The FT has breathlessly reported this morning:
A wave of directors has left Britain since Sir Keir Starmer's government abolished favourable tax treatment for non-domiciled residents and raised other duties on the wealthy, with the United Arab Emirates the most popular destination.
From last year's October Budget until last month, 3,790 company directors reported leaving the UK, compared with 2,712 in the same period a year earlier, according to an analysis of Companies House filings by the Financial Times.
Is the FT really saying this is something to worry about?
Some wealthy people are planning to do some remote working, and we're all meant to be in a panic as a result?
I think they need to get some perspective on life. These people have moved. They haven't even changed jobs. They're just choosing to be resident elsewhere, and we have no idea if tax is the motivation for that. It need not be.
There are storms, and there are storms in teacups.
I suggest the FT should pay more attention to Gaza. That's the real storm.
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“United Arab Emirates the most popular destination.”.. so that would be Dubai? one of the most polluted cities on the planet in terms of air pollution. Good luck to them & their lungs.
To be honest with the aid of your blog Richard once one wakes to up to how money creation really works in the UK( and elsewhere) then you realise that the garbage that the financial elite, media and especially politicians sprout is just that utter garbage.
Apart from being extremely frustrated all that I and other commentators on your blog can do it tactfully “educate” family/friends how the system really works, that LINO issues money then uses taxation to keep inflation under control by clawing the money back via taxes.
And importantly raising the point that wealth trickling down to us peasants from the elite is a very insulting way to describe the wealthy’s very limited contribution to the UK economy.
We only get their scraps.
And their scraps trickling down are far outweighed by the wealth they syphon up.
So an extra thousand people who had non-dom status and thus presumably weren’t paying much tax at all decided to go on not paying that tax by living somewhere else. Who cares?
Anyway, even in the unlikely scenario that each of them was earning a fully-taxed million pounds a year, we’re still only talking about a loss to the treasury of less than half a billion. Compared to the total government budget of around £1,335 billion, it’s irrelevant.
I wonder if Dickie Tice is one of them? Would be more than happy to wave him goodbye.
Thank you, Toby.
Plus his partner, but shes’ there already and seems happy to live in a Muslim country.
Joking apart, the pair are really stoking up anti-immigrant feeling and getting the BBC and Sky to lap up.
Seems like he still lives in the UK?
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/iDabUesOWH_lKM0l2q6XEefh4eU/appointments
Read the FT story this morning. The comments at the end are interesting and shine a light on how these people think.
I had a chance conversation with a “wealth manager” years ago. You needed £20m in liquid assets to get through the door of his firm (probably alot more now). He said his clients weren’t that interested in “growing” their wealth, only in avoiding as much tax as possible. Many didn’t see why they should pay taxes at all
That’s about it.
“They’re just choosing to be resident elsewhere, and we have no idea if tax is the motivation for that. It need not be.”
Of course it is. Tax influences behaviour. Just admit you called this one wrong.
I was being generous to them, and truthful.
Why did you choose to be a total dick?
More silly news from the FT in the height of the Silly News Season?
I wonder though how much of a foothold these people maintain in the country- properties owned, kids in private schools, continued access to health care, tax free investments – could they possibly be targeted through these ‘footholds’ and made to pay anyway? And is there a possibility of successful lobbying about it?
‘Exodus’, ‘wealth migration’, yet another story generated by a report from an interested party, selling wealth manager, golden passports or whatever, run my an unquestioning media.
Why let a little balance get in the way of bad news and clicks?
https://taxjustice.net/press/millionaire-exodus-did-not-occur-study-reveals/
One’s heart bleeds for the poor mites. Now if only the working classes had such pluck and get up and go!
Seriously, the msm and those who own them and write for them live in an alternate universe to the rest of us. First off, if these people aren’t paying tax or much tax anyway, why does it matter if they leave? Who cares? Secondly, maybe some of them are leaving because of the basket case the UK is becoming. Thirdly, I recall Rishi Sunak’s wife had non-dom status, the one time PM of the UK, so it was reported her tax avoidance could have been around £400 million over ten years. £400 million smackeroonies for one person?!! How much tax do the royals avoid, big private landowners, the ‘City of London’, other non doms, big corporations like Starbucks, Amazon and many others? I notice that we the general public are also fleeced when it comes to prices of almost everything and underpaid in jobs and the pitiful benefits and welfare system. I will never understand how the bulk of ordinary people in this country are not angered by the corruption, mismanagement, greed and wickedness of those in power and those at the top of the hierarchy.
It is time now our focus fell on the corruption and greed of the people who, however you wish to see it, run and manage things.
There are overstatements in this post. Your generalisations are not by any means necessarily be true. I have to say that – because it is right.
Benjamin Franklin once proposed a brilliant tax reform that the wealthy contemporaties elites who co-founded the United States with him did not adopt. Franklin proposed that instead of establishing a complicated tax bureau to levy taxes on wealth property or income or whatever else, it would be much simpler to operate a national public bank and use the interest income from lending operations to provide revenue to fund the public sector.
This kills multiple birds with one stone. The national bank (1) provides for the national currency (2) provides for public revenues (3) redistributed wealth. Franklin acknowledged this redistribution function directly, saying that the wealthy, who make the greatest use of money, thus necessarily pay most of this form of tax.
It was a great idea for the health of the country, but the slave owners in power were not keen on actual freedom for those whom thy deemed to be lesser than themselves. Perhaps Richard Murphy could weigh in on this idea of replacing taxes with public banking?
Why waste my time with an idea that so very obviously could not raise more than £1 trillion a year and which only someone fom the far right would think worth promoting now?
The numbers show that many of them move regularly. In the companies I have worked for people tend to stay in senior positions for 2 or 3 years before moving to another position often in another country, so this is not unusual. The fact that this years numbers are bigger than last years doesn’t mean anything without a lot more context. How many moved in? What was the net change? What is the trend over time? Two figures doesn’t tell us much.
The other point is we are told these people are wealth creators, I would dispute this, the wealth creators are the ordinary people tuning up and doing their jobs everyday providing goods and services to customers. The financial elites the government and MSM faun over are wealth extractors not wealth creators, we’ll be better off without them.
Much to agree with
Some really low intelligence on display whenever people like the FT report this. If someone is moving to a tax haven where they pay nothing on earnings then they probably already payed next to nothing on earnings in this country. A nondom likely extracted vastly more from society than it ever payed in tax.
I would like to think they are going because they believe they have at last been rumbled and the jig is up, as they say.
They do not want to suffer the wrath of public anger that will ensue when their greed is laid bare for all to see. So they are going, stealing away from the crime scene.
Then, I woke up.
@ Alan Surtees,
Well it’s nice to dream, isn’t it? 🙂
I usually have Sky News on overnight to help me sleep. I’m wondering how much gets into my dreams – certainly had some weird ones here recently. But possibly that’s been down to the rain on caravan roof, the wind from Floris, and the effect of the hobnail boots the wood pigeons seem to be wearing when they walk on the roof!