Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves risk losing a generation of entrepreneurial wealth creators with both their tax policies and failure to get to grips with the social problems which continue to blight Britain.
This, more than the flight of an already-very-wealthy class of mostly older people whose ties to the UK are often extensive – and whose money can, to some extent, insulate them from the UK’s problems while rearranging their taxes to minimise any hit from Labour – is the greater danger for a country looking to gallop ahead in the growth technologies of tomorrow.
I speak from experience, having moved to Singapore this summer. Okay, I prepared to leave before Labour’s stonking victory on July 4, but I could read the room, and knew neither main party was going to create the social or economic conditions I would want to enjoy in the UK.
Changes to inheritance tax and non-dom rules – not to mention a future exit tax for the rich – might scare the already-very-wealthy, but it is the younger entrepreneurial types (often with only themselves to think of rather than spouses and school-age children) who are the more likely to stampede to the exits.
The already-very-wealthy just need to spend more time in a second or third overseas villa to escape Rachel Reeves. This is less true for the young aspirational buccaneering types, who may well get there one day, but instead are building their futures rather than basking in the glory of having built one already.
But those buccaneering types are tomorrow’s employers and wealth-generators, tomorrow’s innovators and the future major taxpayers for Labour’s beloved NHS. Lose them and the country’s future could be destroyed. It is this, more than a sixty-something multi-home-owning gazillionaire, who Sir Keir and Reeves really need to be wary of.
To be clear it isn’t just about taxes. House price inflation is far more of an issue for an aspirational twenty- or thirty-something. The country’s socio-cultural problems are often far more worrying for a young person staring at sixty-seventy years of decline than a near-pensioner who has a couple of decades left and can bugger off for half the year anyway.
Labour is no more going to fix Britain’s demographic, social and cultural problems than the Tories did. In fact, these problems are likely to grow, while the Conservatives inability to create a conducive environment for wealth creation is simply going to be double-downed on by Labour.
What a legacy it will be if Sir Keir and Reeves manage to drive out not so much the super-rich as the super-rich of the future. In doing so, Labour risks undoing all its hopes for the beloved NHS, its big welfare state and the ballooning pension commitments of the future.
