Nobody at HM Revenue and Customs can tell you how much tax Britain’s billionaires pay. Not roughly, not on average, not at all. The Public Accounts Committee reported last summer that HMRC does not know how many billionaires even pay tax in this country, let alone how much they contribute. The Sunday Times can find 157 of them. The tax authority cannot.

Hold that thought while considering the proposal Gabriel Zucman has spent the past two years putting in front of governments, because the two things are connected. It matters even more for the louder, more popular and considerably worse proposal that has come to dominate the British version of this debate.

Zucman’s idea is routinely described as a wealth tax, and routinely attacked as one. It is better understood as a minimum tax. Under the version he published for the UK last month with Ben Tippet of King’s College London, households worth more than £100 million would have to pay, in total tax each year, at least the equivalent of 2 per cent of their wealth. Income tax already paid counts towards the floor. Anyone already contributing at that level pays nothing extra. The tax only bites on fortunes structured so that tax barely touches them.

That structuring is not a fringe activity. The standard playbook at the very top is to hold wealth in company shares, take little formal income, and borrow against the assets to fund spending. No sale, no gain, no taxable event. In the UK the arrangement comes with a bonus: capital gains are wiped clean at death, when the next generation inherits assets at their market value. A fortune can compound for fifty years and never generate a tax bill that remotely reflects it. This is why Zucman’s research finds the very wealthiest paying effective rates far below ordinary workers, and it is why reforming capital gains tax or inheritance tax, worthwhile as both would be, cannot fix the problem. You cannot tax a taxable event that never happens. At some point you have to tax the wealth.

The Tippet and Zucman report estimates a UK version would have raised £10.4 billion in 2026, from fewer than 1,000 households, rising towards £18 billion a year by 2036 as fortunes grow. The number passes a basic smell test. The 350 richest families in Britain hold £784 billion between them, on the Rich List’s count. A full 2 per cent of that alone is nearly £16 billion, before you add the merely nine-figure fortunes below them. To get to £10 billion net, you only have to knock off the income tax these households already pay and allow for a decent amount of avoidance and departure. It is an estimate, and estimates in this territory are contested, but it is not a heroic one.

For scale, £10 billion is roughly ten times what cutting the winter fuel allowance was supposed to save, and close to a third of the projected current budget deficit. It is real money, raised from the group whose wealth has grown fastest. The richest 300 households held assets worth around 5 per cent of GDP in 1989. Today the figure is about 16 per cent.

Most people who heard the case for a wealth tax this year didn’t hear it from Zucman. They heard it from Gary Stevenson, the former trader whose Gary’s Economics channel has 1.6 million subscribers and whose proposal, a 2 per cent annual tax on everything above £10 million with no exemptions, has become the default version in British debate. A dozen Labour MPs put much the same thing to the Chancellor with a £24 billion price tag attached. YouGov finds 78 per cent of the public would back even a 1 per cent version. It polls well, it travels well on video, and it is the wrong proposal.

Start with the threshold. Dropping from £100 million to £10 million does not add a few more of the same people. It changes who the tax is about. Roughly 20,000 households sit above £10 million, and at that level you are deep into the territory of first-generation business owners whose wealth is a company, not a portfolio. These are exactly the taxpayers for whom the valuation and liquidity objections apply with full force: illiquid assets, hard to value annually, and a tax bill that has to be paid in cash the business may not generate. HMRC would face twenty times the caseload with a fraction of the certainty.

Then the design. Stevenson’s tax is an add-on, not a floor. It falls with identical weight on someone already paying millions in income tax through an ordinary salary and someone paying nothing through careful structuring. Zucman’s minimum can tell those two people apart; Stevenson’s cannot. That is not toughness. It is a blunt instrument, and it hands the opposition its best argument. The sympathetic case study, the entrepreneur taxed twice on a business she built and cannot sell, is real under Stevenson’s design and does not exist under Zucman’s.

The revenue claim is weaker too. The £24 billion figure is precisely the one Dan Neidle’s analysis at Tax Policy Associates took apart, and the no-exemptions design has the worst international record of all. A dozen OECD countries levied broad net wealth taxes in 1990. Three or four do today, and the survivors survive through the carve-outs, caps and discounts that Stevenson’s version proudly refuses. His implicit answer, that past wealth taxes failed because they were not uncompromising enough, is the reasoning of a man doubling a losing bet.

It matters who is making the argument, because of how he makes it. Stevenson bills himself as one of the best, if not the best, inequality economists in the world. That certainty is the sales technique, and as audience-building it plainly works. But it is the wrong temperament for tax design, where what decides whether a policy survives is unglamorous: valuation, liquidity, migration, enforcement. The videos never get there. A proposal whose promoter treats every objection as propaganda for the rich is a proposal that has never been stress-tested. Zucman, by contrast, publishes his assumptions and lets Neidle shoot at them. One of these is how serious policy gets made.

There are serious objections, and Zucman's version does not escape them entirely.

The first is behavioural. The projected yield is extraordinarily concentrated, with a large share coming from a few thousand people and a material slice from perhaps ten. A handful of departures could remove billions. No developed country currently runs both a significant net wealth tax and a significant inheritance tax, and Britain would be an outlier. Outliers in tax policy pay a premium for the privilege.

The second is the residue of the valuation problem. Even at £100 million, private companies must be valued annually, and Norwegian evidence suggests owners respond by pulling dividends out of businesses that would otherwise reinvest them.

These are the strongest cards the sceptics hold, and they are not nothing.

But look at what the design already concedes to them. The £100 million threshold exists precisely so that HMRC faces under a thousand taxpayers, few enough to scrutinise individually, with administrative costs the report puts below 1 per cent of revenue. The proposal keeps households liable for up to ten years after they leave the UK, borrowing the principle Parliament has already accepted for inheritance tax under the new residence rules. Emigration stops being a fire escape and becomes a decade-long unwinding. And the valuation problem is smaller than advertised at this altitude: the same assets said to be impossible to value are valued routinely whenever their owners borrow against them. Banks manage it. HMRC can too.

The liquidity objection, meanwhile, has to survive contact with the number. Two per cent. Large diversified fortunes have historically returned three or four times that annually. This is not confiscation, or anything near it. It slows the rate at which the largest fortunes compound; it does not shrink them.

There is also a precedent the sceptics tend to skate past. When multinational companies spent decades booking profits in whichever jurisdiction taxed them least, the answer that eventually stuck was not tinkering with each country’s tax base. It was a floor: the 15 per cent global minimum corporate tax, agreed by more than 135 countries. Zucman’s proposal applies the identical logic to individuals, and the G20 was interested enough to commission his blueprint. France’s National Assembly voted one version down last autumn, 228 to 172, but that was coalition arithmetic in a hung parliament, not a verdict on workability. The French objection was political. Ours doesn’t have to be.

Here I should declare something. I don’t come at this from the left, and this is not an envy argument. It is a tax integrity argument. Every employee in Britain has their tax collected at source, with no negotiation and no room for clever structuring. A system in which that is true for nurses but optional for the wealthiest thousand households is not a functioning tax system with a gap in it. It is a voluntary regime for the people best placed to pay, run by an authority that cannot count them. If the word conservative means anything in fiscal policy, it should mean minding the integrity of institutions like that.

The behavioural risk is real, and anyone who tells you the revenue is certain is overselling. But the status quo is not a neutral baseline. It costs £10 billion a year in forgone revenue, it corrodes consent for the taxes everyone else pays, and it leaves HMRC blind at the very top of the distribution.

The greatest danger now is not that Britain rejects a wealth tax. It is that Britain tries the loud version, watches it fail the way broad wealth taxes have failed everywhere, and concludes the idea was wrong rather than the design. There is a workable floor available, costed, targeted and honest about its own risks. Britain built one for companies because the alternative had become absurd. The case for building one under personal tax is the same case, with fewer than a thousand names attached. It would be careless to let the wrong proposal spoil it.

Sources: Tippet & Zucman, “A minimum tax on the ultra-wealthy in the UK” (King’s College London / Paris School of Economics, July 2026); Public Accounts Committee report on HMRC and wealthy taxpayers (July 2025); Sunday Times Rich List 2026; Tax Policy Associates, “UK wealth tax: high risk and anti-growth” (2025); EU Tax Observatory G20 blueprint (2024); YouGov polling on wealth taxation.

“Andy Burnham doesn’t have a mandate to lead the country.”

It’s all I’ve heard today. But he doesn’t need one - not from the electorate anyway.

The mandate that matters to an incoming Prime Minister Burnham is the one from his party’s MPs and from the House of Commons as a whole.

The unwritten UK constitution requires the government to have the confidence of the House of Commons. A majority of MPs must be willing to support the government on key votes, and in any confidence motion. That is the whole test. Everything else is commentary.

If a Prime Minister loses the confidence of his own party’s MPs, he may be forced to resign. That can happen well outside any formal parliamentary protocol. It does not need a confidence motion, or MPs voting down a Budget. It can happen because the support simply drains away. That is what has happened to Keir Starmer today.

So look at the barriers an incoming Labour leader actually has to clear.

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The first is the confidence of his party’s MPs. Burnham helped himself here by winning the Makerfield by-election on 18 June, which makes him an MP and quietly removes the only halfway-serious objection going round, that he is not even in the Commons. He is now. With Wes Streeting and others lining up behind him, it looks very likely he will have the numbers in the parliamentary party. First barrier cleared.

The second barrier is the confidence of the Commons. If an opposition MP, Farage or Badenoch for example, were to put a confidence motion to the Speaker, a majority of MPs would have to vote for it to bring a Burnham government down. That majority would have to include a great many of Burnham’s own MPs voting to destroy their own government weeks into its life. That is very, very unlikely to happen.

Here is the part people forget - often knowingly and wilfully, it seems. Nobody in Britain votes for a Prime Minister. Not one voter outside a single constituency ever gets to put a cross next to the name of the person who ends up in Number 10. In 2024 the only people who could actually vote for Keir Starmer were the electors of Holborn and St Pancras. Everyone else voted for their own local MP. The premiership is not an elected office. There is no national ballot for it, there never has been, and there is no law that even requires the Prime Minister to be an MP. The job belongs, quite simply, to whoever can hold the confidence of the House of Commons.

So push the logic to its limit. If a clear majority of MPs were willing to sustain someone in office, that person would be Prime Minister, with full constitutional legitimacy and no general election required, however little say the wider public had in it. We have tested versions of this in living memory. In 2022 the country had three Prime Ministers in a single year without an election, and Rishi Sunak took the job weeks after the Conservative membership had picked someone else. None of that was a constitutional crisis. It was the system working as designed.

Which is why “Burnham has no mandate to lead the country” is not an argument. It’s like trying to find the numerical sum of two colours. He does not need a mandate from the electorate. He needs the confidence of his MPs, then the confidence of the House. Clear both and he is Prime Minister.

Technically, that is all the office has ever been. The Prime Minister is the person who leads the government that holds the confidence of the House of Commons. It isn’t a loophole he’s exploiting. It’s the constitution doing exactly what it has always done.

Politics is actually really straightforward and simple sometimes. This is one of those times. The mainstream press, celebrity journalists, and the commentators they invite onto their ego-feeding podcasts should do a better job of - yes, informing the public - but also being accurate and, perhaps, educational.

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Tice did not present a single serious piece of data to support his claims. Not one. He waved at “insane” examples. He lamented that children without a diagnosis now feel “left out”. He repeated gossip about supposed parental gaming of the system. This was politics by anecdote. The sort of thing you expect to overhear at the bar during a parish council fundraiser, not at a national press conference led by a man who wants to shape education policy.

SEND families know the truth. They deal with waiting lists that stretch into years. They battle to secure assessments. They navigate a system so creaking that councils are forecasting vast deficits in high needs budgets. If anything, the system is failing children because their needs are not identified early enough. Yet Tice has decided the real problem is children wearing ear defenders in class. He speaks as if sensory overload is a lifestyle choice rather than a documented neurological issue.

None of this is out of character. Reform UK has built a brand on punchy statements that fall apart the moment anyone asks for evidence. Tice has said that net zero will “make zero difference” to climate change, as if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not exist. He has repeated a claim that more migrants arrived in Britain in two years than between 1066 and 2010, a claim that was debunked immediately. He has implied widespread postal vote fraud based on the unforgettable sight of “bagloads” of votes, yet somehow cannot produce a location, a witness or a shred of proof.

This pattern matters. It reveals a party that relies on dog whistles because it cannot rely on facts. A party that frames vulnerable groups as the source of national decline. A party that expects the public to accept sweeping allegations without scrutiny. It is the politics of irritation dressed up as insight.

SEND children deserve better than to become props in Tice’s running battle with modern Britain. Their parents deserve better than to be portrayed as chancers exploiting loopholes. The country deserves better than policy shaped by hunches and anecdotes. If Reform UK wants to be taken seriously, it needs to speak to the real pressures in the SEND system. Rising demand. Insufficient funding. Patchy provision. Endless delays. All of it documented, all of it measurable.

Tice chose none of that. He chose noise over substance. That tells you everything.

There are four obvious answers. None is painless, but all are defensible. Ending the fuel duty freeze. Reforming the pension triple lock. Equalising capital gains with income tax. And swapping 2p of National Insurance for 2p of income tax.

Together they could raise or save roughly £25–30 billion a year, enough to steady the debt path and still fund Labour’s priorities.

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End the fuel duty freeze

Fuel duty has been stuck in cash terms since 2011, with an extra 5p cut added after Russia invaded Ukraine. The Office for Budget Responsibility says reversing the cut and resuming inflation-linked uprating would raise £2.6 billion next year and £4.6 billion a year by 2029–30.

The freeze overwhelmingly benefits wealthier, high-mileage drivers and undermines Britain’s climate goals. The Green Alliance warns that fuel-related revenues will collapse to a fraction of GDP as electric vehicles take over.

Reeves could frame an end to the freeze as a climate-aligned fiscal correction, not a tax rise. The Treasury needs the revenue; the country needs the signal.

Reform the pension triple lock

The triple lock guarantees that pensions rise by the highest of inflation, average earnings, or 2.5 %. It has become a symbol of security - and of imbalance. The OBR’s Fiscal Risks report suggests keeping it in full could cost £15 billion a year by the end of the decade compared with earnings-based uprating.

Switching to a “double lock” - inflation or 2.5 %, whichever is higher - would still protect real incomes but stop runaway costs. It would also signal generational fairness: the state cannot keep ratcheting pensions while freezing thresholds for workers.

If Reeves wants to prove she can make hard choices, this is the one that counts.

Equalise capital gains tax with income tax

A banker’s bonus and a builder’s wage are taxed differently. One can face 45 %, the other 20 % or less. The Office of Tax Simplification and Institute for Fiscal Studies have each shown that equalising the two would raise £14–16 billion a year, even after accounting for behavioural changes.

It would simplify the system, close avoidance routes, and reinforce Labour’s core message: the tax code should not reward wealth over work.

The party can present this not as class politics but as consistency - a single, rational framework for all income.

Swap 2p of National Insurance for 2p of income tax

The Resolution Foundation has modelled an elegant reform: cut employee National Insurance by 2 pence, raise all income tax bands by 2 pence. Workers’ take-home pay remains unchanged, but pensioners, landlords, and others outside NI begin to contribute. Estimated yield: around £6 billion a year.

It would broaden the tax base without raising overall burdens. More importantly, it initiates the long-promised task of aligning NI and income tax - something every Chancellor has discussed and none has yet accomplished.

If Reeves wants to demonstrate both fairness and modernisation, this reform does both.

The choice before Reeves

Together, these four changes would deliver real money and real credibility:

Even after adjusting for overlap, £25–30 billion is a plausible estimate. That’s enough to show markets Labour means business - and to finance long-term investment in housing, energy, and skills.

The Budget in November is not just about arithmetic. It’s about identity. Reeves can either deliver a holding statement, tinkering at the edges, or she can mark a clear break from the evasions of the past decade.

Britain’s problem is not that it taxes too much, but that it taxes badly. This Budget is her chance to fix that. Her chance to prove that sound money and social justice can occupy the same spreadsheet.

It started as a political gimmick in the austerity years and has since ossified into sacred policy, repeated by Chancellors too scared of a Daily Mail headline to touch it. In real terms, duty has collapsed. The Treasury has haemorrhaged close to £100 billion that could have gone to schools, hospitals, and public services.

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The freeze is not some neutral policy. It’s a state subsidy for petrol and diesel that benefits the better-off at the expense of everyone else. Car owners, on average, are wealthier than non-car owners. Meanwhile, public transport users have been quietly rinsed year after year with rising fares. London commuters see the price of a travelcard climb with inflation, while drivers enjoy a decade-long holiday from contributing fairly.

It’s also a climate absurdity. Britain claims to be serious about net zero, yet its tax system is designed to lock in oil consumption. Freezing duty undermines any attempt to shift behaviour. A steady, predictable increase would push more people towards EVs, hybrids, and better transport alternatives. Right now, the government is essentially paying people to keep burning fossil fuels.

The politics of it are cowardly, too. Ministers know full well the freeze makes no fiscal or environmental sense, but they’re terrified of backlash from the tabloids or a Reform UK soundbite. Yet the longer this goes on, the more painful the eventual correction will be. We cannot forever keep fuel artificially cheap while everything else in the economy adjusts to reality.

Yes, fuel prices bite in rural areas where alternatives are scarce. That’s where targeted support should come in. But shielding the whole country’s motorists at vast cost is not fairness, it’s a subsidy for middle-class car dependency.

If the Chancellor wants to show she’s serious about economic credibility, climate policy, and honesty with the public, she should end the fuel duty freeze in her Budget this November.

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Danny Kruger wants us to believe his defection to Reform UK is an act of principle. In reality, it looks like an act of convenience; as though he believes the Tories are simply ‘done in’, too fatigued to make any difference to their fate. He spent years as part of the Conservative machine that hollowed out the country, and now he declares the party “finished” as though he had nothing to do with its collapse. The hypocrisy is staggering.

For the Conservatives, this is humiliation. A once-dominant party is now bleeding MPs, incapable of keeping its ranks together. Every defection is another public confirmation that the Tories are no longer a serious political force. They’re not fighting to recover; they’re rotting from within.

Reform, however, should be careful what they celebrate. Each new Tory arrival chips away at the outsider brand they’ve built. You can’t claim to be the scourge of the establishment while filling your benches with ex-establishment men. What looks like momentum risks turning them into nothing more than Tories in exile — the very people they’ve spent years blaming for Britain’s decline.

And Labour would be deluded to treat this as a sideshow. Kruger’s leap signals something bigger: Reform mean business. They are not a pub-room protest movement anymore. They’re drawing MPs, mobilising crowds, and feeding off the same anger that filled the streets in London last weekend. Those marches, once fringe, are growing. Reform are positioning themselves as their political home. That should worry anyone in government.

Kruger’s defection is bad news for everyone. For the Tories, it proves their slow death. For Reform, it muddies their identity.

For Labour, it confirms that the populist right is no longer shouting from the sidelines but organising for power. They should ignore that at their peril.

Today, the Conservatives have gone on the attack, branding Starmer weak for not moving faster against Angela Rayner over her tax affairs. Kemi Badenoch led the charge, saying Starmer was too weak to lead and should have removed his deputy immediately from her cabinet posts.

The suggestion is that a Tory Prime Minister would have acted decisively and without hesitation. But this is where the argument collapses. For the last decade and more, the Conservative Party has treated ministerial wrongdoing not as a red line but as something to be explained away, kicked into the long grass, or excused until the headlines became unbearable.

Indulgence as Standard Practice
Under Boris Johnson, ministerial standards were bent out of shape. When an official inquiry concluded that Home Secretary Priti Patel had bullied civil servants, Johnson simply overruled it. Patel stayed in post, while his independent adviser on standards, Sir Alex Allan, quit in protest.

When Health Secretary Matt Hancock was caught on camera kissing an aide in breach of his own lockdown rules, Downing Street first declared the matter “closed.” Johnson accepted an apology and resisted calls for resignation. It was only after public outrage and wall-to-wall coverage that Hancock finally fell.

Even Johnson himself, along with Rishi Sunak, received fixed-penalty notices for breaking lockdown laws in Downing Street. Neither man resigned. The fines were dismissed as minor, an inconvenience rather than the sort of breach that demanded accountability. That defence now sits awkwardly alongside calls for Angela Rayner to be forced aside over allegations that, at the time, had not even been formally investigated.

And then there was Owen Paterson. The Commons found he had committed an “egregious” breach of lobbying rules. Johnson’s response was not to accept the ruling but to try to rip up the entire parliamentary standards system to shield him. Only after a public and political firestorm did the government retreat. Paterson resigned anyway, but the episode was a defining moment in showing just how far the Conservatives were prepared to go to protect one of their own.

Sunak’s “Integrity” Pledge
When Rishi Sunak replaced Johnson, he promised “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level.” In practice, he followed much the same pattern of indulgence.

He appointed Gavin Williamson to cabinet despite being warned about a bullying complaint. When further allegations surfaced, Williamson resigned. Sunak described his departure as “a great sadness,” as if it were a personal loss rather than a question of standards.

He defended Dominic Raab for months while bullying claims stacked up. When the inquiry substantiated several of them, Raab was not dismissed. Instead, he resigned on his own terms, blaming “activist civil servants” on his way out. Sunak again expressed sadness.

He stood by Nadhim Zahawi over his tax affairs, telling Parliament that the matter had been “addressed in full.” Only after an independent inquiry found a serious breach of the ministerial code did Zahawi go.

Then there was Suella Braverman. Sacked as Home Secretary under Liz Truss for breaching the ministerial code by leaking sensitive documents, she was reappointed by Sunak within a week. Later, when she was accused of inflaming tensions around pro-Palestinian protests with unauthorised remarks, Sunak again hesitated. She was eventually removed in a reshuffle, but only after weeks of pressure.

Across all of these episodes, the pattern is the same: defend the minister, delay the reckoning, and only act when the cost of inaction becomes greater than the cost of letting them go.

The Double Standard
The Conservative attack on Starmer over Rayner is tactically neat. It aims at his strongest suit, his reputation for integrity, and seeks to paint him as hesitant and compromised. But by taking this line, the Conservatives invite voters to recall their own record.

For over a decade, successive Tory governments have treated standards in public life as optional, bending rules to protect allies and rewriting codes when they became inconvenient. The very people now demanding instant suspensions and immediate transparency are the same ones who looked the other way for Patel, Hancock, Johnson, Sunak, Raab, Zahawi, Williamson, Braverman, and Paterson.

If there is a weakness on display in British politics today, it is not Starmer’s. It is the weakness of a Conservative Party that has too often put loyalty above integrity, damage control above accountability, and self-preservation above standards.

That is the charge they will struggle to answer.