Millionaires leaving UK- are you concerned?

[anonhop]

Read today that 10,800 millionaires left the UK in 2024 which is equivalent in tax take for the government to half a million average tax payers. I don't think that factors in their reduced reliance on public services either.

Do you think this is concerning in terms of investment & spending in our economy?

I understand the moral arguments for the wealthy paying more tax but if so many are leaving, will it practically leave us worse off?

Curious to see what people think

Exactly this.
How can someone rise to the very top of government and not understand this? It's baffling.

I agree. There are different tiers of wealthy. Some on the left are so ideologically driven that they just see one catagory: The Rich.

@TheNuthatch there won't be anyone in Labour who gets it, so the top two didn't need to to get the leadership jobs.

It's ridiculous to see them slowly learning on the job (if we're lucky) as the impact is shown and jobs lost etc

I think RR must have been off sick from LSE the day they taught students about where uk growth comes from.

It really is. I sort of assumed there must be a plan that will explain why RR is tanking the economy using measures that anyone can see are counter productive. I now think she's been overpromoted. Unfortunately for the country.

It's just so crazy this lack of foresight into secondary impacts.

Let's take Tesco as an example. They have a big store at X location and have identified two other smaller sites for Tesco Express locals that are both within a 3 mile radius. They fit their expansion strategy.

So they go ahead with the additional Express locals and evaluate the turnover in each. But this is where RR and our government leave the table.

But Tesco are wise and understand that these two local stores are going to take away some turnover from their big Store are location X. Therefore, logistically some of the products will be diverted to the smaller stores, they might put in more self scan tills in Location X and reduce staff count at tills and they might relook at the opening hours as some customers are now making use of the longer opening hours at the smaller stores.

But RR just evaluates the additional income from the two locals without taking into account the adjustments necessary for the big store.

There are 16.7 million people employed by SMEs. How many of those jobs are now at risk because of this incompetent government?

Yes I thought there must be some sort of plan too. Clearly not. They seem to be flailing around grasping at straws now.

Any suggestion of this pre GE was met with the usual nonsense eg 'bot' etc rather than economic scrutiny or reality. Labour and everyone who bought into their anti growth ideas is why we're where we are.

Now they have a large majority and these policies will hit jobs and growth.

OK but at this juncture you also have to ask why are 2 civil servants with not enough business experience even in charge? Where are the top leaders with business acumen and why are they not even bothering to go into Politics and stand to be elected? Because the job is shite and badly paid and you get harassed by the press? So the top talent would rather become a CEO earning millions. That is a problem for all of us, long term.

I agree. But I also think that anybody who does enter into the fray - take Lord Carter for instance with significant business experience - leaves pretty quickly.

They get frustrated with the ineptitude, slow grinding mechanics of government and general lack of intelligent business minded colleagues that make up the mass of government departments.

There are so many career civil servants within government who have studied PPE,albeit at decent universities, then entered as research assistants etc, become SPADs and climbed the internal greasy pole without having any experience of the outside world and what they perceive business to be. They have no understanding of running a profitable company and logistical and financial challenges alongside strategic business planning.

Historically, you used to get people of influence and experience who had experience in the outside world who then came into politics later in life giving something back to the community as a whole. That just doesn't happen any more.

I agree with @friendlycat it's really something you know from doing

And Labour plus civil servants can just be outside that entirely

@Decisionsdecisions1

If you think we can afford to only rely on the selfless wealthy people who love to pay tax & are happy to run loss making enterprises for the greater good, you want the country to be destitute.

It's not immoral to legally avoid paying tax. That's why we need a sensible tax system where everyone pays a fair share that doesn't cripple any one group.

Are these the milkionnaires (my autocorrect is amazingly accurate) who "live" in the uk, eat French cheese, Russian Caviar, spend days on end on the med and gallivanting and hardly pay tax here? The ones that would rather see children in this country miss a meal than pay a tiny bit more tax that will hardly impact their lifestyles? Naaaah. They can go.
If the figure is correct then where is the shame in having over 10,800 millionaires and 4 million children in food poverty? Why the anxiety over 10,809 millionaires leaving?

It’s very concerning. Anyone who thinks that the loss of a significant number of heavy tax payers isn’t concerning is not thinking straight. How could losing tax receipts and spending from those people possibly be a good or neutral thing?

I don’t blame the rich for leaving - they’re taking a sensible and rational decision.

@NautilusLionfish I can't tell if you're trolling or not. In case you aren't:

Yes, there are international millionaires who have a lot of assets overseas. However, they're also paying income tax on their UK income and VAT on their spending in our economy, creating jobs in their businesses here/ employing household staff etc. the tax they pay goes on our public services (eg free school meals for children in poverty). It's a myth that they don't pay any taxes. Even if they find some loopholes, they are still paying huge amounts of tax.

Your attitude is all well & good but if they go, who do you think should pay for our public services, or which public services would you like to see cut?

@aei22 I agree. It's really sad to see people put ideology above our public services that will help the less fortunate.

Doesn't even need to be SME - there are tens of thousands of jobs being slashed by big corporates, especially retail, as a direct response to Labour's budget. And this is even before farmers started taking actions.

Excellent point and sums it up really well.

We have ideologists ruling the country with no business experience at all.

Well, we had one before, but he was too rich to be tolerated.

Yes its already happening. Most of the job losses will be part time workers on NMW.
Certain posters won't blame the budget though when they see unemployment ticking up and prices rising.

Yep, and this is what makes it so easy to influence if given required amount of money.

I strongly suggest watching this docu The Great Hack - Wikipedia
to understand how electoral campaigns work these days.

With Musk supporting Reform, I bet my money on them doing super well in 2029. Unless Kemi does something drastic which is unlikely. Labour won with astonishingly low proportion of votes (only 34%) but 64% of seats. If you target your campaign properly, which can be done easily by pros, the resulting proportion of Reform votes can be turned in quite an interesting number of seats. Don't forget - Labour promised to give voting rights to 16yo as traditionally this group used to be very anti Tory. They will have to deliver, but this electorate is now increasingly pro Reform and easily influenced by SM so it's going to be interesting to see as well.

of course they won't - "it's 14 years..."

Was so obvious before election but still people are surprised now

Plenty of us saw how hopelessly out of her depth she was during covid. She was absolutely pathetic when trying to challenge Rishi about the covid support schemes and in particular the 3 million he excluded - she hadn't a clue and was ridiculously weak in the HOC trying to challenge him - he just batted her away like an annoying fly. It was down to a couple of back benchers who actually bothered to understand the issues who made more serious challenges to Rishi. RR hadn't a clue and came across as if she didn't care.

Was so obvious before election but still people are surprised now

Obvious pre GE to a fair few, including on here, and still not obvious to Reeves and Starmer

I think this is a really immoral approach. It's playing with the lives of vulnerable people such as those on benefits. If we scare off the people who are the main supporters financially of those vulnerable people (like the high earner who pay the most tax) then these vulnerable people are even more exposed and have even less spent on them. Real austerity.

We cannot continue to have more people who are a net burden on the state than those who are net contributers. The books won't balance. I fear we are all going to learn a hard lesson on this but the poor will suffer most.