One more good reason to completely rethink inheritance tax

Germany’s system of inheritance tax encourages family businesses to grow and thrive. Ours does exactly the opposite, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

While I was standing around in the rain waiting to be interviewed for 5 Live earlier in the week, I got talking to an academic from the University of Stirling.

He specialises, among other things, in the knotty problem of youth unemployment. We talked about the root causes in Scotland, and I wondered to what extent lousy education is to blame. He wasn't sure about lousy, but conceded that the lack of an efficient apprenticeship or trainee system that put people on the road to careers without a full university education was partly to blame.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.