Who wants to be a patriotic millionaire?

Britain is losing its millionaires. According to a UBS report, the UK is set to lose more than 500,000 millionaires by 2028 — the largest percentage fall in the world. Why should we care? Because Britain is broke, and the government is set to spend £115 billion more than it takes in this year. 

Some campaigners suggest the solution is to tax the rich more. According to polling commissioned by Patriotic Millionaires UK and reported in The Guardian, three quarters of UK millionaires say they would be willing to pay more tax. Given this extraordinary result, we would expect to see money pouring into the treasury. 

So, why has this not happened? After all, there is nothing stopping self proclaimed patriotic millionaires from practicing what they preach. HM Treasury already operates a voluntary donation scheme for anyone who feels they do not pay enough tax.  

Yet over the last decade, this has raised just £2.3 million, barely £230,000 a year on average. At that rate, Britain’s national debt could be paid off in around 12 million years. Or at least it could if it wasn’t also going up by £500 million every single day. 

Patriotic Millionaires UK argue that there is little point in voluntarily paying more as an individual unless everyone else is forced to do the same. But that logic quickly falls apart. We don’t wait until everyone else donates to a charity before doing so ourselves. 

One cannot help but suspect that the survey is little more than an exercise in virtue signalling and a fig leaf for more tax-and-spend, as opposed to a serious proposal for fixing the public finances. As the IFS has made clear, if we were to implement the tax system of a typical high-tax European Union country it is middle earners who would be hit hardest. 

Yet here in this poll are supposedly 374 millionaires crying out to pay more tax. Leaving aside my sneaking suspicion that real millionaires don’t actually spend their time answering online polls, the findings themselves are rather more qualified than the headlines suggest. 

Respondents did not simply say they were willing to pay more tax, full stop. Instead, they said they would be willing to pay more tax to ensure the attributes that make the UK a place they are proud to live in get the public funding they need.

The top three of these attributes identified in the survey were Britain’s culture and history (30 per cent), family and friends (15 per cent) and creativity and innovation (14 per cent). These are hardly reflective of how tax money is currently spent. We spend about 220 times more just servicing the national debt than on museums and galleries, for example. 

According to one “patriotic millionaire” quoted, “the reality is all of these things will be at risk unless we reduce inequality.” Never mind that the share of wealth held by the one per cent in the UK is already lower than every other G7 country — what does inequality have to do with people being proud of their country, culture and history? 

Other questions presented respondents with a false binary. For example, respondents had to choose between two options: “the government should (or should not) increase taxes on the wealthy to reduce the tax burden on everyone else”. As if the only way to lower taxes for ordinary Britons was to raise them elsewhere. Conspicuously absent was the far more obvious option of bringing Britain’s runaway public spending under control.

The real reason nobody makes voluntary donations to the treasury is because they do not have confidence that their money will be spent wisely. In the last financial year, the welfare bill consumed every penny collected in income tax, and then some. That’s before the cost of inflation busting public sector pay rises, lavish gold plated pensions and the ever expanding unaccountable quango state.

One suspects this is why the majority of respondents to the poll also said that it was not unpatriotic to leave the UK because of the high tax rate. Millionaires are probably just as fed up with politicians and bureaucrats wasting our money as everyone else. 

While Patronising Millionaires UK continue to advocate for the wealthy activists who want everyone to pay more, the TaxPayers’ Alliance will continue to stick up for the majority of people who are sick of paying too much for too little.