How to get filthy wrong

I‘m not really sure why we keep indulging this. If a man stood on a soapbox in Ilford declaring himself the finest cardiologist in Britain, on the grounds that all the other cardiologists are either dead or living in Paris, he would have men in white coats whisk him away. But because Gary Stevenson says it about economics, and says it loudly and with an accent that ”shows the establishment what“, he gets ninety minutes of primetime Channel 4 instead.

How to Get Filthy Rich, which aired on Wednesday, is a very painful hour-and-a-half party political broadcast for the wealth tax, garnished with the occasional dissenting voice wheeled on to be talked over. For me, it gave me the same second-hand embarrassment of watching David Brent or Mark and Jez from PeepShow. Time after time, and whether they are experts like Dan Neidle or entrepreneurs like Bassim Haidar, Gary’s contortions of economics were laid out straight. But, as with so much of our politics today, this could simply be glossed over because they were in on it. As if there was a Masonic conspiracy that united economists and experts across the political spectrum against a policy that would raise piddling sums.

Economics is a discipline of trade-offs, evidence, and unintended consequences. It is a dismal science, because rarely are the decisions going to put a smile on anyone’s face. Politics, on the other hand, is the science of winning. Ne’er the two shall meet. Even for its most irreverent practitioners, simply bashing your opponent over the head with conspiracies and “well, it polls well” rarely leads to an anticipated victory. In Gary’s case, every fact is bent to serve a narrative that inequality is the greatest threat facing humanity (even though inequality in wealth and income has not moved since the millennium).

Let’s see what the evidence says, even from those outside of the conspiracy. Stevenson’s own sunniest projection has his wealth tax raising £24 billion a year, which is less than two per cent of government spending, or roughly two months’ interest on the national debt. That is the optimistic case, the one that assumes the wealthy sit still while the state annually shears them. As we know, the wealthy, like all of us, are rational creatures and don’t particularly like being taxed. Even Gary’s own group of “Patriotic Millionaires” show no evidence of voluntarily paying more tax — as a friend of mine in the Treasury once joked, the voluntary tax desk is covered in cobwebs.

In 1990, twelve OECD countries levied net wealth taxes, but today, barely a handful persist, and not because governments are tired of revenue. France’s ISF chased out an estimated 42,000 millionaires over fifteen years before Macron scrapped it. Norway raised its wealth tax in 2022 and promptly watched billionaires decamp to Switzerland, taking future tax receipts with them. Even Gary’s own documentary furnishes us with the downsides he so readily dismisses. The aforementioned Bassim Haidar tells him, to his face, that he would leave the moment a two per cent levy arrived. Gary’s response is to disbelieve him. The Norwegians disbelieved them too.

The tragedy — and it is a tragedy, because there is a real grievance buried under the shouting — is that Stevenson’s diagnosis is half right. Britain has seen an extraordinary transfer of wealth to asset owners since 2009. The culprit is not some cabal of billionaires, however, but £875 billion of quantitative easing, which inflated the price of every house, bond, and share while wages stood still, alongside a planning system that has criminalised housebuilding for three generations. The divide that matters in Britain is not billionaire versus pauper but homeowner versus renter. As someone in the latter camp, I can assure Gary that no wealth tax will build me a house. It is telling that the remedy which would actually help his young audience is the one that requires no villain but the tedious, unglamorous work of repealing bad laws.

But tedious, unglamorous work does not get 1.6 million YouTube subscribers. They want to hear that the end is nigh: the NHS will go, Britain is finished, the welfare state will be shut down. Unless, of course, we adopt the one weird trick that economists don’t want you to know about and the establishment refuses to implement. Stevenson is a millenarian content maker and half-decent author: he is not an authority figure on economics or policy, and you would be a fool to take him as such.

The danger is that the show has an audience, and the audience votes. An incoming government hungry for revenue and hungrier still for applause may find the applause lines irresistible. If it does, the sequence is as predictable as any of this economic claptrap. The capital flees, the revenue disappoints, the deficit remains, and the young people Gary claims to champion inherit an economy with less investment, fewer jobs, and less wealth than before. Forty centuries of wage and price controls taught us that popular interventions and effective ones are rarely the same thing. Wealth taxes are simply the latest verse of a very old song.

So let the curtain fall on the Gary Stevenson show, as its star apparently wishes. And when it does, perhaps we can return to the harder business of making Britain rich which starts, as ever, with building stuff.