We’ve lost our imaginations, now how do we get them back?
The reaction to Abi Wilkinson’s musings on abolishing inheritance shows our unwillingness to look past our own fingertips

This week Abi Wilkinson wrote a piece in the Guardian laying out some of the potential pros of a 100% inheritance tax rate, and everyone predictably lost their shit.
This isn’t a new suggestion from Wilkinson, who first speculated that preventing people from hoarding wealth down the generations might actually be a good thing in a Medium piece about two years ago, but every time she brings it up everyone, predictably, loses their shit.
There are some technical objections — usually ones she’s already addressed in her article, like the argument that inheritance money was already taxed as income tax, or that it disincentives hard work (because getting rich isn’t enough) — and a whole heap of moral outrage that anyone would suggest stealing the hard-earned cash ordinary people want to leave to their kids. Wilkinson remains open to arguments against, but what she isn’t getting much of is a debate about what a world without any inheritance might actually look like.
There’s a failure of imagination here. People respond in horror to what she suggests because in the world they envision life otherwise remains the same, by which I mean infected with fear. The same one-sided labour market, the same grotesque worship of property, the same indifference to ordinary people’s dreams and wishes. In that kind of world, who will guarantee a roof over our children’s heads, if not us? How will they be stable and safe when we’re not there to ward off the chaos? Without wealth passed on, offspring are exposed to the elements, deprived of any liberty to choose their path in life — or at least their annual holiday to Mallorca. It’s immoral to take away the chance for them to secure their future.
Wilkinson, though, isn’t just asking us to pick through the practicalities of a policy. She’s asking us to imagine a different world. Appalled readers responded to her proposition like it was a technocratic tweak gone wild, ED-209 blasting through the suits at the conference table. But when Wilkinson asks the question “would we be better off with a 100% inheritance tax”, she’s really asking “what if we didn’t need an inheritance?”
Warning — very violent
At least, that’s what I hear. Life today is terrifying. The retirement age creeps ever upwards, the wages creep down. It’s no kind of future to rely on nothing but the possibility our home-owning parents will jog off while the property market is still hot. That isn’t what hope looks like. This isn’t about our parents’ right to hoard wealth, it’s about building a world where that kind of thing ceases to make any sense. Imagine if you didn’t need it. Just imagine, for a minute, a world in which you just knew you were going to be okay.
But that’s not the kind of response Wilkinson received, mostly. So if her article showed us anything, it’s that imaginations are hamstrung. Maybe not among the young people who campaigned and voted in their droves at the last election, but certainly among the people who write about them. It shouldn’t be treated as some kind of moral crime to say “how would a world work if x”, no matter how big that if or how harebrained you think it is, when these are sincere questions of how we support a society that works for everyone.
What I take from all this is that, on the left, we have a responsibility not just to resist the order we live in, and not just to get a left wing government elected on a great manifesto. It’s to expand imaginations so we all start talking about what comes next. I think that’s where Wilkinson was trying to go with her piece, but there are also questions here about how we organise and how we mobilise.
This is the first thing I’ve written and posted in several years and I’m a procrastinator so I make no promises, but I’d like to think about this and try to develop it a bit in future. Momentum clearly had the same idea with their The World Transformed fringe event at last year’s Labour conference, and I’m sure there’s lots more going on along the same lines, which maybe I’ll come across.
If anyone has (comradely) thoughts feel free to share @buddleoffun.
