Who wants to be a millionaire? Everyone, obviously. But in London? Not so much. Labour’s plan to tax the rich until they bleed may well have been a vote-winner, but it’s having an all-too-predictable side effect — all the ultra-high net-worths are all ultra-speedily sodding off, forming a stampede abroad to sunnier climes, and less hostile environments.
According to a report by investment advisors Henley & Partners, 9,500 millionaires are expected to leave the UK this year, more than double the record-breaking number last year.
This is in stark contrast to most other major economies across Europe and beyond. The number of high-net-worth individuals in Germany, for example, is up 15 per cent over the same period, while the number in the US jumped 62 per cent. The UK and Russia were the only two European nations to record an outflow of millionaires.
Public services are all in a state of utter decline and the top one per cent pay 30 per cent of all income tax
Good riddance, I hear you say. Well, that’s all very well. Except public services are all in a state of utter decline, and the top one per cent pay 30 per cent of all income tax, not to mention all the other taxes.
Rachel Reeves’s plans to target wealth creators with tax rises on capital gains, private equity and inheritance tax may sound appealing to the 9.2 million people we have in the UK of working age neither in work nor looking for work, but somebody has to pay for everyone.
There was good reason behind Lord Mandelson’s unforgettable quote: “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes.” It became a maxim for New Labour and although people didn’t like it, the sums added up nicely. Even a small proportion of high earners leaving has a devastating impact on a country’s finances, which is why everyone else is doing the opposite of us and welcoming high earners with open arms.
Countries with better weather, security and medical facilities are working hard to attract wealthy people with financial tax incentives. A new set of tax laws in Italy, for example, are aggressively aimed at targeting rich people to relocate there.
Reeves spoke last week at the Barclays financial forum at the Corinthia about continuing the new laws that make life more difficult for non doms, laws which people in the banking sector see as an act of fiscal self-harm.
And it’s not just that. Punishing our private schools (yes, largely attended by the well-off) by forcing them to charge VAT will have a devastating impact on their world-leading reputation and will stop them acting as a magnet for the global elite to base themselves in the UK. By making them charge more, the schools will have to pivot from taking the brightest they can to taking the pupils who can afford the fees, which will mean a terrible decline in quality of outcome.
You may despise the wealthy and dream of the mass emigration of millionaires, but this country is already over-burdened with record levels of borrowing and taxes.
All that the rich leaving means is less money for everything and for everyone. We’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Slave Play is everything theatre should be
The hottest ticket in the West End right now is Jeremy O Harris’s Slave Play, the one that caused all the controversy over black audience-only nights. I went last week and it’s a challenging, exhilarating, thought-provoking ride. Three multi-heritage couples enact pornographic deep South slave fantasies as therapy to try and reignite the non-white member of the couple’s lust for the other.
As part of the inter-racial triptych, Denzel Washington’s daughter Olivia asks her husband Kit Harington, both pictured, to make himself a whip-brandishing Southern slavemaster while she twerks and he makes her eat off the floor — her fantasy and preoccupation, not his. Harris, as a black queer playwright, has received attention not only because of the lack of voices like his in theatre, but the transgressive nature of his work. It’s an incredible production, and everything theatre should be. Do go.
