The last few weeks have brought with them a thoroughly distasteful amount of whining from the very rich.
Take Dermot Smurfit. He tells The Daily Telegraph that he pays “significant taxes” in the UK, that he “places no burden” on the state, that he is a “seriously mobile” person. And if the mooted changes to the tax laws governing the non-doms come in, he’ll leave the UK: “it’s goodbye”.
Let’s look at this a bit more closely. I have no idea how much Smurfit is worth. The papers say £500m, so – given that wealth is very easily exaggerated – let’s say £250m. The income on that, if it is conservatively invested, would be around £12.5m.
And the significant taxes that Smurfit says he pays? £150,000. So an effective rate of 1.2%. I pay 40%. Smurfit says he places no burden on the state because his children go to private school. He’s not alone there. Lots of people’s children go to private school and, of course, lots of people don’t have school-age children. They’re not paying 1.2%. And “no burden”? What of the roads, the trains and the tubes that get the waiters serving him his food in Mayfair to work? And the tax credits that top up their wages? Moreover, who pays to educate them? And what if he has a heart attack over a cognac one night? Has he arranged for the NHS not to bother to send out an ambulance? And what of our police? I imagine their very existence has stopped quite a few people mugging him already. We’re all a burden on the state.
And the “very mobile” bit? He’s been living here for 20 years, for heaven’s sake. Hardly smacks of a footloose life led by the kind of person who flits from country to country to take advantage of the myriad opportunities of different tax systems.
It’s all absolutely absurd. Why are people who have been based here for 20 years allowed to claim that the UK is not their domicile in the first place? And having done so, why are they allowed to pay practically no tax and then pretend that this situation is good news for the rest of us? I don’t believe that a £30,000 charge is going to make many of the non-doms leave London, but I’m so horrified by the outpourings of self-serving nonsense I’ve read and heard over the last few weeks that right now I rather wish it would. I daresay Mr Smurfit’s family would enjoy visiting him in Dubai or Monte Carlo occasionally (he seems to suggest he is leaving them behind), although they might wonder why he would abandon them for the sake of £30,000.
There’s also a flip side to all this, of course. If taxing the non-doms more will mean that the Treasury will get less revenue from them, surely it stands to reason that if it taxes the rest of us less, it’ll get more revenue from us – or at least stop us moving to Dubai and Australia (note that 5.5 million Britons already live abroad and a record number – the majority highly skilled, according to the OECD – continue to leave every year)? It makes sense then, surely, just to slash income tax to 1.2% for everyone and leave us all to get on with it. Or not?