Post by Jaga on Feb 23, 2008 17:56:53 GMT -7
this is an interesting article from Guardian. Below is a fragment:
One of the consequences of Tory MP Derek Conway losing his job for giving his sons our money for doing nothing is that a spotlight has been shone on the dubious practice of MPs employing family members and the culture that justifies it. In conservative lore, nothing should prevent - certainly no obligation to society - parents being able to give everything to the children they love, the tearjerker argument that shadow Chancellor George Osborne used to justify his proposed lifting of the threshold for inheritance tax to a £1m.
Conway, the bone-headed Tory, was merely stretching that philosophy to the limits, but has found that there are obligations, such as accountability and propriety, that get in the way. It was public money he had been spending. The case was open and shut. But parallel arguments extend to the private sphere, as Nigella Lawson showed in a widely publicised interview in My Weekly. She differed from her husband, Charles Saatchi, she said, about how much of their estimated £110m fortune they should leave their children. Echoing American billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, she believed that too much inherited money corrupts children; they need to work. Her husband took the premodern, dynastic and conservative view that every penny should be passed on with the DNA.
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2251727,00.html
One of the consequences of Tory MP Derek Conway losing his job for giving his sons our money for doing nothing is that a spotlight has been shone on the dubious practice of MPs employing family members and the culture that justifies it. In conservative lore, nothing should prevent - certainly no obligation to society - parents being able to give everything to the children they love, the tearjerker argument that shadow Chancellor George Osborne used to justify his proposed lifting of the threshold for inheritance tax to a £1m.
Conway, the bone-headed Tory, was merely stretching that philosophy to the limits, but has found that there are obligations, such as accountability and propriety, that get in the way. It was public money he had been spending. The case was open and shut. But parallel arguments extend to the private sphere, as Nigella Lawson showed in a widely publicised interview in My Weekly. She differed from her husband, Charles Saatchi, she said, about how much of their estimated £110m fortune they should leave their children. Echoing American billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, she believed that too much inherited money corrupts children; they need to work. Her husband took the premodern, dynastic and conservative view that every penny should be passed on with the DNA.
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2251727,00.html