We will miss the selfish filthy stinking rich when the last one leaves

Young businessman next to the private jet airplane talking on the mobile phone.
A young businessman next to a private jet - EXTREME-PHOTOGRAPHER/Getty Images

It is almost catechism among the metropolitan chattering classes – of which yours truly counts herself a member – to despise ostentatious shows of wealth.

Bling is embarrassing, unless it is done ironically. Being open about earnings and money and the desire for more of it is painfully gauche. Showing a passionate regard for the size of one’s house, or swimming pool, or the luxury of one’s holiday, or – and this is more of a problem the higher up the social pecking order – the names in one’s little black book… all cringe.

It was in the heady 2000s, as a lifestyle journalist, that I had my first full-frontal exposure to the self-regarding hyper-consumption of those peddling the most meaningless of financial products. I didn’t like it much.

Flash forward and the cavorting City boy flush on clever trading sprees no longer really exists in plain sight. The visible flexing of financial muscles – with all the gaudy in-your-face-ness that goes with it – has been suppressed because the love of money is no longer something to be open about in Britain.

Still, obnoxious as stinking riches may be to those without them, Starmer – and Britain’s – war on money is a Pyrrhic victory.

It should be obvious to anyone with half a brain-cell that the more money sloshing around in these isles, the better it is for everyone. And yet the enduring idea, the backbone of the Left and the sustenance of its many intellectual luminaries, is that good restaurants, SUVs, and designer boutiques are a terrible sign of wealth that is “unequally distributed”.

Or is it, in fact, the cause? Either way, we now have a government that is motivated by the false idea that if we can only make it harder to make, keep and enjoy money, then somehow the poor will be less poor and Britain will become better, aka “fairer”. This is rubbish.

Last week, amid widespread horror at the tax raids his Government is promising in this week’s budget, Starmer claimed while in Samoa that “there is no reason” for the entrepreneurs and the super-successful to flee Britain as suggested by business insiders.

He pointed to his investment summit earlier this month in which Elton John, among other stars, was wheeled out to help persuade investors to park their cash in Blighty. Starmer said the summit had attracted £63 billion of inward investment: “evidence that what we are saying is attractive to investors”.

Hmm. Despite the promises of a few heavy-hitters, is there really “no reason” for entrepreneurs – those hungry for success and riches – to leave? On Friday, Starmer suggested that landlords and shareholders were not “working people”, and therefore those who have assets may not be protected by the manifesto pledge to freeze tax on income.

It is hard to think of anything worse for the supply of properties than a government that wants to go out of its way to punish those who own them.

Meanwhile, 30 MPs and peers have pressed Starmer for a “super-wealth tax” – 2 per cent tax on assets worth more than £10 million; another attempt to make Britain as unappealing a place as possible to be very successful.

MPs obsessed with bringing down the “super rich” want CGT and Inheritance Tax to be raised – again, as a punishment for profit, and as a clear announcement to the ambitious: don’t come to Britain unless you want the fruits of your hard work to be requisitioned for whatever grand project the state fancies at the time.

Not reassuring. Add in VAT on private school fees and the UK starts to become deeply unattractive to those keen on making money.

So no, Keir, there are indeed plenty of reasons for our most successful entrepreneurs to leave.

If Starmer just wanted to close a few loopholes benefiting the very richest of the rich, and the most tax-avoiding of huge corporates benefiting from a British base – purely with the end of raising money for the Treasury – then I might shrug.

But what’s going on here is a wannabe socialist project obsessed with “more equal distribution”. It is motivated by a thick-headed meanness, in which success is a zero-sum game.

How wreckingly dumb can you be not to see that Britain will thrive when there are more, not less, people desperate to come here to make and spend money, to buy and rent out property?

Britain’s darkness is now emphasised by the attitude of our European neighbours: Portugal, Italy, and Austria have worked out that to get their countries back on track and out of economic holes, they need to attract young and ambitious entrepreneurs, with huge tax breaks, and the promise of EU citizenship.

And lo and behold, some of our best and brightest have already packed up shop and moved down south where they find their ambition is rewarded – and the sun shines down on their efforts.