Alex MacCaw

For years I've been saying the UK tax system is out of control and very wealthy people who pay disproportionately more taxes will leave. When someone like Chris Rokos leaves the UK the money he was paying in taxes (£330M last year) falls on the shoulders of ordinary tax payers. Here's a few interesting points about this story: 1. Rokos is one of the world's best bond traders. His business is to understand how government policy impacts the economy. The fact that he's leaving the UK is a massive signal - he sees a negative outlook in the UK. He sees that we will go down the disastrous path of wealth taxes, exit taxes and become even more anti-wealth and anti-success than we already are. 2. A move like this has a lot to do with his senior team. Chris would have a dozen senior partners in his organisation that are fed up with the UK too. Each of them worth £100M+ or making £10M+ income. They would also be driving this decision. When the Greek authorities rolled out the red carpet, the London office would have talked it through as a team and decided where they wanted to be. 3. Big Whales make the headlines but this isn't one guy leaving. The news isn't covering the thousands of people leaving the UK who make £1M per year or who are taking their £10M of capital somewhere else. It certainly isn't covering the complete stop we've seen in entrepreneurs coming to the UK to invest. 4. Your idealistic feelings don't matter. Many people say "good riddance" and this is utterly foolish. We live in the real world and gleefully celebrating wealth creators leaving the economy is akin to a business celebrating their top customers taking their business elsewhere. The people leaving were not avoiding tax - if you could stay here and avoid tax then they wouldn't leave. The people leaving were paying MASSIVE amounts of tax but they got pushed too far. No one wants to pay 5-star prices for a 3-star service. You can call him "greedy" but until I see you happily paying a million a day I'll assume that all people are self interested. 5. The UK Government is genuinely broken and needs fixing. We pay more in welfare than the entire income tax collected. We let government pay 10x more for things than the private sector would allow. We have a revolving door between government and the contracting class who extract money from government. If you ran your business like the UK Government, you'd be broke in no time. Like it or not, we live in a competitive world with a hyper-mobile class of wealthy people. Each country must choose to become a destination or it will be a departure gate. Greece has shown its cards - it's playing to win and rolling out the red carpet for wealth creators. The UK is deliberately playing a strategy that is proven to lose and shouldn't act surprised when it unfolds the way it always has. ft.com/content/43efa6c1-6b37…