Another day, another campaign disaster. Now it’s the turn of the Green party’s co-leader Adrian Ramsay, who was this lunchtime interviewed by Andrew Neil for Times Radio. Ramsay’s first mistake was to turn up late to the interview — while his next was to, er, not fully answer his interviewer’s questions.
Introducing the Greens as an ‘anti-growth or no growth party’, Neil first asked Ramsay whether he was in that case ‘pretty pleased with this government’, given the UK has had almost no economic growth since Covid. Next, Ramsay was quizzed on the Green party’s ‘wealth tax’ — which would involve introducing a new tax of 1 per cent on assets worth over £10 million and 2 per cent on those worth more than £1bn — but the eco-activist didn’t seem quite aware of how beneficial or otherwise his grand plan would actually be. Thankfully Neil was able to help him out.
AN: You say that a wealth tax could raise tens of billions. Now a number of countries have had wealth taxes over the last 30 years. What have they raised on average?
AR: Well, we’re putting forward what the proposed wealth tax that we have would bring in…
AN: You must have studied other countries, so what have they raised on average?
AR: There’s a wealth tax in places like Spain and Switzerland, that’s absolutely true.
Yet still Ramsay didn’t answer the question. He insisted his plans would ‘raise £15bn a year by the end of this next parliament’, adding: ‘That’s a cautious estimate.’
‘I understand the purpose,’ Neil replied, ‘it’s whether you raise the money or not.’ He went on:
AN: In 1990, 12 European countries had wealth taxes. How many have them now?
AR: Well, I quoted you a couple of examples…
AN: So how many?
AR: Spain and Switzerland… I don’t know the exact number.
AN: The exact number’s three, only Norway in addition to the two you’ve mentioned. And one of the reasons that they gave up on wealth taxes is that they didn’t raise much money. They were expensive to administer but they didn’t raise much money. The average revenue raised by countries that still have wealth taxes is around 0.5 per cent of total tax revenues. That’s not £50bn in Britain’s case, that’s nothing like £50bn. It’s closer to £5bn if you’re lucky.
AR: And France also got rid of its wealth tax and one of the reasons it did that was because it was starting it at €1 million, we are proposing to start it at £10 million so a much more realistic level to start it at.
AN: But that means you’ll raise less. If you look at Spain and Switzerland and Norway, their wealth tax clicks in at quite low wealth levels — around £150,000 — and even when you do that, you raise hardly any money, just a couple of billion. You’re not planning them to click in to over £10 million. You’ll raise even less!
Oh dear. Whenever will the Greens come out of fantasyland to face the real world?
Listen to the clip here:
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