According to P85 forms (the paperwork you file when you tell the taxman you're gone), almost 69,000 taxpayers told HMRC last year they were done with the nonsense and leaving Britain for good.
That's up from 52,000 the year before - a 32% jump in a single year.
These are the productive, the mobile, and the solvent. They ran the numbers on the British "tax deal" and concluded, quite rationally, that rape wasn't for them and they could do better elsewhere.
When a country's most capable citizens start voting with their passports, look at who benefits from making them go.
Since the last general election, the Treasury has reached for nearly every lever on the panel. Each one was sold as modest, targeted, and fair. But when added up, they're a sustained assault on anyone who saves, builds, employs, or plans for the next generation.
Notice the pattern?
Not one of these measures taxes unbridled consumption, speculation by the connected, or the state's own bloated overhead. Every one of them taxes accumulation: the people who turn income into capital and capital into jobs.It's an assault on the entire mechanism of what makes a society productive and wealthy.
A government looking to grow the economy would do the opposite. But a government looking to manage decline, and make the population more dependent on it, would do exactly this.
Under the old regime, new arrivals got preferential treatment on Income Tax and Capital Gains Tax for up to 15 years. That window's been cut to four. Inheritance Tax went from 15 years to 10.
These are, by definition, the most mobile taxpayers on earth. They already live across borders. Their advisers already have files open in Hong Kong, Zurich, Dubai, Cayman, and Singapore. Italy and Switzerland are openly marketing competitive regimes to exactly this crowd... and they're winning.
The politics was irresistible: a small, unpopular group that few voters would defend. Brilliant!
Economics is another matter.
A non-dom who leaves takes their own tax bill with them, along with the house purchases, the staff, the school fees, the charitable giving, the restaurant tabs, and the companies they'd have started. As for the companies they already run, they shift focus and redomicile.
It might be tempting (and comfortable) to call all this incompetence, because incompetence can be fixed at the next election (for those who still, remarkably, believe elections matter). But British policy has moved in the same direction under governments of every color for the better part of two decades. When the outcome's this consistent, you can no longer chalk it up to a coincidence.
A controlled demolition looks orderly. The charges go in, the load-bearing walls come out one at a time, and the building drops into its own footprint while the crowd watches from behind the tape.
Who places the charges? Not the voters. Look instead at who actually has access to the podium:
- Donors and their lobbyists, whose interests are rarely the small business owner or the family farm. Large incumbents can absorb higher employer costs and compliance burdens. Their smaller competitors can't. Regulation and tax complexity are a moat, and moats are purchased.
- The permanent administrative class - the quangos, regulators, and consultancies whose budgets, headcount, and influence grow with every new rule and every new form.
- The asset-light financial center, which profits from churn, fees, and state-backed debt issuance, and couldn't care less whether a domestic manufacturing or farming base survives.
- The political class itself, which finds a dependent population easier to govern than an independent one.
None of this requires a bunch of crusty old men sipping cognac in a smoke-filled room.
What it does require, however, are aligned incentives. Every actor on that list gains a little from a bigger, more intrusive state, and loses nothing when a builder in Kent or a farmer in Devon sells up and leaves. The people paying the bill have no lobbyist. It's the people drafting it that do.
That's what capture looks like: the podium answers to the donors in the front row, and the taxpayer peasants at the back are expected to keep footing the bill.
Britain's income tax take is heavily concentrated at the top. A small slice of earners pays most of the bill, so you don't need many of them to make the hole in the Treasury's accounts even bigger.
But here's the catch...
Raise rates on the mobile and some of them move. Revenue falls short of forecast. The shortfall gets met with more tax hikes, on a smaller base, which prompts more departures. Each turn of the screw produces less, all while the bond market reprices the risk and sends the cost of capital higher and higher.
The people who can't leave - the pensioner in Swindon, the nurse in Leeds, the young couple still renting - get left holding the bill: the higher prices, the frozen thresholds, the fiscal drag, and the degraded public services. The exodus of the productive is a transfer of burden onto the immobile.
This policy mix is marketed as making the "rich pay their fair share." In practice, the rich are the only ones with the option to not pay at all. The real answer is massively shrinking the government, but the odds of that are right up there with snowballs surviving in hell, so...
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