‘I’m a millionaire who wants to pay more tax – it will be good for me’

Who exactly is it,” Nick Marple wonders aloud, “who objects to millionaires paying more tax?” Certainly not this millionaire investor.

The London-based father of two is one of that elite group with assets over £10m – quite a change from his modest upbringing when his dad thought his mum was posh because her family had an indoor toilet.

When I meet him, he is sitting in the study of his Islington home in front of a signed shirt of his favourite football team, Aston Villa. Marple, who initially made his money through a betting syndicate, is talking to me about why he has joined UK Patriotic Millionaires, a group of super-wealthy people who want to pay more tax.

And he is not alone. On Thursday, a group of over 100 UK-based millionaires, including Lineker, screenwriter Richard Curtis, novelist Val McDermid, and ex-City trader Gary Stevenson signed a letter urging Mr Burnham to tax their wealth, telling him: “We can afford it”. Mr Burnham has previously signalled his intention to overhaul the tax system in order to fund his policy ambitions as prime minister.

Two years ago the international campaigning group, Patriotic Millionnaires, set up in the United States in 2010 by, among others, Abigail Disney, great-niece of Walt, released a poll that showed that 74 per cent of 2,300 millionaires and billionaires from G20 countries surveyed actively want their taxes to go up.

Marple muses: “So, if the people who will be paying more tax are happy to do it, and working people would definitely see the super-rich pay more as a great idea, that only really leaves politicians as blocking the proposal.”

There are several ways the government could introduce a wealth tax. The most commonly proposed scheme is a 2 per cent levy on the assets of the richest people in the country, which experts say could raise billions every year.

Lineker said: “Paying your fair share is a basic British value, but so many ordinary people are already paying more than they can afford. Our richest people can do more and most want to. To live up to our national values our new government must raise taxes on extreme levels of wealth for a fairer, better, more hopeful Britain.”

In an interview earlier this month, Mr Burnham also suggested there is “some room” in the Labour manifesto for “movement on tax”.

By the reckoning of the Patriotic Millionaires Club, if a wealth tax was levied on those in the UK with more than £10m at a rate of between 1 and 2 per cent (our current top rate is 45 per cent on income over £125,000) it could yield an estimated £22bn per year in the UK for our hard-pressed public services.

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With the general feeling that nothing is currently working as it should be – schools and hospitals reportedly at breaking point – why, Marple wants to know are both political parties seemingly so wary on openly talking down the benefits of tax for the wealthiest in the country. Not increasing tax for middle earners is understandable, but many of the super-rich don’t think it’s fair that they don’t pay more tax when those most in need are suffering the most.

In the group’s Proud to Pay More report that accompanied details of its previous survey, Patriotic Millionaires highlightsedthat three-quarters of the super-rich respondents contacted backed a 2 per cent wealth tax on billionaires, as proposed by the EU Tax Observatory in October in 2023.

More interestingly perhaps, 54 per cent believed that “extreme wealth” such as their own, was contributing to the widening gap between rich and poor and this was posing a threat to democracy.

“We are living in a second Gilded Age,” Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actor Brian Cox, who played fictional billionaire Logan Roy in HBO’s Succession. said at the time. “Billionaires are wielding their extreme wealth to accumulate political power and influence, simultaneously undermining democracy and the global economy. If our elected officials refuse to address this concentration of money and power, the consequences will be dire.”

Marple reflects that there is nowadays, “no pride in paying tax”. This is why this group calls themselves Patriotic Millionnaires. They see it, tax is a way of investing back into their country and why they describe themselves as truly patriotic.

Another of their group, Gemma McGough, arrived to meet me a few minutes late, full of apologies. She had been out near her home in Buckinghamshire, helping one of her three children buy a second-hand car, she explains. Mentioning that it second-hand sums up her attitude to wealth.

“I was never motivated to work to make lots of money. It caught me by surprise.” She and her husband were co-founders of Product Compliance Specialists, working in wireless and electronics product certification and regulation. They sold it eight years ago and made millions.

“Having money caught me by surprise almost. I definitely have a guilt complex about it.” That was one of the things that prompted her to campaign to pay more tax. Another reason was Covid. “We weren’t all in it together. Poorer people struggled and people like me didn’t.”

When the rich stop relying on public services and start, then they no longer care about the rest of society, and the community breaks down. It’s a social contract that links us all together Keenly aware of her privilege, she draws a clear distinction between those, like her, in the £10m upwards income bracket, and those in the UK, comfortably off, but not with more money than they can spend.

“It is different. I can see why people in the middle want their taxes reduced. Once you are rich, you find that money makes money for itself.”

Any decrease in tax revenue going into the exchequer from people like her will, she argues, only exacerbate the “terrible” state of public services. “We have a systematic problem – in schools, across the NHS. When we get to a place where public services are running smoothly, that might be the time for tax cuts. But not now.”

She is in a position financially to pay for private schools and private medical care. But she grew up poor – her mother was a cleaner and her father a painter-decorator, in a house without central heating or car until she was 10. Today, however, she believes a pay-as-you-go system is fundamentally flawed. “When the rich stop relying on public services and start, as they are doing in California, having their own private police and private firefighters, then they no longer care about the rest of society, and the community breaks down. It’s a social contract that links us all together.

“We are not as bad as the United States, but we are heading there if it is left unchecked.”

What about the argument that high taxes on wealth will deter entrepreneurship and dampen the drive to wealth creation that our economy needs to start growing again? Nick Marple is sceptical.

“If you talk to young entrepreneurs like I do and say to them, ‘if your idea and your hard work does pay off, you might have to pay a lot of tax’, it’s not going to put them off.”

Another striking statistic is that 70 per cent of those millionaires say that they believe that what will work best to produce higher economic growth is increasing taxes. Julia Davies can see why:

“There may be millionaires and billionaires who say no to higher taxes,” says the lawyer who made her money when she and her ex-partner co-founded the backpack and travel goods company Osprey Europe in 2003. “Yet, rationally, it is against their economic best interests because if governments don’t have the funds to invest in infrastructure, our economy isn’t going to grow.”

Dorset-based Davies certainly doesn’t want to come over as if she is wearing a hair-shirt and feeling bad about her wealth. “I enjoy my money, I can heat my home, and travel for winter sun without a second thought, but it has also got me into a position to do something about issues that concern me.”

The traditional channel for such a desire among the super-wealthy has been through philanthropy, often in the form of setting up a charitable trust or foundation. This is something that Davies does to promote rewilding and tackle deforestation. In 2021, she put up £4m to enable the Dorset Wildlife Trust to purchase 170 hectares of farmland near Bere Regis and return it to nature.

“But,” she insists, “there are things that need to be tackled on a national and international scale.” Her approach is guided, she says, by the lessons her “ordinary” parents had taught her growing up in the 1970s. “Don’t show off and don’t be selfish. The world has lost that and we need to get it back.”

And with all the talk of “trickle-down economics”, the current direction of travel is depressing: millions of people in the UK (many of them in work) use a food bank but, at the same time, private jet flights account for one in 10 departures from UK airports. “Having wealth and passing it on to my children will not help them when the gap between rich and poor starts to cause things to break down in society,” Julia says. “Yes, they could cut themselves off behind gates and in bunkers, but that’s not freedom,” she says.

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