A snowballing exodus of high-earners from Britain – the top 5% of whom pay half of all income tax – is a disaster for Rachel Reeves brought on by her own war on wealth, financial advisers have warned. The Telegraph‘s Eir Nolsøe has more.
Rachel Reeves likes to present herself as a friend of the global elite, rubbing shoulders with finance ministers in Washington and posting pictures online meeting Wall Street billionaires.
But behind the façade, a storm is brewing at home over the Government’s change to non-dom tax rules on these financial masters of the universe, who help fuel a disproportionate amount of UK tax receipts.
Fresh figures this week showed that the British Government is having to borrow more than expected, as tax income typically paid by the wealthiest has disappointed since the start of the year.
Lower capital gains taxes, levies on self-assessed income and a weak growth in financial services bonuses have also contributed to the dire picture for Reeves.
The list of wealthy non-doms and British business owners fleeing the UK is also growing longer by the day, with places such as Dubai, Italy and Greece mopping up Britain’s richest émigrés.
Last week, Richard Gnodde, Goldman Sachs’s most senior banker outside the US, and British billionaire brothers Ian and Richard Livingstone became the latest to shift their tax domicile outside the UK.
They join Egypt’s richest man, Nassef Sawiris, who co-owns Aston Villa Football Club. Steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, whose family is worth £15 billion, is expected to follow.
Advisers to wealthy global elites warn the chickens are coming home to roost after Reeves’s tax changes, and that efforts to scale back attacks on the wealthy have fallen short.
As the Chancellor returns from her Washington trip, is she starting to regret her move to collapse the non-dom regime?
Among the first to know when a billionaire or multimillionaire decides to up and leave are their tax advisers.
Ceri Vokes, a partner at law firm Withers, says around 10% to 15% of her clients have left Britain because of Reeves’s less generous non-dom scheme and changes to inheritance tax for business owners.
Those with the most to lose are the first to leave, she says.
“It’s definitely the case that the clients who left were those at the upper end of the wealth spectrum. We definitely saw more billionaires leave than millionaires and hundred-millionaires,” Vokes says.
Reeves in January tried to temper the blow with a more generous phase-out of the tax benefit but it “had absolutely zero impact on client behaviour”, Vokes adds.
Britain’s non-dom rules, which date back to the days of William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806), allow foreigners living in the UK to avoid paying tax on income from abroad.
In the 21st century, these wealthy non-doms have become an increasingly important source of tax revenue for successive British governments.
According to the latest government figures, there were 37,800 non-doms in the UK in 2022 who chose to only have foreign income or capital gains taxed if brought into the country.
On average, these people paid £170,700 each in income and capital gains taxes as well as National Insurance contributions.
In comparison, the average British worker pays £7,000 in income tax and National Insurance and most would have paid no capital gains tax at all.
Stuart Adam, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says it is impossible to say with any certainty yet whether the blow from wealthy people upping and leaving is bigger than Britain’s fiscal watchdog had anticipated.
Indeed, just as much of a concern is how many people would normally come that now won’t – a difficult thing to measure.
There is a lot at stake: the top 1% of the highest-earning workers pay 28.2% of all of the Government’s income tax revenues. If you zoom out a little further, the top 5pc pay just less than half at 48.8%.
“One of the consequences of tax revenue becoming more reliant on a smaller number of people is that it does make the public finances more vulnerable to the behaviour of that small number of people,” Adam says.
“If you did see a large exodus, that would have an outside impact on the public finances. That is a reason to worry,” he adds.
Worth reading in full.
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I can see why Trump is getting irritated with Putin, If Putin isn’t careful he will attract the full ire of the Trump administration and that means tens of billions in aid not just the odd billion! Trump will start supplying the real top notch stuff!
If Trump does then Russia will use its own “top notch stuff” that will lead to WW3.
Putin is a master of international law and he is surrounded himself with military strategists.
Trump wants to wash his hands of Ukraine so he can concentrate on war with Iran and/or China.
Russia will achieve its goals either by negotiation or on the battlefield.
Here’s a suggestion which I believe to be really helpful in this situation: Please tell Putin that he’s free to insert as many of his nukes as deeply into his rectum as he feels comfortable with. This will then have put them to some otherwise unachievable good use. There’s a German proverb Hunde die bellen, beißen nicht — dogs bark because they don’t dare to bite — which is very applicable to this recurring nuclear sabre-rattling.
We categorically don’t care.
Sorry but nukes are Putins only big play, he can never win a conventional proxy war with a fully US backed Ukraine,
See for yourself!
Oreshnik.
I had to look up the meaning of “Oreshnik”, and found this:
Russia’s Oreshnik missile: What we know – BBC News
Wow, so you think the US has nothing to counter this? Crikey
“US Space Force General David Thompson warned that American hypersonic missile capabilities are “not as advanced” as those of China or Russia, implying that the US is falling behind in producing the newest and most cutting-edge weaponry.”
https://sputnikglobe.com/20211121/space-force-general-admits-that-us-lagging-behind-russia-china-in-hypersonic-weapons-1090894495.html
Complete rubbish as you are fighting the wrong war. A drone costing a few hundred Roubles and produced on a daily basis will knock out your $50m dollar tank that will take two years to replace for example. The whole of NATO are set up to fight a different war.
At the behest of Israel re Iran…
I may be wrong about this, but I think Russia’s goals are more modest than Ukraine would have the world believe. The Ukrainian People of Crimea voted in a 2014 referendum to BREAK AWAY FROM UKRAINE and join Russia, and I reckon the Crimea is all that Putin wants to claim as Russian territory, which is full of Russians anyway.
I don’t see how this is anything for the West to get involved in at all, except to protest on humanitarian grounds at the Horrific Mass Slaughter of Slavic Warriors caused by both Putin & Zelensky in their insane Meatgrinder War.
Crimea is a Russian naval base whose native population (Tartars) got deported by Stalin. That personnel of and civilians attached to a Russian military installation occupied by Russian military at that time ‘voted’ to become Russian is completely meaningless. That’s a trick originally invented by the Bolshevists who came up with concept of self-determination of the peoples the American president of that time (Woodrow Wilson) just copied from them.
In full splendour, it works like this:
Second- and third-line Russian politicans also don’t exactly keep their desire to restore the status quo ante 1990 in full secret and there’s even a Russian political theorist who claims that this is Russia’s mission to bring racial justice for global majority people to the world by subjugating the white European racists/ Nazis.
People with some background in history will recognized this as a modernized variant of the theory of Moscow as the third Rome and thus, rightful ruler of all Slavs everywhere, no matter if they want this or not, and – by grace of Roosevelt, Churchill and God (in no particular order) – ethnical cleanser of all impure countries infected with non-Slavian people (although there’s probably little left to do here in Europe).
Apart from Crimea, Russia want the 4 Russian speaking Oblasts – Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia as a DMZ or Buffer Zone between RF and NATO controlled Ukraine. It would be designated Novorossia and initially controlled from Moscow – that is what they wanted!
The idea that Russia plans further conquest seems risible, there is nothing to suggest they have any expansionist plans beyond those Russian speaking Oblasts. This seems to be a political and media fiction.
However, NATO should take steps to make any such attacks (on existing NATO countries) extremely damaging – trust, but verify and prepare to defend if necessary – after all we are constantly reminded NATO is a defensive coalition.
Any attacks Russia have made further into Ukraine appear to be reprisal attacks, when targets have been hit inside Russian territory, or following assassinations.
WAR is terrible, war is awful and innocent people die, sometimes in large numbers – the answer to that is peace! Zelensky needs to be removed and replaced, he seems to have forgotten he’s not in a movie, this is real, and many people are dying!
So petty and unprofessional, from yesterday’s fencing. Check your politics at the door and demonstrate proper sportsmanship, like the Italians seemingly can;
”Swiss fencing team branded ‘disrespectful’ for refusing to turn during the Israeli National Anthem, after Israel took gold at the U23 European Championships.”
https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/1916491396170604884
As for the sudden Pakistan vs. India flare-up, I read somewhere that India’s Modi is threatening to cut off Pakistan’s main water supply, by blocking off the upper reaches of the Indus River. Looking at the map below, I don’t understand how that is possible, since the British essentially gifted the whole of the Indus River Valley to the new Muslim country of Pakistan that was carved out of Indian territory 70 years ago at the Partition of India, which means Pakistan is a younger country than Northern Ireland. Any thoughts on this?
And look how Pakistani Muslims showed their gratitude: by swarming into Britain, bringing drugs, honour killings, human trafficking & rape gangs with them, while crushing hapless Pakistani Christians in a debt-slave system back home in Pakistan. According to international agencies, “Every brick in Pakistan is made by a Christian Slave.”
War is great for the political/media class and shite for everybody else.
Working people trying to raise their kids NEVER start wars, but always end up paying the consequences of politicians’ and religious leaders’ choices..
Absolutely right you are! The Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote,
“When the Rich wage war, it’s the Poor who die.”
Or as an English commenter said,
“War makes the rich richer, and the poor dead.”
It isn’t and it can’t. Interesting to see Baluchistan which is bound up in the Kashmir terrorist murders.
As Orwell described it in 1984, totalitarian systems necessarily exist in a permanent state of war, or at least war psychology.
War provides an excellent opportunity to implement extreme measures and exert total control over the population.
I suspect a lot of western governments, having had a taster session of absolute control over the population courtesy of Covid, would rather like a war situation that would provide them with justification to obtain unprecedented powers again. And that’s probably why there haven’t been any serious attempts by these governments to come up with a peace plan; the only way forward is more and more weapons, which of course translates into more and more corpses on both sides of the conflict.
Good points! Is it also part of the Globalist Depopulation Agenda?
Plus it is a distraction from their incompetence at home .
They all want their Falklands moment.
Hear, hear!
War should certainly not trump peace.
The claim “Sadly, it takes two to make peace” is generally correct but Trump could have ended two wars with a pen-stroke on his first day in office simply by stopping all weapon deliveries to Ukraine and Israel. It would have been so easy. Instead, Trump now bears responsibility for the continuation of two wars, whereby the Gaza conflict means Trump is additionally aiding and abetting the worst of all crimes: genocide.
The author refers to “The worst attack on Jews since the holocaust” but there is no mention of the infinitely worse attacks made by Israelis against Palestinians.
During the foundational events of the Nakba in 1948, approximately half of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population, or around 750,000 people, were expelled from their homes or made to flee through various violent means, at first by Zionist paramilitaries, and after the establishment of the State of Israel, by its military. Dozens of massacres targeted Palestinian Arabs and over 500 Arab-majority towns, villages, and urban neighbourhoods were depopulated. Many of the settlements were either completely destroyed or repopulated by Jews and given new Hebrew names. Israel employed biological warfare against Palestinians by poisoning village wells. By the end of the war, 78% of the total land area of the former Mandatory Palestine was controlled by Israel. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba)
And the Israelis initiated the 1956 war, they initiated the 1967 war, they initiated the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and now they are mounting a full-scale genocide against the Palestinian people, not to mention attacking and bombing practically every neighbouring country in the area.
Quoting Col. Douglas Macgregor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djo10WRZrIg):
I cannot conceive of any set of circumstances under which I, as an American citizen, would condone, legitimate or promote mass murder and expulsion of millions of people from their homes in Gaza. And it makes no difference to me whether the people there are Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims, Christians or Jews, or Chinese or German or Russian or Ukrainian or anything else.
Israel is waging a war of annihilation against a group of people that they have condemned as subhuman, as animals, and not exclusively there by the way: I haven’t seen much evidence for mercy offered to anyone in Lebanon or Syria or anywhere else in the region who stands up and opposes Israel and its dominance, its hegemony.
Israel has murdered more than 200 journalists and more than 400 aid workers in Gaza. Only recently, Israeli soldiers murdered 15 ambulance crew members and buried them underneath their flattened ambulances (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjMhqIe0wus).
Since 18th March, when Israel broke the so-called ceasefire and resumed its mass-scale slaughter in Gaza, nearly 1,900 Palestinians have been killed and around 5,000 have been injured. That figure includes approximately 600 children killed and approximately 1,600 children injured in just five weeks. (https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/israel-imposes-starvation-design-gaza)
Israel has now imposed more than 50 days of a complete siege on the Gaza Strip, prohibiting entry of all humanitarian aid, water, food, fuel and medical supplies, while Israeli forces accelerate the forced displacement of Palestinians, pushing them into smaller and smaller areas.
One single week’s worth of Israeli atrocities are documented here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1tVFNGr73M.
All the while, a solution for peace would be easy. Quoting Prof. Jeffrey Sachs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL_0GSOQkf8):
What we need for peace – and the whole world is saying it except for Netanyahu and the Israel lobby – is we need a State of Palestine living alongside a State of Israel. This is the whole story for peace in the Middle East …
There’s one vote only that separates us today from peace and that is the US veto in the UN Security Council that blocked Palestine becoming the 194th UN member state [“because of the iron grip that the Israel lobby has on American foreign policy”] … It’s one vote, it’s our vote. Israel has no veto over a State of Palestine.
The International Court of Justice ruled last year that Israel’s boundaries are the boundaries of 4th June 1967. The United Nations, by an overwhelming, overwhelming majority – 95% of the world’s population – has called for there to be a State of Palestine.
But still we are only reminded of the holocaust during WWII. No criticism of Jews is ever allowed.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/28/putin-trump-zelensky-war-peace-defence-spending-4pc/
‘…..the deal now available to Ukraine will be worse than what was within their grasp in the negotiations in March to April 2022’
In all probability, had Russian terms of surrender been accepted in April 2022, Russian forces would by now be in control of Kyiv, Odessa, Chisinau, quite possibly, the Suwalki corridor and much else. We know this quite simply because that is what they tell us themselves.
‘From day one, we were taught that Russia is and must remain a derzhava — a “great power.” Not just one country among many, but a pole in a multipolar world. A country destined to challenge the West. That belief — fused with resentment, imperial nostalgia and a constant sense of grievance — forms the backbone of Russian diplomacy.
At MGIMO, we were taught to cite international law while violating its spirit, to defend norms while dismantling them and to speak of peace while justifying and waging wars. Georgia. Syria. Ukraine. These weren’t deviations. We deployed whichever claim of “Territorial integrity” or “self-determination” suited the day’s talking point. This is Russian anti-normism in action.’
Britain now requires an annual defence budget of £130bn. VAT must rise by 5% immediately in order to pay for this.
As that distinguished soldier, General Sir Richard Dannatt, so eloquently points out in today’s DT, Ukraine has bought us time to rearm.
We must not waste it.
The knowledge surrounding these wars and political confrontations is like a floating iceberg. Only 10% of it is visible. 90% of the true driving factors and benefitting parties are never public knowledge. Even after major conflicts are finished, the victor manages the story. It’s like living in a made up fairytale.
War never trumps peace.
Peace is achieved through deterrence.
Deterrence trumps war.
Unfortunately, arrant stupidity trumps everything……