At a packed press conference this week, Nigel Farage unveiled his latest headline fodder – the Britannia Card. For just £250,000, wealthy foreigners would be able to get their hands on the card, giving them a 10-year UK residency permit. In return, it would exempt them from UK tax on their overseas income, assets, and capital gains.
Reform claims this income would then be redistributed to low-paid workers – around £600 per eligible person. Labour dubbed it a “golden ticket scheme for foreign billionaires”, the press said it was a “Robin Hood tax”. Whatever you call it, I think we can all agree, it’s a fantasy.
The exodus fallacy
A day later, the super-rich were making headlines again with claims of a wealth exodus. Once again, golden passport promoters Henley & Partners claimed millionaires are leaving in their droves. It’s a wonder there are any millionaires left in the UK, we hear about them leaving so often. But that’s the tactic: if you repeat something enough, people will start to believe it.
This is nothing more than a scare story to try and protect a status quo that only ever benefits the super-rich at the expense of everyone else.
So let’s clear this up. There is no exodus of millionaires. I know because I am one. I’m not going anywhere, and neither are my rich friends. In fact, since 2017 the UK millionaire population has grown 10 times faster than the rate of millionaires supposedly leaving. You can’t just look at one side of the equation.
Tax Justice Network has debunked these much-repeated claims with their excellent report into the exodus myth, as have many others over the course of the year. Yet 10,900 news stories were published last year on Henley & Partners’ spin alone. Nice bit of PR for a firm offering to help all of these millionaires that it claims are leaving. Where was the scrutiny of what was effectively a piece of marketing by a private company?
The latest Henley migration ’report’ claims 16,500 millionaires are projected to leave the UK in 2025. That’s based on Henley’s in-house database and research, which includes looking at a few rich people’s LinkedIn status updates, not actual migration. So it takes a skewed and unrepresentative sample size and extrapolates that out to the population. Tax Justice Network asked Henley & Partners exactly how many millionaires they saw migrating – but they won’t share the data to clarify.
So let’s work with the projection in their report: 16,500 millionaires. That is just 0.6% of the millionaires in the UK. Why are half a percent of people getting so much airtime? Because extreme wealth and the super-rich are buying up our media, and our politics. And now, they want to buy you with their “Robin Hood tax”. More like, hoodwink tax.
Calls for tax justice
Reform’s idea of giving £600 to a handful of people doesn’t even touch the sides of the economic, social, and welfare issues facing people in the UK. The public need and deserve tax justice so that the wealthiest in the country pay their fair share.
People need and deserve decent wages, good schools for their children, a doctor’s appointment when they need one, investment in the jobs and energy of the future, and a working criminal justice system so that they feel safe in their homes and at work.
The public want to see the super-rich pay more and so do patriotic millionaires like me. A 2% wealth tax on assets over £10mn could raise £24bn a year for our country. Among UK millionaires, 80% support this wealth tax and 72% think the Government should raise taxes on the super-rich to reduce taxes on everyone else.
This is the investment in public wealth the UK and businesses need, not a paltry handout at the whim of the incoming super-rich. It’s time we stopped providing free advertising to the wealth protection industry. They have an agenda, they know exactly what they’re doing.
Instead we should start paying attention to the needs and hopes of the majority of people in this country, of our struggling small to medium-sized businesses.
Tax us, those with the wealth to afford to pay more, more fairly.
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