'The tax millionaires show everything that's right - and wrong - about Britain'

26 January 2024 , 13:54

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Britain has two types of people - which do you prefer?

There's nothing more Scottish than taking a very English thing and making it more stupid. A lot of them still bang on about independence, for example, when their king LITERALLY took over England in 1603 and brought his bonkers witch trials with him.

But in Edinburgh this morning were a long line of pissed-off McPrats in SUVs, idling their engine at temporary traffic lights installed outside JK Rowling's home so workmen could trim her 100ft-high Leylandii hedge.

"Ah'm fewmin'," spluttered one mum, unaware that she was indeed filling the air with benzenes, carbon monoxide, and utter guff. For JK Rowling pays more tax than anyone else in Scotland - £40million of it in the past year alone - and without that fine woman's stout refusal to engage in offshore jurisdictional shenanigans, there'd be no hospitals left to treat all the respiratory disease created by people who don't turn off their engine at traffic lights.

The Harry Potter creator needs an impenetrable hedge just as much as the King, and he didn't pay any tax last year. She can demand a military salute from the binmen, if she likes, because it's she who pays their wages. Edinburgh should be delighted she's theirs, and also take note of the fact the pruning was carefully-timed to coincide with council roadworks so as to limit the disruption.

She might be the most considerate owner of a Leylandii hedge that's ever existed

Now let us consider one of England's richest sons, Formula 1's founding tycoon Bernie Ecclestone, who paid a whopping £652.6m in tax last year according to the Sunday Times tax list - 16 times what Rowling did.

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He did so only after pleading guilty to a charge of fraud brought by the taxman after a complex global investigation which uncovered a £400m bank account in Singapore that he had denied existed.

And that case, which came to a head last year, followed another in 2008 when the taxman found he was still benefiting financially from Formula 1-linked family trusts transferred to his ex-wife when they divorced. Panorama claimed the overall tax liability was £1billion - but HMRC offered to settle with Bernie for just £10m.

Eccelstone has more than once engaged in the sort of tax avoidance which not only deprives the UK of resources, but has also been proved to be unlawful. He is well overdue a one-fingered salute from his binmen, who've had to go on strike before local authorities can scrape together the money to pay them properly. Yet he's still good ol' Bernie, the little chap with tall wives, to millions of Brits who watch Formula 1 without realising they've been stiffed.

You can bet he'll be paying less tax next year (APA/AFP via Getty Images)

The person who pays the most tax in Britain is a mathematician called Alex Gerko, who of course runs a City trading firm. His £664m is equivalent to paying £75,000 in tax every hour, every day and every night, for a year. Can you imagine? To this guy, it's not so much tax as a rounding error on a spreadsheet.

But there are others who really noticed what they're paying. Like boxer Anthony Joshua, born into a family of Nigerian and Irish immigrants, and raised on a Watford estate next to the M1. The former bricklayer and two-time world heavyweight champion now has a property and endorsement business turning over £129m a year, and paid £12m in tax. That's the sort of money that could fund every school in Watford. It's much less than Gerko, but strangely more impressive. Where's his parade?

The Coates family behind Bet365 paid £204m in tax, but think it through. It's money they took from mostly-poorer people with the intent of giving them nothing but disappointment and empty hope in return. The only reason their distasteful trade is allowed to breed on every High Street is because they give the government a slice of the take. It's not tax so much as bribery, and the fact it works - despite the billions it costs families, businesses, and the state in other ways - should sicken us far more than it does.

And then there's 'Sir' Tim Martin, the Wetherspoon's boss who campaigned to make Britain poorer with Brexit and has spawned a pub chain more icky, sticky, and charmless than the one that hangs from trap 3 in the gents' at Newport Pagnell services. Thanks for the £167m, Tim, but can't you sort out that smell?

I mean just look at the customers (Getty Images)

Sports Direct fatso Mike Ashley paid £139.4m tax owed on the profits of selling sportswear to people who never do any sport. Ed Sheeran paid £62m for selling songs fit only for forgettable funerals. Other betting families, the owners of Primark and Specsavers are also on the list - making us appear, from the tax receipts at least, a nation of badly dressed, half-blind, gambling addicts.

John Timpson is on there, though, a man who runs 2,000 shoe repair shops and recruits 10% of his staff from prisons, the majority of whom are saved from reoffending. He's a Brexit-backing 'Sir' as well, but why aren't his views sought on government policy with the same or more frequency than the bloke who owns 'Shpoons?

The answer is that Britain has two types of people. One is rich, and tries to stay that way by paying as little tax as possible. The other sort, regardless of personal wealth, considers riches lie in people, not shiny bits of tin hoarded in a big ol' pile. People who see being a 'tax millionaire' as a loss, and those who consider it a win. It's about what you aspire to be, and who benefits if you manage it.

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It is the first sort of people who form the majority of the Conservative Party, and who selected a Prime Minister whose family wealth is so vast that if the taxman ever asked him where the money is he might genuinely be able to say, as Ecclestone does, that he hasn't got a clue.

With people like that in charge of the taxman, of course they offer to settle a tax avoidance case for 1% of the tax avoided. Of course loudmouths who pushed us to Brexit get knighted. Of course we breed the sort of people who see someone cutting their hedge with a care for public safety, and consider it an imposition on their valuable time and another chance to poison the planet.

Without taxation, there is no state. No traffic lights, hospitals, binmen or cops. Just a long, awful, survival-of-the-worst, Darwinian bunfight to the bottom of the swamp, where Bernie Ecclestone is king and the only hand you get is a smack in the face. Next time they talk about tax cuts, remember this: it's a nation they're slashing to the bone.

Fleet Street Fox