I Give Up (And You Might as Well Too). Britain Has Made Striving Pointless

Let me make my position clear from the outset, because it is quite an extreme one.

I would rather give my accountant £2,000 in order to save £1,000 in tax than hand that £1,000 to the Government.

Yes, I know. That makes absolutely no financial sense. That is rather the point.

I have reached the stage where my resentment at handing money to the British state has become greater than my desire to keep it myself. I wasn’t always like this. In fact, I grew up in a decidedly Left-wing household in a relatively poor part of North London. My father was an accountant and my mother was a teacher. She became a teacher at a time when Ken Livingstone, Labour councils and Left-wing politics were very much the prevailing culture in London.

Government wasn’t something I hated. Quite the opposite. The bargain seemed perfectly reasonable to me. You worked, paid your taxes, obeyed the law and contributed to society, and in return the state provided decent public services and a safety net for people who genuinely needed it. That was the deal. I believed in it. I don’t anymore.

Then they came for the pension

The final straw for me is pensions. From April 6th 2027, most unused pension funds and pension death benefits will be brought into a person’s estate for Inheritance Tax purposes. This isn’t speculation. It isn’t something Rachel Reeves might do at some unspecified point in the future. The change was announced in the 2024 Budget and has subsequently been legislated for. (Here’s HMRC guidance on the April 2027 pension changes.)

HMRC estimates that around 38,500 estates a year will pay more Inheritance Tax as a result, with an average additional liability among affected estates of around £34,000.

I find this extraordinary. I’m in my late 50s. I’ve been a reasonably successful serial entrepreneur. Nothing spectacular; I’m certainly no Richard Branson, but I’ve started companies, employed people and spent decades paying Corporation Tax, VAT, PAYE, National Insurance and all the other taxes and charges associated with trying to run a business in Britain.

I still have two or three little businesses. I have a YouTube channel. Occasionally I even manage to make some money from the stock market. I’ve been lucky. My house is paid off, I don’t have significant liabilities and I’m getting on with my life and, until recently, quite enjoying doing it.

I hadn’t particularly planned to spend my pension. My assumption was that I would draw whatever I needed and leave the rest invested. Perhaps one day I would need a substantial chunk of it to pay for care in old age. (More on that particular racket shortly.) Whatever remained would eventually go to my children.

Now the Government has changed the calculation. The pension accumulated by working, saving and taking risks for decades is another pot of money the state has decided it wants a piece of when I die. Which has left me asking a question I never expected to ask: why am I still trying to accumulate money?

What exactly am I paying for?

The question gets considerably more irritating when I look at what the British state chooses to spend money on. Take asylum accommodation.

The former RAF Wethersfield site in Essex has recreational and sporting facilities, healthcare and taxpayer-funded transport. Reports from the site describe a gym, entertainment room, squash court, table tennis, pool tables, social areas and minibus services.

The Sun describes Wethersfield as being like a holiday camp. The Express has this report from inside the migrant accommodation centre.

I pay for my gym. I pay for my television. I pay for my transport. I pay for my house. I pay enormous amounts of tax. And apparently I need to pay more.

You can argue about whether the facilities at Wethersfield are luxurious. That isn’t really the point. The point is that somebody is paying for them. And that somebody is me. And you.

Then there is social housing

Social housing is another subject where people become incredibly nervous about stating what the figures actually say, so let us state them.

According to the 2021 Census, 47.6% of household reference persons living in social housing in London were born outside the United Kingdom. Call it 48%. Nearly half. The national figure was around 19%.

The Telegraph’s subsequent analysis reported that the effective benefit these households receive through rents below the private market rate amounted to an average discount of roughly £11,600 a year per household. It also reported that around 35% of working-age foreign-born household reference persons living in London’s social housing were unemployed or economically inactive.

I have questions.

What should entitle somebody to a heavily subsidised and exceptionally scarce public asset? Should previous contribution count? Should length of residence count? Should somebody whose family has paid into the British system for generations have any greater claim than somebody whose connection with Britain is much more recent?

Apparently these are questions we are increasingly not supposed to ask. I think we should ask them, because there are young British families whose parents have paid taxes here and whose grandparents paid taxes here who cannot get anywhere near a council property. They sit on waiting lists while nearly half of London’s social-housing households are represented by somebody who was born outside the country.

That is not a racial observation. It is a statement about allocation of a scarce resource. Social housing in London is extraordinarily valuable. If the private equivalent costs thousands of pounds more every year, then the person receiving that subsidised tenancy is receiving something of immense economic value. Taxpayers are entitled to ask how that resource is being allocated.

And before anyone says this is all about immigration, it isn’t. In fact, concentrating entirely on immigration lets an enormous number of British-born people off the hook.

Because while I am being encouraged to keep working into my 60s, paying tax, employing people and building a pension that the Government eventually wants to tax on my death, something else extraordinary has been happening. Britain’s disability-benefits system has exploded.

As of April 2026, four million people in England and Wales were entitled to Personal Independence Payment. Before the pandemic, the combined number entitled to PIP or its predecessor DLA was about 3.5 million. By November 2025 it was 5.3 million. And here is the number that really made me stop: psychiatric disorders are now the primary disabling condition in 39% of ordinary PIP claims. Nearly four in 10. The largest category of all.

Among psychiatric cases assessed over the last five years, the great majority fall into five groups: mixed anxiety and depressive disorders, mood disorders, ADHD-type conditions, autism spectrum disorders and anxiety disorders. In January 2025 there were 587,000 people receiving the PIP daily-living component whose primary condition was anxiety and depression, while another 75,000 had ADHD or ADD.

Obviously serious mental illness exists. Obviously there are people with psychiatric conditions that are absolutely devastating. Schizophrenia exists. Psychosis exists. Severe autism exists. Nobody sensible is suggesting otherwise. Those people need help and they should get it.

But I cannot be the only taxpayer looking at the sheer scale of the increase and wondering what on earth is happening. We have gone from recognising that anxiety, depression and ADHD are genuine conditions to a situation in which psychiatric disorders are the biggest category in a disability-benefits system supporting millions of people. At some point you are allowed to ask whether every incentive in this system is pointing in the right direction.

And then there are the cars

This was the statistic that really caught my attention. At the end of July 2025, 593,700 PIP claimants had an active Motability contract. Of those, 174,700 had a psychiatric disorder recorded as their primary condition. In 2020 the corresponding number was 76,100, so it had more than doubled in five years. And among those Motability users in July 2025 were 10,400 people whose primary recorded condition was ADHD or ADD.

Again, precision matters. They aren’t literally being handed a ‘free car’. Someone receiving the enhanced mobility component of a qualifying disability benefit can use that payment to lease a car through Motability. Insurance, servicing, maintenance and breakdown assistance are normally part of the package. The award isn’t supposed to be based simply on the name of the medical condition. It is based on the functional effect that condition has on the claimant.

Fine. But I am still allowed to look at 174,700 Motability customers with psychiatric disorders recorded as their primary condition and ask whether Britain has got this balance right.

I have to buy my own car. I insure it myself. I service it myself. I put fuel in it. I pay duty and VAT on that fuel. I earn the money used to pay for all this, on which I have already paid tax. Meanwhile, some of that tax is going into a system that can ultimately finance somebody else’s Motability lease because a psychiatric condition has been assessed as sufficiently affecting their mobility.

Perhaps every single award is correct according to the rules. But there is an important distinction here: a system can be operating exactly according to its rules and the rules can still be insane.

This isn’t about accusing everybody of fraud.

PIP is not an unemployment benefit. You can work and receive it. It isn’t means-tested. And having ADHD written on a doctor’s letter does not automatically get you a car (well, maybe). Those distinctions matter.

Nor am I claiming that four million people are fraudsters. They’re not (though I suspect many are). My objection is actually more fundamental than fraud. The question is what sort of behaviour the state encourages.

Stand back and look at the system as a whole. We have millions receiving disability benefits, a dramatic growth in claims involving psychiatric conditions, hundreds of thousands using Motability vehicles, huge numbers economically inactive, employers being charged more money for employing people, employment law becoming more cumbersome, entrepreneurs deciding that taking another risk isn’t worth it, and now a Government looking at the pension pots accumulated by people who spent their lives working and deciding that there is another source of Inheritance Tax sitting there.

Incentives matter. You cannot make economic inactivity steadily more comfortable while making economic activity steadily more expensive and then act mystified when the number of economically inactive people rises.

Then there was my father

This is where the whole thing becomes rather less theoretical for me. My father worked steadily throughout his life. He lived in the same London borough for roughly 50 years. He paid PAYE, National Insurance and council tax. He owned his home. He did precisely what generations of British people were told responsible citizens were supposed to do.

Then he developed dementia. When he became too infirm to look after himself, we discovered just how much all those decades of contribution were worth. Not very much.

Because he had accumulated assets, he had to pay for his own care. And because we didn’t want to put him somewhere resembling a Victorian workhouse, eventually his care was costing us in the region of £2,500 a week. Week after week, his estate disappeared at an astonishing rate.

Had he properly understood what was happening, it would have driven him mad. Everything he had spent his life accumulating , everything he believed he was eventually leaving his family , was being consumed because he had done exactly what society told him to do: work, save, buy your own house and provide for yourself.

The principle remains embedded in the care system today. If you possess assets above the relevant threshold, you generally fund your own residential care. Once your resources have been sufficiently depleted, the state starts paying more.

Think about the incentive. Save and you pay. Accumulate assets and you pay. Own a house and, depending on the circumstances, its value can enter the calculation. Reach old age without substantial resources and the calculation changes.

I am not arguing that some penniless 85 year-old should be dumped on the pavement. Obviously not. I am asking why the person who spent a lifetime being prudent is so often the mug.

My father didn’t suffer from a bit of anxiety about going to work. He had dementia. He genuinely could not look after himself. And when that happened, the state’s answer was essentially: you’ve got money, spend it.

So we did. £2,500 a week. His life’s savings disappeared because he had committed what increasingly seems to be the cardinal error of the British welfare state: he had accumulated something. And that is what I can no longer stomach.

Peter McCormack has noticed it too

I follow the entrepreneur and podcaster Peter McCormack. He is considerably more successful than I am, but he likes starting businesses. So do I. There is something immensely satisfying about creating something that didn’t exist before, employing people and watching an idea turn into a functioning company.

But McCormack recently said something that struck me because I realised I was beginning to feel exactly the same way. In a February 2026 podcast interview, he talked about considering another business before concluding that he “cannot be bothered to start businesses anymore”.

He had been considering opening another business, a pizza restaurant. Then he looked at the capital expenditure, the lease, the cash flow, the state of the economy and all the aggravation that comes with employing people in Britain. He went on to say that Britain had “destroyed ambition and entrepreneurship”.

And this is a man who actually enjoys building businesses. He explained that once you add together higher costs, employment regulation, HR, accounting, taxation and everything else that falls on a small entrepreneur, it becomes increasingly difficult to make the numbers work. At one point he essentially asks: if you take the risk, finally generate the profit and the Government takes so much of it anyway, what is the point?

Exactly. That is precisely where I have arrived.

Death by a thousand cuts

Employer National Insurance went up to 15% in April 2025. At the same time the threshold at which employers begin paying it was slashed from £9,100 to £5,000.

Think about what that means. Government says it wants more employment, then increases the tax on employing somebody. Government says it wants growth, then makes growing a business more expensive. Government says it loves entrepreneurs, then creates another pile of regulation for entrepreneurs to administer.

Every individual measure can be defended. That is how this always works. This tax is only a little higher. This new regulation is reasonable. This employment protection is only fair. This reporting requirement isn’t particularly difficult. This threshold change isn’t enormous. This pension change only affects some estates.

And then one day the person paying all these little amounts stands back, looks at the enormous accumulated pile and asks: why am I doing this?

That is where I am. I have a viable business. I could grow it. I could employ more people. I could start another company. I could work harder. I could continue building investments. I could leave my pension untouched and allow it to compound for another decade.

But why?

If accumulating more money simply makes me a larger target for the state later, perhaps the rational response is to stop accumulating it. Perhaps I should reduce the business, start drawing down the pension, spend the money, travel more, work less, employ fewer people and take fewer risks. Why wouldn’t I?

Governments seem to assume taxpayers are inanimate objects. Turn the tax dial another notch and precisely the same amount of economic activity will continue happening underneath it. But taxpayers are people. We change our behaviour.

HMRC itself has acknowledged potential behavioural responses to changing the tax treatment of pensions. Well, hello. I am one of the behavioural responses.

And it isn’t just Labour

I reserve plenty of anger for the current Government, but blaming Labour alone would be dishonest. The Conservatives had 14 years. They presided over enormous immigration, allowed the state to expand, presided over deteriorating public services and increased the tax burden while continuing to talk about themselves as the party of enterprise.

They had ample opportunity to do something different. They didn’t. Labour has simply accelerated a process that was already well underway.

I hate what this Government is doing, but I have become profoundly sceptical of all of them. This increasingly isn’t Left versus Right. It is the state versus the person who keeps paying for it.

And before somebody inevitably decides this is a racial argument, it isn’t. I grew up in a Left-wing household where racism barely entered the conversation. My mother taught in East London in a school where a huge proportion of pupils didn’t have English as their first language. I don’t care whether somebody is black, white, Asian, brown or purple. I care whether the system is fair.

If somebody moves to Britain, works, starts a company, becomes a nurse, builds houses, employs people and pays taxes, wonderful. Equally, being born in Britain doesn’t give somebody a moral entitlement to spend 40 years living off everyone else. The PIP figures irritate me just as much as the immigration figures.

That’s the point. This isn’t immigrants versus natives. It is contributors versus a system that increasingly seems to take contribution for granted.

The mug finally notices

You can only push that arrangement so far. Tax the businessman and his profits. Tax him for employing somebody. Tax the employee. Tax what they buy. Tax the petrol they use to drive to work. Tax the house they buy. Tax their investments. Make them fund their own care because they accumulated assets. Then bring their remaining pension inside their estate when they die.

Meanwhile, continue expanding the number of people supported by the state.

At some point the mug paying for all of this notices. And this particular mug has noticed.

A very clever friend once said something to me that I have never forgotten: “Your house isn’t the most expensive thing you’ll ever buy. Your government is. So shop around.”

He’s right. Add up the tax you will pay over your entire life: Income Tax, National Insurance, Employer’s National Insurance, VAT, council tax, fuel duty, Insurance Premium Tax, Stamp Duty, Capital Gains Tax, Corporation Tax if you own a business and finally, after spending a lifetime paying all the others, Inheritance Tax when you have the temerity to die with something left over.

Your government may indeed be the most expensive thing you will ever purchase. So what are you getting for the money?

That’s where I increasingly struggle. Try getting through to a government department. Try getting a GP appointment. Try finding NHS dental treatment in parts of the country. Look at the condition of public infrastructure, polluted rivers, energy bills, housing costs and the tax burden.

The state costs more and more while somehow managing to feel less and less competent. And every time something doesn’t work, the proposed solution appears to be another few billion pounds. Your billion pounds, obviously.

So I’m going shopping. I have finally concluded that my friend was right. I am going to shop around. I’m seriously considering leaving Britain.

Not because I hate Britain. Quite the opposite. I hate watching what has happened to it. I don’t particularly want another flag. I don’t particularly want another culture. And I have no desire to become one of those insufferable expatriates explaining at every opportunity how much cleverer he was than everybody who stayed behind.

I simply want a government that offers something approaching value for money, and one that doesn’t regard somebody who has worked, saved, invested, employed people and built businesses for decades as an inexhaustible cash machine.

Increasingly, I tell younger people the same thing. If you’re 25, ambitious, mobile and capable of building an international career, why wouldn’t you look elsewhere? What is the compelling argument for spending the next 40 years accumulating assets in a country that appears determined to become steadily more inventive about taxing them?

Peter Hitchens has been telling young people to leave for years. He’s right.

And that should terrify the Treasury, because entrepreneurs aren’t oil wells. You cannot simply drill a little deeper every year and confidently assume the same quantity will come out. Eventually people stop. They work less. They don’t employ the extra person. They don’t open the second shop. They don’t start the pizza restaurant. They stop investing. They retire early. They spend the pension. They leave. Or, like Peter McCormack, they simply announce that they cannot be bothered to start another business.

That is the real danger of what Britain is doing. It isn’t merely that people resent paying tax. People have always resented paying tax. It’s that eventually the people who create the taxable wealth stop seeing the point in creating it.

For most of my life, I believed working hard, building businesses, saving money, buying your own home, providing for yourself and leaving something behind for your children were obviously sensible things to do. My father believed exactly the same thing. He played by the rules for 50 years and, at the end of his life, discovered what those rules were worth.

I don’t intend to make the same mistake. For the first time in my life, striving increasingly feels irrational.

So I give up.

A. P. Doff-Cashcow is a pseudonym.