‘If you have bought an issue with the Budget, you are a part of the issue’

A few days ahead of what will be the most competent and honest Budget anyone’s bothered to write for 14 years, our silliest millionaires are in open revolt.

Although the Tories drove the tax burden to a record high, cost business billions with Brexit and furlough, then misspent billions more on Covid contracts dashed off on the back of a fag packet, it is the first female Chancellor of the Exchequer they fear will cost them money.

One of the signs of Treasury competency is that the bad news had been briefed out early. That means the markets had their indigestion a week before the announcements, rather than as words are spluttered over the Despatch Box, and things should land more smoothly than when Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss bumf***ed the bonds market without so much as a by-your-leave.

But with little else to go on and airwaves to fill, there’s lots of speculation. And popping up regularly is Charlie Mullins, the millionaire founder of Pimlico Plumbers, who has announced he’s left the country.

I say announced, but he’s left before. During Covid, he appeared on This Morning from one of his three Spanish villas bemoaning people wanting to work from home.

Last year he bought an apartment in Dubai, and was buying a new barn in the Cotswolds. This year, he’s selling his £12m London penthouse and basing himself abroad so he will not be subject to the taxes he fears Labour will impose on the likes of him, who will now have to make do with just the four houses (that we know of).

Charlie is a fascinating character – bunking off lessons aged 10 to help a plumber, leaving school with no qualifications, setting up his own business in an estate agent’s basement and building an empire. He was against Brexit and not a fan of the Tories towards the end, donating to Reform and the Lib Dems. He’s earned the right to inject himself into the national conversation, which he appears to enjoy doing whatever country he’s speaking from.

But the flip side of that is people start talking back. And so it should be pointed out that, while Charlie takes to the airwaves bemoaning how terrible the Budget will be for employers, in 2018 the Supreme Court ruled he had been pretending he wasn’t employing any plumbers. His firm was ordered to pay thousands in unpaid holiday, because he’d been treating staff as self-employed and avoiding paying their full entitlements.

According to dodgy guesstimates reported as fact, millionaires are fleeing Britain because of Labour’s tax hikes. Except, the taxes were already hiked, and the elites were already basing themselves in alternative tax jurisdictions. The men who own your favourite football club or fashion brand may not even live in the same hemisphere.

The big beasts have been splitting their time and finances between countries for decades, and the Tories didn’t give a damn. Their big idea was to make Britain “competitive” by not taxing them as much as elsewhere, in order to attract them for at least some of the time. But what did we get in return?

Football clubs owned by murderers and misogynists. Newspapers run by tax exiles, telling readers the country’s on its knees for a lack of money. A handful of jobs they couldn’t offshore, like servicing the Rolls, or having their mansion cleaned. And we got the idea that a country gets rich the same way as they did, by hoarding dividends, when really countries are more like businesses, and grow only with investment.

Charlie, and the millionaires like him, forgot they got rich by taking that first tenner and investing it in their businesses so it became £50. To expand, to grow, to do more, to put more in whether it was time or effort or finance, to get more out. Instead, thanks to austerity and the idiotic 1980s rhetoric of Margaret Thatcher, we were told to think of a country like household finances, and tighten our belts.

Yet no-one would tell a business to pay less, give less, do less, maintain less, and not bother to invest in new technology, staff, or training. Yet the millionaires demanded that of Britain plc, because they wanted to keep more money than was healthy.

More than was healthy for Britain, which suffered as tax revenues grew and spending stalled. And certainly more than was healthy for the super-rich. If they trusted their governments or their families, because if they did they’d all have an inheritance tax bill of £0, instead of complaining that both would misspend it.

In Tory Britain, the mega millionaires could sell their firms, employ nobody, and still be invited on the airwaves to discuss how firms won’t employ anybody if a more sensible politician is in power.

The rich who are glad to be able to pay their fair share are the best of Britain. Those who want to choose which sun-drenched home to work from, but complain when staff take time off to care for a loved one, or are late because the bus broke down, or can’t afford the childcare, are part of the problem. They create no jobs, attract no flies, and can b***er off to whatever country will put up with them. It’s their stupid fault we’re in this mess, and we’re better off without.