I’d happily jump on the Telegraph bandwagon for the abolition of inheritance tax, even in the company of Liz Truss and Nigel Farage. The urge to provide a cushion of capital for children and grandchildren is an honourable one. Recipients of already-taxed cash from deceased relatives are arguably less likely to be burdens on the state in their own later lives, just as the state is unlikely to spend the same money, if confiscated, in efficient ways for the greater good. And to argue against inheritance is to put socialist hostility to wealth ahead of the worthy aim of family betterment. Enough said.

The trouble with this campaign, however, is that it’s also a call for a £7 billion tax cut for the better-off, which simply isn’t going to happen. Certainly not ahead of the next general election; perhaps only in some imaginary golden future of fiscal surplus and Tory swagger. I don’t even hold out hope for an uplift in the £325,000 IHT threshold that was frozen in 2010 and should be £450,000 by now to keep up with inflation but will stay where it is, by Jeremy Hunt’s decree, until 2028; as will the additional £175,000 ‘residence nil-rate band’ for homes bequeathed to direct descendants.

But still there’s room for creative thinking. Why not, for example, use IHT to address the issue of future burdens on the state more directly, by creating an additional nil-rate band for capital passed into descendants’ pension pots – to remain there untouched until retirement age? If that device became a catalyst for a new habit of pension-building among the young who currently save nothing, could anyone object?

Our people are missing

‘A renewed CBI for our members, our stakeholders and our people’ was a headline that helped the business lobby group win its ‘vote of confidence’ on Tuesday. It was the title of a 28-page manifesto setting out commitments to internal reform, improved governance and more effective external focus, and ‘our people’ – meaning the CBI’s 250 staff, as in ‘Chief People Officer’, meaning personnel director – were mentioned in almost every paragraph.

But if the verbal pitch carried the day, corporate psychologists must have been more intrigued by the document’s cover artwork – depicting green woodland against a melancholy rural background, with a graphic line looping overhead to descend in the midst of the trees. Maybe it was meant to suggest ‘sustainable growth’, though not in an industrial sense. More obviously, it said ‘not out of the woods yet’ or simply ‘lost’. But given that there are no people in the photo – nor indeed, apart from president Brian McBride and director-general Rain Newton-Smith, anywhere else in the prospectus – the strongest subliminal message was ‘no one would give permission for their face to appear in a CBI document’. One way or another the emerging rival, British Chambers of Commerce’s ‘Business Council’, looks the better horse to back.

UK specialists wanted

In any global share portfolio managed from London, the proportion of UK equities held is likely to be well below 10 per cent – and if the investor has strong views on relative prospects in rival markets, closer to zero. That’s not unpatriotic: it’s a reflection of how the world sees us.

But a plethora of current reviews and proposals aimed at making our capital markets function more efficiently in support of stronger UK economic growth – including ideas for consolidating smaller pension funds into megafunds that might invest in private equity and infrastructure as well as high-tech listed UK companies – all tend to agree that City skills have diminished in one vital respect. We no longer have a critical mass of specialist fund managers and research analysts devoted to the search for value in UK assets and patiently engaged with the companies and projects they invest in or follow.

Let me therefore salute Richard Buxton, who is due to retire this summer from the Jupiter UK Alpha fund after delivering average annual returns of 8 per cent for his investors over the past two decades.

Buxton believes in holding a limited number of UK blue chips, often unfashionable ones, for the long-term: his largest stakes included Glencore, Drax, BP and Shell in the energy sector and both Lloyds and Barclays in banking. He expresses strong views on corporate governance and boardroom pay – favouring long-term equity awards with restricted rights to sell, rather than the typical bonus-plus-three-year-incentive plans which (he argues and I agree) encourage executives to shoot unwisely for short-term performance.

Buxton has also been a reliable source of pithy quotes. I particularly relished his dismissal last year of Unilever boss Alan Jope’s doomed £50 billion bid for GlaxoSmithKline’s consumer healthcare arm: ‘The idea of letting the goons at Unilever run [the GSK business] is laughable.’ I hope Buxton finds a new City platform. He’d be a great non-executive director for a ‘UK future’ megafund.

A crowd of bow ties

At a celebration for the life of Lord (David) Young of Graffham, in the ornate if mildly incongruous surroundings of Freemasons’ Hall, there were many references to his lifelong belief in enterprise as a force for good and his personal enthusiasm for digital gadgetry. We were also reminded that Margaret Thatcher’s right-hand minister was a man of distinctive sartorial style, his family’s choice of bow ties as the dress code for the crowded occasion enabling him, as one speaker noted, to deliver a posthumous sales boost to the very old-tech sector of dicky-bow makers.

Our Economic Innovator Awards are likewise eclectic in welcoming entries from every kind of business – and founded on the Youngian idea that there is no area of life which entrepreneurship cannot make better. A gentle reminder that the closing date for entries is next Friday, 16 June.