From now on same sex couples will be able to register their civil partnerships with solicitors and public bodies, giving them proper inheritance and pension rights.

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Both seem to imply that the colonial inheritance of an independent class of public servants who could detach themselves from their ethnic or religious roots and serve the nation offered Africa its best chance of developing.

ECONOMIST: Books on Africa

Dr Stuart White, head of the Public Policy Unit at Oxford University, is an advocate of citizen's inheritance, moving the process of inheriting money away from families deciding who gets what, to redistribute wealth.

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He points to the seeming incoherence of their approach to the public finances, in which promises of a tax break for marriage and a higher threshold for inheritance tax jostle with a putatively severe fiscal squeeze.

ECONOMIST: Britain��s prime minister