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WWhat can we do about a country where the richest 56 people in the UK have as much wealth as the poorest 27 million? What do we do with a country that just saw the birth of its first trillionaire? What do we do at a time when you can ask the owner of a telecoms company in his multi-million pound Hyde Park mansion and the frontline ambulance worker who should be in his car, parked on a road near Bristol?
Gary Stevenson knows what to do. He is an evangelist to do. Gary has been proven to know what to do after making a fortune in the city gambling against the country’s economic recovery after the 2011 financial crisis and the Eurozone crisis. The UK needs wealth tax – they recommend 2% on everything everyone has over $10m. This would bring in £24bn a year which could be spent on the NHS, affordable housing or (Gary’s favorite option as it would redistribute the wealth the 56ers and their candidates) got) tax cuts for “ordinary people”.
Stevenson has been campaigning eloquently against such a tax since he left the city, a conscientious objector to a profit-based job and the increasing plight of people who grew up as a working-class boy in the late 80s and early 90s in Ilford. His conversion is chronicled in his 2024 best-selling book The Trading Game and he now spreads the word through his YouTube channel, other social media appearances and the hour-long documentary How To Get Filthy Rich With Gary Stevenson.
A wealth tax is a powerful, simple and attractive idea (I think I have no more than 56 in my audience), a way to reduce what many of us feel is an unfair and unsustainable gap between the few haves and the millions of have-nots. And the history of Stevenson and the beginning of Garynomics are almost identical. However, before we get to the questioning of his main idea, there are two major obstacles.
The first is that Stevenson is not a showman. He has a youthful bullishness about him that comes across bad on screen, raising a kind of fight-or-flight response in the audience rather than encouraging engagement. The mature ideas that enter his speech and style are difficult to take from young people, where at least, but they live less than 39 years old – adults must have confidence, knowledge and wisdom that gives more.
The second is that he has gone through and been defeated by almost everyone who questioned him. Telecoms mogul Bassim Haidar, who made headlines last year for switching loyalties and donations from the Conservative Party to the Reform Party, does so with dignity. He is calling on Stevenson to deal with what he can do when his proposed tax has led to investors like him taking all their money out of the UK and finding a friendly place instead. Twenty-eighth generation property owner Francis Fulford (yes, of The F**king Fulfords and Life is Toff fame, but here in a less serious style) does this with a strong sense of humor (“The way you’re basing your figures has fallen! It’s Noddyland – it doesn’t work”) and asks the rich as they earn money. Andrew Henderson of Nomad Capitalist, who advises clients on how to reduce their tax liability by moving countries, does this through violence (“I don’t think life is fair and I think it’s very offensive to people who talk about inequality because you feel entitled to the rich people’s money”). Tax attorney and consultant Dan Neidle will tackle the final challenge at the end of the program by summarizing the challenge of each event. “You can’t,” says Stevenson calmly but firmly, “separate your feelings from the inequity and the intellectual test of the best weapons.”
This, in fact, is where the most amazing writing would begin. Instead of Stevenson being left reeling, without confirming the return of any of them (wasn’t he briefed? Was he lame in front of the camera? Did he just waste too much time preaching to the choir and forgot what it’s like to be criticized? Or Neidle is good in his frustrated voice that “There is no evidence related to only one hour!” a real expert and let us all learn something along the way. This method was just a shameful waste of time.
