Dear Mr and & Mrs Loadsadosh,
I see you are leaving us. According to the people whose job it is to count our resident millionaires (proper millionaires, not just the couple with a gentrified house in Hackney), you’re upping sticks and heading to places more amenable.
Henley & Partners, which makes a fine living cosseting the wealthy, claims that between 2017 and 2023, 16,500 millionaires migrated from the UK. Henley, the “investment migration consultancy”, seems perturbed. “Provisional estimates for 2024 are even more concerning, with a massive net outflow of 9,500 millionaires projected for this year alone,” it says. As fate would have it, fewer millionaires fled Russia in 2022 (as it invaded Ukraine and became a sanctions piñata), than are expected to leave the UK this year.
I don’t know: I am sure some of you are talented, some will sponsor public things in return for an engraved name-check, some will allow a little wealth to trickle down while living high on the hog. Maybe those of us left behind will miss some of that. But will we miss you? I don’t know.
We read a lot about people who help migrants move around and they come in all shapes and sizes. One kind capitalises on dehumanised people desperate to reach a friendly, safe and secure nation where they hope to contribute and build a new life. The other quite legally helps the ultra-wealthy, such as yourselves, flee to nations which are much more tax-efficient, with far less sticky red tape. The former will dump you on a small dinghy, the latter will usher you on to a superyacht.
Where are you off to? Henley says a good proportion of you are converging in the United Arab Emirates. At the risk of being intrusive, what is it about the land of “zero income tax, golden visas and a luxury lifestyle” you most like?
You are a funny bunch. Some of you are the citizens “of nowhere” who Theresa May pointed her finger at, but others are the type who were desperate to “take back control”, who fly a crisply ironed union jack on a neatly manicured lawn; who belt out Rule, Britannia! during Last Night of the Proms, but do everything they can to shrink their tax exposure. But there is no more patriotic act than paying your taxes: contributing to the continued growth, prosperity and security of the land that might have made you wealthy, that schooled your children, that sustained your staff. So fleeing to what is basically a sauna with pretty skyscrapers in order to avoid paying taxes is not really a good look.
What was the straw that broke the camel’s back? Was it the primacy of culture wars here over competent economic stewardship? Of anti-immigration rhetoric over crude national necessity?
It might be mere coincidence that Britain’s three-quarters of a century-long reputation for being a millionaire magnet really began to wane from 2017 to 2023 – a year after the brainwave we called Brexit. With the abolition of the non-dom tax regime (which permitted the super-wealthy, including the prime minister’s wife, to avoid tax on foreign earnings), and the pending removal of the VAT exemption on private schools, Britain is not the fun-packed playground it once was for the cash rich. Worth saying that our playgrounds aren’t the playgrounds they used to be either: your lot built flats on many of them. You may be able to see that from 10,000ft as you head off.
So as we prepare to vote on 4 July, you’re voting with your Louboutin-shod feet. Even more power to you: more success. If you have citizenship, leave it on the bedside table or with the chauffeur. We can pick it up later. See it as another premium product for the monied refusnik: the IGG, the “Irreversible Golden Goodbye”.
And now, I’ll let you get off – you’ll be wanting to supervise while your bags are packed. Because someone has to do it, and I doubt it is you.
Nels Abbey is a writer, broadcaster and former banker. He is the author of Hip-Hop MBA: Lessons in Cut-Throat Capitalism from Rap’s Moguls and the founder of Uppity: The Intellectual Playground
