No taxation on expatriation

Since Operation Epic Fury began, the British state has been a veritable whirlwind of inaction.

The PM initially refused to allow US strikes to launch from Diego Garcia and Fairford, before relenting when drones struck an effectively undefended British base on Cyprus. He considered deploying a carrier before realising Royal Navy had no ability to defend the ship, and eventually despatched HMS Duncan to Cyprus days after the war started – despite having known about the impending hostilities since the 11th of February. Meanwhile a Greek warship moved to defend Cyprus for us, and a French carrier group sailed for the region. In many ways this is a worse humiliation than Suez. At least then we were able to deploy forces, able to try to exert our will upon the world. Now all can see that Britain, for the first time in half a millennium, has no navy to speak of, and is entirely unable to project its power. While the fate of the Middle East, and perhaps the American Empire, is determined in and around Iran, Britain has done nothing. 

If Britain cannot make the area safe, what about repatriating the many thousands of British citizens stranded in the Gulf? It seems not. I understand that while around 92,000 British nationals have returned from the Gulf since the 1st of March, the Foreign Office has only chartered six flights to bring perhaps a thousand or so citizens home. The rest flew back on commercial flights, which they paid for. What the UK has done is make a ‘register your presence’ service available, allowing British nationals in the region to make the government aware of them, should they need evacuation at some later date. As of Sunday around 176,000 Brits have used this service.  Given the UK’s notoriously slack approach to capturing data on who is or isn’t in the country, it’s quite possible that this number is a surprise to those in power. 

Perhaps this is part of the reason so many voices have been clamouring to change the rules so that all British citizens, wherever they might reside, pay taxes to the British state. The argument seems to be, as Ed Davey put it, that “Brits benefiting from armed forces protection should pay their fair share of tax”. This policy has even been cheered for in the Telegraph, with Gerard Lyons arguing that a citizenship tax would address the situation in which a “UK passport holder…can move abroad, earn handsomely and pay not a penny to the country that protects their rights”. His suggestion is that the UK copies the US and forces all its citizens to file a tax return. 

This is a policy which is both practically and morally wrong

It would facilitate all the state’s worst impulses. The UK already has one of the highest tax burdens in its history, and is forecast to reach a record high by 2030-31. Increasingly we are being driven bankrupt by our statutory obligations, by judges setting the price of labour, and by waves of migrants who will forever be a fiscal burden (and who send millions home in remittances, which no advocates of the citizenship tax seem concerned about). In this crisis entirely of our own choosing, our politicians will do anything rather than change the system which is destroying us. As the country declines, our emigration rate remains stubbornly high. In that context, it’s easy to see why politicians and civil servants might change the rules so that even those Brits who have left the country can be compelled to become “PAYEpigs”, working to feed the endless demands of an uncontrolled beast. Such a policy, preventing taxpayers from voting with their feet, might delay even further the moment of reckoning when we will have to finally fix the broken state. 

This policy also lacks any reasonable moral justification. Ed Davey drew a link between “benefiting from armed forces protection” and paying tax, but it has become abundantly clear in the last few weeks that we are not able to offer such protection. 

There was, of course, a time when we did have such a power, and would deploy it to protect a single Briton. In June 1850, the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, gave his famous civis Britannicus sum speech following the Don Pacifico affair, in which he describe the government as “bound to afford protection to our fellow subjects abroad”, and that “a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and strong arm of England, will protect him against injustice and wrong”. Even then, at the height of the Pax Britannica, we did not dream of taxing British subjects across the world. 

Now, in 2026, the idea that the British state might protect its citizens in such a fashion is laughable. Without the ability to project power via our aircraft carriers, given the lack of any strike groups to deploy them with, the British state is in no way able to use its military ‘might’ to defend its citizens across the world. Indeed, I understand that within the Ministry of Defence that it has been common knowledge for some time that we don’t have a navy in any functional sense. That reality is now common knowledge. The idea that we could ask, or expect our citizens to pay for this lack of protection is as pathetic as it is laughable. 

There is then, no good argument for a citizenship tax, other than “the state wants more money”. These proposals are nothing more than a grasping attempt to squeeze extra revenue from a system that has no plan to fix its spending woes—and they, along with their advocates, deserve to be met with outright scorn. Let’s starve the beast instead.