- See more Daily Mail on Google - save us as a Preferred Source
By and large we British do not go in for mass self-flagellation.
We frown at penitential festivals such as the Riti Settennali, when Italians flay themselves with metal whips and push nail-embedded corks into their naked chests, much as one does to a potato before baking it.
And yet some 120 British millionaires, including Gary Lineker, have signed an open letter begging the Burnham government to make them pay more tax.
As an exercise in masochism it may seem impressive. Thrash, oh thrash us with higher taxes, Lord. But do please spell our names correctly in the newspaper.
Calling themselves the ‘Patriotic Millionaires’, these prosperous paragons want Andy Burnham to grab ‘with both hands’ the opportunity to impose a 2 per cent tax on fortunes of £10million.
This, they allege, would raise £24billion and lead to a ‘devolution of wealth and power from the very richest’ – by which they mean themselves.
The letter’s signatories, alongside incorrigible show-off Lineker, include soft-focus film director Richard Curtis, ageing rocker Brian Eno and crime writer Val McDermid, an ardent Scots nationalist.
Gary Lineker is one of 120 millionaires who have called for more taxation of the super rich
It is expected new Prime Minister Andy Burnham will raise taxes to pay for his spending spree
Also on the list is an old drinking acquaintance of mine, Brian Basham, a City public relations smoothie who used to polish the halo of Hastings Banda, murderous dictator of Malawi. Dr Banda (who died in 1997) had his faults, but parsimony towards PR agents was not one of them. Brian is loaded.
Well, bully for him. High-spending democracies need financial go-getters.
The trouble with the Patriotic Millionaires letter, odd as it might seem from signatories of such kidney, is that it is financially naive.
The wealth tax it proposes would likely drive away hundreds of less saintly multi-millionaires. Even if it reaped £24billion from those who stayed, greater billions in tax receipts would be lost amid the dash for the airports.
The Patriotic Millionaires idea began in America in 2010 with the support of rich Democrats such as George Soros, the Europhile financier who nearly broke the Bank of England on Black Wednesday in 1992.
Has Soros, or someone like him, put Gary Lineker up to this stunt? If so, they possibly did not realise that our Gary has a not exactly spotless reputation on tax, having, in 2017, been entangled in the Paradise Papers scandal that unveiled tax-avoidance in the British Virgin Islands. No law may have been broken but it was hardly the behaviour of a champing altruist.
We should not doubt that other signatories of the Patriotic Millionaires letter would happily tear the jangling gold bangles from their wrists and throw them into the Chancellor’s collecting bowl, but as Tory leader Kemi Badenoch noted yesterday, there is nothing to stop them already doing so.
The Treasury employs civil servants to handle donations. I am told that it is the most popular desk in the entire department – ‘because it is never busy’.
Most filthy rich tend to dislike paying tax. That is how fortunes are made.
John Paul Getty once observed that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights’. And as George Bernard Shaw has one of his characters say: ‘I am a millionaire. That is my religion.’
Stonkingly rich people are not like the rest of us. They chase numbers.
Their motivation goes beyond avarice, for you can only eat so many lobsters. It is powered by something different, as much by indignation at prohibition as by material lust. If they think they are being taken for fools by interfering politicians, something snaps inside them and they migrate, as fast as swifts in September.
Henley & Partners, a firm that helps plutocrats flee high-tax regimes, publishes ‘country wealth flow’ charts. These show that high-tax Britain is losing more multi-millionaires than anywhere else in the world.
Likewise, the Sunday Times Rich List has found that the number of billionaires in Britain, now 157, is 20 lower than it was four years ago.
Some of our fellow citizens, hearing that, will say: ‘Hooray – we can’t bear blingy billionaires.’ Revulsion at flaunted wealth is only human, but it is, in this case, self-defeating.
The 157 billionaires who remain here represent 22 per cent of our gross domestic product. That may indicate how much we have lost since 20 of them left, and how much more might vanish if Mr Burnham were dim enough to squeeze assets of £10million.
Can such privileged people not afford higher tax bills? Yes. But they can also afford to move elsewhere and they are no longer hesitating to do so to the Gulf, the USA, Italy and Switzerland.
A year ago I met a rich Californian who had lived in Britain happily for 15 years. He reared his family and ran his company here but was now moving to Portugal because our inheritance tax had started to annoy him. In Portugal they have no such tax.
Death taxes are but one area where the super-rich leave a hole. There is the stamp duty they pay on big houses (the London market has slumped). There is the VAT on their sports cars, jewels and trips to Mayfair boutiques and auction houses.
There is their income tax and the people they employ – maids, chauffeurs, bodyguards – and the lawyers they consult and the victuals they slosh down their skinny gullets.
New research by the free-market Adam Smith Institute shows that the number of sterling millionaires in Britain today is the lowest since the financial crash of 2008.
Meanwhile, the Italian government can’t believe its luck. Suddenly it is receiving lots of lovely loot that these stateless tycoons used to drop in London.
The only British people who gain from such movements are Left-wing ideologues in the think-tanks and institutions who want to turn Britain into some egalitarian utopia. The rest of us, who used to benefit from the taxes paid by millionaires, will be poorer.
Inequality will be said to drop merely because it is a relative measure.
Gary Lineker, who fancies himself as a political influencer, probably reckons he is pushing at an open door. Mr Burnham has certainly made one or two noises about a new wealth tax. But is Westminster with him?
Officials at the Treasury have become alarmed by the exodus of multi-millionaires. Before the change of prime minister, Labour MPs appeared to be starting to understand the golden goose had been over-plucked.
Mr Burnham may not notice how much parliamentary opinion has matured until he turns up in the Commons in five weeks’ time.
As for the Riti Settennali, in which those devout residents of Guardia Sanframondi trudge through the streets lashing their backs, comparisons to Moneybags Lineker & Co fail in one crucial respect.
The self-mortifiers of Guardia Sanframondi wear white hoods over their heads. These may make them look like Ku Klux Klansmen but they bestow anonymity. Their friends cannot see them. Their virtue is incognito.
Dear Gary, please pay more tax if you wish, but do it in private. Anything else just looks like the actions of a conceited creep.