We should shame rich tax dodgers

a call to change the narrative

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I wrote the following article for Left Foot Forward, an online left media outlet so the tone and content is slightly different from what you are all used to but as much as I am comfortable in my diary voice I would like to develop my mainstream media polemicist voice so that when the time comes when I really need to use it it has been chiselled and polished into a deadly blade. I appreciate the bellow sounds more populist and unforgiving that I got you used to but when shit hits the fan we all have to pick sides, and I have picked mine.

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London if the rich paid their taxes

I’m tired of sitting on panels on GB News and other right-wing outlets and being lectured by millionaires about immigrants who don’t love the UK. I agree that if you decide to move to a country, it’s appropriate, and probably more pleasant for your own sense of self, if you feel an affinity to your host country and its people. But how can I take them seriously when in the same breath, they tell me the super-rich should be allowed to pay less taxes than the rest of us? If the rest of us feel love for this country intuitively why do the rich need to be bribed to act on it?

The UK tax system is tens of thousands of pages long, and deliberately so. For it suits the handsomely paid accountants of the super-rich that it should remain opaque to the rest of us peasants for two reasons. Firstly, the complexity means those with the means can hire their expert services and make full use of loopholes.

Secondly, the rich can then employ the best PR money can buy and divide and conquer society as a whole from the individual who depends on the services provided by the state. It is not us, the top 1% dodging taxes, leaching your wealth! It is the evil state that taxes your hard-earned labour! If anything, we contribute to your wealth- we pay your salaries, do we not?- and put MORE back into the economy than all of you cheapos combined because our luxurious lifestyle is very expensive.

Every time a democratically elected minister dares to suggest the rich non-doms should pay tax for the country they claim to love, the same scenario unfolds. Like a toxic girlfriend, the rich threaten to abandon us. Worst still, like a menacing mother-in-law clued up on the plan, the media amplifies their threats. I can’t hold it against them, as most are on the verge of bankruptcy and cuckolded by the billionaire class they need to save them.

How big is our loss if non-doms leave precisely? They typically contribute very little beyond indirect taxes like VAT and stamp duty, and they often find ways to avoid even these. ‘They don’t use public services as they have private healthcare!!’ – do they also not drive on our roads, call the same emergency number and use the same dilapidated courts as the rest of us? ‘They create wealth by providing jobs!!’ – when the super-rich occasionally spoil us with genuine entrepreneurship and investment instead of sponging off of private equity, do they not benefit from a workforce that has been educated and trained by the British taxpayer?

Their threats have worked wonders. Despite living in a democracy where one person is entitled to one vote, each ultra-wealthy voter gets to hold our political class in a chokehold with their media-amplified meltdowns.

Despite their constant propaganda about benefit scroungers and lazy Gen Z/Millennial workers, the wealthiest individuals earn the bulk of their income from capital rather than wages. Wealth inequality is far greater than income inequality. The top 1% of earners in the UK may account for 13-15% of total income, but they hold an estimated 23-25% of the country’s total wealth. The concentration of wealth in financial assets is even starker, with the wealthiest 1% owning around 35-40% of the country’s financial assets.

Since the 70s, taxes on wealth, such as capital gains tax and inheritance tax, have been progressively reduced, allowing the offspring of the rich to accumulate unearned wealth without having to pay anywhere near the same tax deducted from our salaries and fees. The capital gains tax rate for high earners is currently 20% for most assets, a significant reduction from the 40% rate in the 1970s. This incentivises wealthy individuals to accumulate wealth through investments rather than wages, hence the obsession with landlordism and passive income.

On Michael Portillo’s show recently I snapped at the suggestion that Britain should be worried the super-rich may leave us for tax havens because they don’t want to pull their weight. Portillo, used to my lefty shenanigans on his otherwise civilised Sunday show, responded that as I said that, I reminded him of Margaret Thatcher, who was adamant of the responsibility of those better off to lift everyone else with them.

In 2013, the late Labour MP Frank Field wrote for the Times that when Thatcher was ousted by her own side, she told him of her bitterness at the meanness of the rich: ‘I cut taxes as I thought it would generate a giving society. It didn’t.”

Field asked the Times readers 12 years ago: “How do we respond to Mrs Thatcher’s own critique that a giving society has not emerged, even though individuals have gained fortunes beyond the dreams of avarice?”

Despite being a left-wing millennial who cut her campaigning teeth on political correctness, I am all for bringing shaming back into politics. On my long list of people it is my political imperative to shame, the rich non-doms threatening to leave the country that nourished them, gave them their confidence, network and gravitas that only the UK could give, who are now repaying it by moving to citizen-of-nowhere tax havens will be top of my list.

So be it if they prefer to be surrounded by battlers and yachts. I’d rather sleep on a bench in Hyde Park than on the barren shores of Dubai. There, at least, I can get my bacon sarnie.