From employers and home buyers to pensioners and the parents of private school pupils, the queue of those complaining about Rachel Reeves’s Budget grows longer by the day. Just when things can’t get any stickier for the Chancellor, along comes Ruth Davidson waving a steak bake.

The former leader of the Scottish Conservatives has compared imposing inheritance tax on farms to the pasty tax, an idea (from the mind of Tory Chancellor George Osborne no less) so obviously wicked it was reversed soon after.

The NFU says it has never seen farmers as angry as they are over the inheritance tax move. Many fear they won’t be able to hand farms to their sons and daughters without landing them with a huge tax bill. Farms will go out of business, they warn. Food supplies will suffer. The Government says only a minority of the wealthiest landowners will be hit.

Wiser heads might have warned Reeves to steer clear of anything that interferes with people’s desire to do what they want with their money once they reach a certain point in life.

There’s a lot of such meddling about. Anyone fortunate enough to have money to pass on faces no end of advice about what to do with it. The children expect an inheritance. Charities need your money or good causes will suffer. This Labour Government wants to take from the old and give to the young.

It is a way of thinking that belongs to an age that is going fast. People are now living longer, healthier lives. Why shouldn’t........

© Herald Scotland