Russell Jones's Week Moment: Billionaires, Miscarriages of Capitalism, and Bin Collections

In the week the Government cut £5 billion in benefit payments, Russell Jones takes the UK's tax-dodging billionaires to task and urges Labour to get on with imposing a wealth tax

Photo: Peter Lopeman/Alamy

I launch into this week’s column with my privileges fully checked. I’m a straight, white, middle-aged Englishman with a home, a car and a job that occasionally pays me. I have no disabilities, I’m moderately healthy, and to the best of my knowledge I’ve never experienced any kind of mental illness.

So the Labour government’s forthcoming £5 billion of cuts to benefit payments won’t directly affect me at all. I have bigger concerns: the collection of my dustbins. I know, I should have issued a trigger warning, because let’s face it, bin day is every adult’s worst nightmare.

I live in East Cheshire, a district which is technically bankrupt, largely due to the previous round of austerity slashing funding for the local council by 63%. As a result, a quarter of adult social care workers were sacked, the budget for road repairs was halved, education funding dropped by over £5,000 per pupil, and – worst of all – my bins are now collected not weekly, not even fortnightly, but once every three weeks.

I’ll get started on the telethon, you call Bono and get to work on the charity single.

The upshot of this is that rather than sending out a single bin lorry, now every household in a 450 square mile region has to regularly negotiate the pock-marked, tyre-demolishing moonscape of our disintegrating road system in a desperate attempt to reach the council tip before it closes, which is, naturally, an hour before any of us leave work.

So a couple of weeks ago, I was making my regular 12-mile round-trip to throw away the six square metres of cardboard that my Amazon order of a pencil came in, when I came across something I haven’t seen for years. Road repairs. Still reeling from the shock, I followed a diversion down an unfamiliar winding country lane, when I spotted something even more astonishing. There, in the middle of nowhere, stood a grand entrance to what looked like the tastelessly gleaming headquarters of a pharmaceutical giant. There was no corporate sign outside, just a modernist glass gatehouse, and two men in the sleek back leisurewear of professional bodyguards.

I’m still relatively new to the area, so had no idea Lumon had an offshoot nestled in the countryside outside Alsager, largely because it doesn’t. This behemoth turned out to be the 52-acre, £90 million private home of Britain’s richest woman, Denise Coates, of Bet365 fame. Constructed to her specification by the man who built The Reichstag and looking like a Tesco Extra designed by an Apple Mac fetishist, it boasts an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a private lake, and parking for her two helicopters.

Denise Coates pays the same amount of council tax as me.

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The Vexation of Unequal Taxation

Not proportionately, of course. Council tax remains the most unequal tax, costing the poorest 10% of Britons 7% of their total income, while the richest decile pays just 1.2%. And if you’re Denise Coates, it costs you 0.00476% of your income.

This is of a piece with the general trend of taxation, where despite their howls of pain, the richest tenth of Britons lost 39% of their income to taxation, while the poorest lost almost half.

Still, we shouldn’t complain too much about Denise Coates. She is, after all, a wealth-creator. That’s how billionaires are described: wealth creators. And we must not hurt the wealth creators. Bet365’s method of creating wealth, for example, is to get people with a lousy appreciation of the mathematics of probability to give it £3.39 billion in a single year, and then hand back a small percentage of that money to the rare individuals who win one of its bets.

Apparently, this is creating wealth. I don’t want to get too technical, but difference between creating wealth and simply relocating it from poor people to rich people is best explained with these words: “Something, something, politics of envy”.

However, let’s be fair to the very, very, stupefyingly, grotesquely, obscenely, reprehensibly rich: they do pay a lot of tax. They keep telling us so in the newspapers they own. They hope we don’t notice that of the top 10 richest people in the UK, only one appears in the top 10 list of taxpayers (the Weston family, owners of Primark). The rest manage to avoid paying their fair share.

If “fair” is the right word for this system.

More fairness: Denise Coates isn’t among the tax avoiders. I wouldn’t want to suggest she’s avoiding anything. She and her family (the 17th richest people in Britain) managed to be the highest taxpayers between 2019 and 2023. Credit where it’s due: well done, Denise.

However, it’s worth noting that during that period, Bet365 set up a charity in her name, into which it poured £752 million, of which only 10% was distributed to good causes. The rest just sat there, on paper looking for all the world like a charitable donation and allowing the Coates empire to write off more tax as “charitable donations” than she paid to the treasury.

Meanwhile her company has begun the process of moving its revenue to “overseas subsidiaries”, which have reduced the amount it pays in tax here in Britain by 30%. Unlike practically every other stock-market quoted gambling company, Bet365 doesn’t give a breakdown of where on the planet its revenue resides because – and here’s a phrase for the ages – “in the opinion of the directors, such disclosure would be severely prejudicial to the interests of the group”.

I bet it would.

I have to ask: what is the point? Nobody needs that much money, so they certainly don’t need to manage their taxation as a ploy to get even more. You couldn’t spend it if you tried. Even if you didn’t pay clever accountants – even if you didn’t set up tax-saving charitable foundations in your own name, even if you just stuck the money into a basic savings account – Denise Coates’s £7.5 billion would earn you £32 million every month in interest.

If “earn” is the right word for this system.

And as for that charity: her donation of £1.2 million to Staffordshire’s New Vic Theatre sounds lavish. But do the maths. It’s the equivalent of somebody on an average salary parting with £5.39. And I do that every time I order soup of the day off the theatre’s pre-show menu.

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What Shall We Do with the Billionaires?

Let’s face it, billionaires should not exist. It is only through a grotesque failure of economics, politics, and monopolies regulations that such a thing as a billionaire has come to pass. It’s a complete miscarriage of capitalism that it is now impossible for a genuine alternative to Amazon to appear. Elon Musk’s $327 billion represents not a success, but a massive defect in our economic systems. No company should be allowed to dominate a market enough to generate that much wealth for its owners. No individual should have so much lucre that they can warp democracy.

Billionaires shouldn’t exist. But they do, so we might as well try to find a purpose for them.

How about this? Instead of Labour tackling its dreadful economic inheritance with a second round of self-defeating austerity, pushing hundreds of thousands into deeper poverty, and harming the lives of millions with disabilities, let’s imagine a different approach. Let’s suppose we introduced a wealth tax on one third of the accumulated money and property held by Britain’s 177 billionaires. Why not? They’re never going to spend it.

So how much money are we talking about? Well, one third of the wealth of Britain’s billionaires would be enough to fund the entire cost of building a million new homes, insulating every other home in the country, re-nationalising the entire water industry, renovating 90% of Britain’s schools, and completing the repairs backlog of every single NHS building. And by the time we'd finished everything on that list, even the most poverty-stricken of those unfortunate, over-taxed billionaires would be left scraping by on a paltry £666 million.

Yet via donations, lobbying and open manipulation of our information environment, the hyper-rich endlessly seek more riches for themselves. Both New Labour and the Tories have been happy to oblige. The wealth of Britain's billionaires has increased 1000% in the last couple of decades, and almost tripled between 2010 and 2022.

Over the same period, the number of kids from working households who grow up in poverty increased by 44%.

Poverty in Britain exists not because we don't have enough money to satisfy the needs of the poor, but because we don't have enough money to satisfy the greed of the rich.

And it’s not merely billionaires. The same issue extends to the fabled one per cent, most of whom have no idea they’re wealthy at all. Polling found 60% of those earning between £80,000 and £100,000 – which is three times a typical wage – thought they were “about average” on the income scale. Quite clearly, these are not the super-smart people they tell you they are. They sound like profound idiots.

For most of us – for the people at the sharp end of these policies – living standards collapsed under the Conservatives, with average UK workers being £14,000 worse-off than if earnings had continued as they did before austerity. Yet between 2010 and 2021, the wealth of the richest one per cent of Britons – around 67,000 of the wealthiest people to have ever lived – increased 31 times more than it did for the other 67 million of us. And they still claim they’re hard done by.

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Inequality Is Killing Us

Our natural sense of community has been shattered not by immigration, but by inequality and its attendant austerity draining the life out of vital local services. Anti-migrant sentiment is merely deferred pain from the underlying socioeconomic cancer that has been metastasising since the days of Cameron and Osborne, a thumb with a mouth-slit, and his pet sadist, both hailing from that same isolated, imbecilic, ignorant income strata who spend their days pocketing $10 million for lobbying one group of iffy squillionaires on behalf of another group of iffy squillionaires, but think they’re normal because they occasionally cosplay in a flat cap.

The cause of Britain’s decline lies there, not with a stressed-out mum in Grimsby who’s been forced onto sickness benefits because austerity closed her Sure Start and left her unable to access mental health care. As the rich gobbled up all the money, our hometowns fell into neglectful ruin without any help from rioters or vandals. And in the absence of any political alternative – thanks, Labour – our former civic pride has warped into raging nationalism, as many cast their lot with Nigel Farage, who somehow attracted their votes despite honking constant denunciation of everything his own voters wanted back: fairer distribution of the nation’s wealth; a truly nationalised NHS; a state that delivers for the people; and greater equality of opportunity.

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A Swift Kick in the Ballots

Voters in Runcorn and Helsby, half of whom put their trust in Labour in 2024, are about to give Keir Starmer a swift kick right in the ballots, and I don’t blame them for a second. I would too. We’ve been abandoned by a Conservative party in permanent hock to corporatism, and when we turned to the Labour party, we have found it to be basically the same.

It’s time Labour realised that the vast majority of British citizens can’t take much more of this. Stop catering for the rich. The rich can look after themselves. That’s why they got to be so bloody rich in the first place. Frankly, if the likes of Denise Coates dislike being more rigorously taxed on their repellent wealth, and decide to move overseas, I simply don’t care.

Off you pop, love. Enjoy your tan.

We’ll just ban your company from operating here, and the £3.39 billion a year you take from ordinary working people will instead be spent in local shops, bars and restaurants, where it will generate far more economic activity – and far more tax revenue – than you do.

Councils won’t go bankrupt. Those with disabilities won’t be abandoned. Schools will get funding. Roads will be mended.

And more importantly, my bins will be collected. Although as I think I’ve just made clear: there is some trash I have no problem taking out.

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Russell Jones is the author of two books, The Decade in Tory, and most recently, Four Chancellors and a Funeral. His forthcoming book Tories: The End of an Error, the final volume in the ‘Torygeddon Trilogy’, will be published in 2025