A millionaires wealth tax letter signed by 120 well-off Britons, including Gary Lineker, Brian Eno and actor Simon Pegg, landed on Andy Burnham’s desk this week with a demand that will test the new prime minister earlier than he might have hoped.
The letter, organised by campaign group Patriotic Millionaires under the banner ‘Proud to Pay’, calls for a 2% annual levy on personal wealth above £10 million. According to Patriotic Millionaires, that single measure could raise £24 billion a year; reforms to capital gains tax, which the group also advocates, could add a further £12 billion annually.
That is serious money. Whether it is serious policy is another question entirely.
What the millionaires wealth tax letter actually proposes
‘We can afford it,’ the signatories write. ‘We’re not talking about higher taxes on those who get up and go to work for their income every day, but on the very richest whose income is derived from the wealth they hold.’
The list of names extends beyond the headline acts. Alongside Lineker and Eno, The Independent reports that novelist Val McDermid, ex-City trader and economist Gary Stevenson, film director Richard Curtis and Ian Gregg, former managing director of Greggs, have all put their names to it. The letter contends that ‘a primary source of untouched capital investment is sitting with us, in untaxed potential’ and calls for a ‘devolution of wealth and power from the very richest’.
On the polling question, the group’s own figures tell a muddled story. Patriotic Millionaires UK’s archived policy proposals put support among millionaires for higher taxes on the wealthy at 65%. Fortune reports 80% of UK millionaires support the 2% proposal specifically. The two figures likely reflect different polling questions on different dates; they are not necessarily contradictory, but neither should be treated as definitive. What they do suggest, collectively, is that wealthy opposition to a wealth tax is not quite the monolith its opponents imply.
A separate, sharper proposal waits in the wings
The Patriotic Millionaires letter is not the only wealth-tax proposal circulating. Academics Gabriel Zucman and Ben Tippet this week argued for a narrower, steeper version: a 2% charge on households with assets above £100 million, which they estimate would affect fewer than 1,000 of the wealthiest households in the UK and raise £10 billion a year. Zucman and Tippet told The Independent the tax would ‘raise meaningful revenues and dampen runaway inequality’.
That is a different calculation from the Patriotic Millionaires model. The group’s own archived policy document estimates that setting the threshold at £10 million would touch roughly 20,000 people, or 0.04% of the population. The two proposals, then, represent genuinely distinct choices about where to draw the line and who bears the weight.
The voluntary giving argument, and its limits
The stock response from the right arrived promptly. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said Lineker is ‘very welcome to pay more tax, he can write a cheque to the treasury, no one is stopping him.’ Chief Secretary to the Treasury Emma Reynolds offered a warmer but functionally similar answer, welcoming the sentiment while pointing to the Treasury’s existing donation facility, according to Fortune.
The donation route is real, if modest. GB News reports that British taxpayers have voluntarily handed £2.3 million to HM Treasury over the past decade. The BBC adds that 153 donations have been made to the Treasury over the past two decades, including 27 people who left money to the chancellor in their wills.
The numbers are not nothing, but set against a £24 billion annual projection for the wealth tax, they are a rounding error. The Badenoch retort treats a structural fiscal argument as if it were a personal failing of generosity. It is a witty line. It is not an answer.
Burnham has not given one yet either. Before taking office he told Lineker directly that he might ‘have to ask for a little more’ from taxpayers at some point, without committing to any particular mechanism. That is the studied ambiguity of a politician who knows the arithmetic but has not yet decided whether to absorb the political cost of acting on it.
With two serious revenue estimates now on the table and 120 names attached to a public letter, the studied ambiguity becomes harder to sustain. Burnham’s first Budget will tell us whether ‘Proud to Pay’ found a prime minister willing to let them.
