00:00There are louder calls to raise more from extreme wealth, especially with budgets tight and services under strain.
00:07But a formal wealth tax remains politically radioactive.
00:12The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has repeatedly said there'll be no broad wealth tax.
00:16There's no doubt that a tax on the wealthy would be extremely popular.
00:21Most people in this country do not own over £10 million. Far from it.
00:24It's the sort of the something of their dreams, only the sort of thing you win on the sort of the euro millions.
00:31And I don't need to say what the chance of against that are. It's extremely rare.
00:36What's really important to recognise is that we're being told of black holes by the sort of the current Labour government.
00:42If I was to say that a tax of two percent, which, of course, is what's being mooted also, potentially sort of more tax on the sort of the everyone,
00:52which would include pensioners who they pay some tax.
00:56But of course, the thing is, they don't pay sort of national insurance.
00:59So, of course, this would offset against working people.
01:02But just to come back to the important thing, a tax of two percent on those who own over £10 million would raise £24 billion a year,
01:11enough to sort of fill the black hole and some besides.
01:15So, of course, this would be very, very popular. It wouldn't hurt the average person.
01:19Businesses warn a wealth levy is cumbersome and could push people and money overseas.
01:26The business secretary has called a broad wealth tax daft, arguing political enforcement problems and better alternatives exist.
01:35The difficulty we have, of course, is that sort of people with large amounts of money, they tend to be able to employ accountants.
01:42They can find ways of sort of avoiding this, perhaps.
01:44The other thing is, of course, they tend to be much more footloose than sort of the vast majority of people, so they can sort of move elsewhere.
01:51But, hey, you know, you've got to balance one thing against another.
01:54Either you're going to sort of try and sort of make the wealth that's in the country more equally distributed,
02:00or you're sort of going to sort of ignore it and sort of tax working people, which, of course, is not what this government want to do.
02:06But there's another couple of sort of important statistics, if I sort of may just add, that the sort of the number of billionaires in the UK,
02:14this comes from the Sunday Times Rich List, which was published earlier on this year, has risen from 15 in 1990.
02:22So what's that, 35 years ago, to 156 in 2025.
02:27But that's a sort of vast increase.
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