Peter McCormack 🏴‍☠️🇬🇧🇮🇪

Total government spending in the UK for the financial year 2019/20 was £889 billion. Total government spending for 2025/26 is estimated to be £1,368 billion. You simply can’t tax your way out of this level of spending growth.

If I’m a billionaire and the UK government starts taxing my wealth at 2%, I’m taking the one off CGT hit, selling everything and exiting the UK asap, what rational person wouldn’t?

Say you have £100M net worth. The proposed wealth tax is 2% on assets over £10M… so you’d owe £1.8M every year in additional taxes. To pay the additional £1.8M each year (2% on £90M) you would need to pay a £4M dividend. Of that £4M dividend, you get zero ALL of it is tax (see calculation below). Given that most scalable assets pay less than 4% yield as it is, there is no point in owning UK assets. Especially because you’d also be paying tax to buy the assets, to employ people to run the assets and you’d be losing CGT or IHT if you sell them or die. All serious investment would dry up and the economy becomes a backwater, stagnant economic wasteland rapidly.

Come on, Andrew, play fair! Your pedantry here is misplaced. Rupert Lowe meant “one” incident of mass murder. And I’m speaking as a non-British individual with no dog in any ‘cult’ fight but decades of experience previously in journalism. 📹 In all his discussion surrounding the “one murder” misspeak, Rupert was talking about guns-guns-guns to a Texan (Joe Rogan) — his own guns that were confiscated, the ‘no guns’ policy for the public, guns to shoot clay pigeons & game, handguns, his father’s pistols at Oxford Uni. ‘Dunblane’ was mentioned only as a one-off in passing. Rupert did not elaborate any further as the Dunblane shooting was clearly not his subject of discussion. And neither Joe nor Rupert ever brought up Dunblane again in the rest of their interview. TRANSCRIPT: Proper context of the “one murder” utterance Rupert Lowe: [Four armed police] took all my guns, all my ammo, and it took me five or six months to get them all back. [Note: Rupert was referring to police investigation of him following complaints by Zia Yusuf.) But look, so they don’t want the public to have guns. And they are doing their very best to damage the shooters who perfectly legitimately like to go and shoot clay pigeons, who like to go and shoot game, who like to go and hunt. Effectively they’re trying to make that very difficult through the licensing laws for guns. As you probably know they banned handguns [Rogan: “in the ’90s, right”] in the late 90s, because there was a murder up in Dunblane. [Rogan: “One murder?”] One murder. So everybody, my father used to shoot pistols for Oxford University and he’s dead now, bless him but he had, all his pistols were taken away. The pistols he used to shoot with at Oxford University.