media loved the idea of taxing foreigners to save on IHT, as did the man in the street, with Labour strategists claiming this accounted for much of the 8% swing back to the Conservatives.

But Osborne is not chancellor and does