The problem with living in a rich man’s world | Letters

David Redshaw and Fernando Quintana respond to reports of a billionaire exodus from Britain

The idea that the departure of the super-rich is a problem ignores a historical fact ( Apparent exodus of super-rich suggests UK is no longer billionaires’ playground, 7 October ). Capitalism works better without them. The most successful countries today are states where redistributive taxation has empowered the working masses and provided a better and more stable market for business people.

How do today’s complaining uber-rich explain the postwar decades, when the top rate of income tax was commonly 80% or 90%, and yet the period is known as a golden age of capitalism? Then Margaret Thatcher lowered the top rate to 60% and the country tilted into a massive recession. The rich get to a point where they simply become wealth extractors, using their money to buy assets and raising the cost of them for the rest of us, housing being a good example today.

A good story from 1969 comes from a music writer who was embedded in the Rolling Stones’ tour of America. Earwigging the band talking about becoming tax exiles, if not on main street, then maybe in France, he hears Charlie Watts (a non-songwriter, so less affluent) say that he rather likes his land and his house and his horses, and he wouldn’t want to leave. Isn’t that rich enough for most of us? It’s appropriate that John Maynard Keynes is now on stage in the West End. People might remember what he said about the dangers of wealth disparity and the bubbles of speculation that they bring. David Redshaw Saltdean, East Sussex

Your report ( ‘I reside in Monaco’: billionaire said to have quit UK over potential wealth tax had already left, 7 October ) exposes something far more troubling than billionaires fleeing Britain: the extraordinary power of the super-rich to hold an entire country hostage to the threat of their departure.

Ordinary working people cannot relocate their tax obligations to Monaco. They pay their taxes, fund public services and shoulder the consequences of a system increasingly tilted towards those who need its protection least. Yet we are expected to tremble at the prospect of billionaires taking their fortunes elsewhere. Why? Wealth does not exist in a vacuum. It is built on a society’s workers, infrastructure, institutions and opportunities.

If the wealthiest can enjoy the fruits of that society while escaping their fair share of its responsibilities, the scandal is not that they leave. It is that successive governments have allowed them to make the rules. A country that cannot afford to lose its billionaires should ask itself why it can apparently afford to impoverish everyone else. Fernando Quintana London