One would think that we were legislating here for drunken dukes avoiding taxation for the benefit of dissolute doxies. We are, in fact, dealing with very respectable people living down the country and trying to avoid leaving their widows and children virtually destitute on their deaths. Let us take the ordinary farmer or shopkeeper who, by prudent living all his life, managed to build up a solvent company or a solvent enterprise, has grown weary of being kicked around the place by the local bank manager, and is determined that he will plough back into the business or farm sufficient capital to permit him to say with his head erect that he is in a position now to kick in the door of any bank in the town in which he lives. He arrives at the end of his life, or at the prospect of the end of his life, and he is faced with the appalling prospect that, having established his independence of the bank manager by his forbearance, thrift and care, he is now about to deliver his wife and family into the hands of the Department of Finance.
I say the Department of Finance deliberately, because the Revenue Commissioners carry out the laws we make very humanely, very courteously and very decently. If, in effect, we impose on the Revenue Commissioners the obligation to pursue the widows, and children, and families, of these people with whips and thongs, to extract from them the maximum we can by way of death duties, what that means is that without breaking up the provision the fathers made for them during their lives, it is impossible for them to meet the demands made on them.
If the credit situation is easy, it may be possible for them to go to the bank and get an advance to meet the obligation which we are in the process of providing here by way of death duties, and pay them off over the years by a joint family effort, without breaking up the family assets. But do we want to do that? Is there anything wrong in a thrifty individual with a wife and family, when he reaches the autumn of his days, seeking to divide his property among his wife, children and relatives in such a way as to avoid their being crippled by estate duties and death duties when he comes to die?
I know the Minister may say that I have overlooked the fact that in making provision in section 18 he is trying to finance certain concessions he has in mind for widows and dependent children, but taking the whole picture of the discussions which proceeded heretofore on the amendments proposed to the section, we must not lose sight of the fact that we are living in a country where there are not any dissolute dukes.
Sir William Harcourt introduced this whole scheme of death duties in Gladstone's last Budget in the late nineties for the purpose of making the big landed proprietors of England liable to taxation which at that time they substantially avoided. I believe that at the time Sir William Harcourt had in mind people like the Duke of Westminster who owned half of London, and other persons who drew vast revenue from the landed estates of rural England. As the years have rolled by, death duties and these other duties have come to affect a greater and wider section of the community. They were incorporated in our legislation in the nineties of the last century and have remained part of our taxation structure ever since.
Surely the time has come when the Minister should ask himself if, in following the British code of the Labour administration which is primarily concerned to prevent tax avoidance, it constitutes the same kind of evil as it may constitute in Britain. We know that in Great Britain every duke and marquis is a limited liability company and all sorts of strange devices are operated by very wealth men to establish companies and avoid taxation within the law and that highly-paid accountants and advisers spend the greater part of their time examining the Finance Acts of England to provide loopholes for these people. Nobody here wants to assist any shrewd individual to avoid his fair share of taxation, but in our zeal to achieve that end, do we want to make it impossible for an individual to leave to his wife and family a viable inheritance by way of a business of farm which has to be carried on? I think the Minister ought to pause and recognise that he may be creating a situation in which no family business or farm can be carried on if we continue to press the inheritance or estate duty aspect of our taxation system.
It may be that in the changing world in which we live we have all suddenly come to the conclusion that the whole social pattern of our country should be torn up and that we should adopt the British social pattern. Do we want that? Every Deputy knows that there is in this country a vast number of relatively small family business and a vast number of small farms compared with the situation in Great Britain. By small farms, I mean farms of 100, 200 and 300 acres on which families live. Is that the social pattern we wish to preserve or do we want to destroy it? I put it to the Minister that the lines he is travelling at present are calculated to make the operation of a family business or family farm impossible. It is time we took a look at this whole situation and determined, as a policy, whether those are the lines on which we wish to proceed.
I think they are bad lines: I do not accept the proposition that everything that is new and foreign is better than the system we have built up for ourselves. There is a great danger in blindly following precisely what the revenue authorities may do in Britain or in Germany, France, Belgium or Holland. We have a different type of society and I think ours is the better and more stable type and one of the greater stabilising influences in our society is the family business and the family farm. I speak by analogy when I say this whole tendency to proletarianise all property in the country is wrong. We are losing sight of the family until and I think the more we depart from it the greater injury we do the foundations on which our society stands.
It is hard, in the context of section 18, which is the operative section, and the various amendments put down to it, to determine what is exactly the appropriate point at which to make the point I am now submitting, but I suggest to the Minister that, without recapitulating the whole argument when we come to consider the situation in its entirely, it is appropriate now to ask ourselves what we are trying to do. Do we want the family business and family farm made impossible of survival? If we do, we are going the right way about it: if we do not, I suggest we should stop and consider whether, in following every development of British revenue law, we are serving the best interests of the kind of society we have built up in this country.
