Will Britain Tax the Rich?

So this, it's worth saying, is a government that, at least in the various individuals that make it up, have talked a decent amount about taxing the rich before.

A few days ago on social media, I was served a video of Andy Burnham, now the Prime Minister, who is maybe in that building, I don't know, presently, had been meeting with a group called Patriotic Millionaires UK, which is a campaign group here in the UK that has been really pushing for a wealth tax.

And he spoke fairly passionately, I would say, about that disconnect between the amount that people are taxed by on the money that they earn through going out to work and the amount that you can be taxed on kind of having assets or earning through property, which is often much smaller than the amount that you are taxed on work.

There have also been several members and quite senior members of this government who have pointed out the disconnect between a tax called capital gains tax, which is the tax that you pay on assets that you sell, including investment properties and also stocks and shares, which is often much, much lower.

We'll come back to that in a second than income tax.

Both were treating the current defence secretary and Louise Haig, the current first secretary of state, which is a bit like a deputy prime minister, but not have in the past called for equalising or at least bringing those two taxes a little bit closer to one another.

more broadly the big man next door has talked a lot about wanting to change the trajectory of politics that has been in place over the past 40 years here in the UK and dismantle neoliberalism we are kind of still waiting in some regards to see exactly what that means but for many people in their kind of lived experience for many of you watching one of the key aspects of that has been a widening gap between the wealthy and people who make money through property and stocks and shares etc and people who go out and work so when we look at this budget today how do we think it ranks in terms of addressing that disconnect I want to tell you two things that the chancellor has said the government is going to do to address that and two things that they have said won't happen.

So they haven't introduced a wealth tax.

First things first, that kind of tax, which has taken up quite a lot of space in the public debate over the past couple of years, hasn't materialized.

And in truth, we weren't really expecting that to happen at all.

Many of you will know that there has been a big campaign in the press, partly on the behalf of a group called Patriotic Millionaires UK that I mentioned a moment ago.

Also, Gary Stevenson has been talking about it a lot.

Usually the policy proposal is a 2% tax on wealth over £10 million.

This is also a pretty popular policy.

Polling by Oxfam, who also support the introduction of such a tax, found that 76% of the British public support such a move.

There is also, it's worth saying, been a massive rearguard action on behalf of fairly wealthy people to fight against the introduction of such a measure.

Now, as I mentioned, Andy Byrne hasn't explicitly called for such attacks in the past, but he has spoken about that real disconnect between the amount of money and power that having wealth has gets you in comparison to going out and working each day and that rising inequality.

But there is no such measure or even the sense that there possibly could be such a measure in today's budget.