The economist Gary Stevenson has described himself as “one of the best, if not the best, inequality economists in the world,” citing the deaths or foreign residency of rivals.
His diagnosis of Britain’s inequality problem is partially correct, as an extraordinary transfer of wealth toward asset owners has occurred since 2009.
The Bank of England’s quantitative easing programme drove up bond prices, crushed yields and pushed investors along the risk curve, inflating asset prices dramatically.
Some £875bn of gilt purchases handed enormous windfalls to property and equity owners, while wage earners and cash savers quietly picked up the bill.
Stevenson, who made his fortune trading during this period, now proposes a two per cent annual levy on wealth above £10m to address the inequality that followed.
The proposal runs directly into the awkward business of international evidence, where similar experiments have produced damaging results for public finances.
France ran a broad wealth tax from 1988 until 2018, and Eric Pichet’s study estimated it triggered roughly €200bn of capital flight, costing the French state about €7bn a year in lost revenue, twice what the tax raised.
Norway increased its wealth tax at the top end in 2022, and on Civita’s figures, 261 residents worth more than NOK10m left that year, with another 254 departing the next, more than double the pre-hike rate.
Christine Blandhol’s Princeton research puts Norway’s long-run output loss at about 1.3 per cent, and Oslo’s response was to introduce a tougher exit tax simply to slow departures.
Stevenson dismisses such concerns as “just scaremongering,” yet Sunday Times Rich List figures show 111 of Britain’s 350 richest people already live off the British mainland.
One in six names from the Rich List two years ago has disappeared entirely, and that exodus has occurred before any wealth tax has been introduced.
The Tax Justice UK proposal that Stevenson echoes claims £24bn a year from roughly 20,000 people, assuming most remain in the country and can be accurately valued.
Dan Neidle’s analysis of that same proposal found 80 per cent of the projected yield comes from about 5,000 individuals, with 15 per cent from just 10 people.
A handful of relocations to Milan could remove billions in projected revenue before HMRC has valued a single private company, making the arithmetic deeply fragile.
Even the proposal’s own low-response scenario implies £200bn of capital leaving the country, a figure that should give any serious policymaker significant pause.
The £24bn headline figure must also be placed against Britain borrowing £129bn last year, with the state spending close to 45 per cent of national income.
Debt interest alone is running at about £110bn, roughly 1.8 times the £62.2bn defence budget, making Stevenson’s flagship policy worth approximately ten weeks of the deficit.
Perhaps the most revealing moment came when Stevenson was asked whether he personally donates any of his wealth, given his campaigning position.
“I don’t, no,” he replied, acknowledging he has made more money since leaving banking than he made inside it, while advocating that others pay considerably more.
The deeper conversation Britain needs involves restoring sound money, liberalising housing supply and reforming a planning system designed in 1947, not simply taxing the resulting wealth gap.