Reading that the billionaire property tycoon David Reuben has moved to the tax haven of Monaco, joining his brother Simon who quit Britain to live there around 40 years ago.
Together, they were ranked Britain’s second-richest people, with a fortune of £ 28 billion. The fact that all their wealth is now offshore represents another huge loss to the Treasury.
David Reuben hasn’t said publicly why he’s left the country, although it’s easy enough to guess. He has joined other billionaires, including the hedge-funder Chris Rokos, the steel tycoon Laskhmi Mittal and the shipping magnate John Fredriksen in fleeing Britain for countries that are doing their best to attract job-creators and successful entrepreneurs.
In just two short years since Labour came to power, Britain has lost half its billionaire wealth – an exodus pretty much unprecedented in our history.
I sold my own business, Pimlico Plumbers, for £ 145 million back in 2021. Even then, I am worried the writing was on the wall for the country I love. And as soon as Keir Starmer came in back in 2024, I was one of the first entrepreneurs to pack up and leave – and I now live in Marbella.
Read more related news:
Burnham’s spending promises collide with £35bn black hole as Healey faces Budget reckoning
Burnham’s care plan has one funding source left, and it’s your wealth
Clarkson asks ‘why would anybody set up a business in this country’ under Burnham
Britain risks losing its wealth creators as Burnham courts Europe
Jealous Lefties have called me a ‘tax-dodger’, but believe me: you don’t move to Spain if you want to avoid tax. Personal taxes here are, in fact, higher than they are back in Britain.
And let me tell you: I’ve paid more than my fair share in tax. Over my working lifetime, I calculate that I’ve handed over about £ 100 million in taxes to the British state, and that is just my personal input. It doesn’t include the countless millions in company taxes paid by Pimlico Plumbers over the decades, or the income tax and National Insurance surrendered by our employees.
But like so many entrepreneurs, I’m no longer prepared to contribute half my income to a government that then fritters it away on fancy accommodation for illegal migrants, welfare scroungers and others who do not contribute to the economy.
Labour’s addiction to welfare and taxation is intrinsic to who they are. They’ll never get it out of their system.
I do miss Britain, but leaving was one of the best decisions I ever made. And nothing I’m hearing from the UK’s latest prime minister, Andy Burnham, convinces me that is remotely interested in – or capable of – turning things round.
Despite the ex-mayor’s empty rhetoric about ‘investing’ in young people in order to keep them off benefits, I don’t believe for a second that he will do a single thing to help the economy, generate employment or stop millions of young people being consigned to a miserable life on welfare.
He clearly sees his job, like any good socialist, as taxing the middle classes as much as possible and handing over their money to feckless scroungers.
Rather than incentivising businesses to create more jobs, this Labour government is treating job-creators as the enemy. Instead of promoting enterprise, they want to make the lives of entrepreneurs more difficult in every way.
And I’ve seen this for myself. After selling Pimlico Plumbers, I founded another company, a maintenance and emergency repair business called WeFix.
The difference between setting up a business now compared to 1979, when I launched Pimlico Plumbers, is astounding.
Not only has Labour clobbered companies with higher National Insurance contributions, business rates have gone through the roof and getting round London has become a time-consuming and expensive chore.
Quite apart from onerous fees such as Sadiq Khan’s hated congestion charge (£18 a day) and the even more unpopular Ulez (£12.50), roads are constantly closed and traffic is slowed down to a crawl by the explosion in cycle lanes.
WeFix has 75 vans on the road and employs up to 85 people. It is helping to generate the economic growth that the country so desperately needs. But, if I had known we would end up with a Labour government that abhors wealth and success and is more interested in finding ever-more creative ways to tax productive people, I wouldn’t have bothered.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Labour could improve the lot of young people at a stroke. As things stand, a whopping 16.4 per cent of people aged 16 to 24 are unemployed – which is nothing short of a human catastrophe.
If I was in government, I would start by transferring the responsibility for paying apprentices from employers to the government. Yes, it would ‘cost’ £15,000 per year over three years for each apprentice – but that would be a great investment that would save money in the long term.
Not only would it immediately take thousands of people out of the benefits system and give them solid and valuable skills – it would nurture a new generation of tradespeople at a time when the country is crying out for them.
Only yesterday (MONDAY), the Daily Mail revealed that the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is constantly being asked by her ministerial colleagues to find ways to let more migrant workers into the country, rather than training up our domestic workforce. This is completely back to front.
Britain has now become like a giant version of Celebrity Traitors: the only difference being that, unlike in the BBC TV version, it’s obvious from the start who the bad guys are: this wealth-hating, growth-destroying Labour regime.
I suspect that Burnham will, sooner or later, break the British economy completely. Every Labour government in history has left behind a financial crisis and this one will be no different.
So could anything tempt me back to Britain? I like Kemi Badenoch a lot, and she’s certainly grown into her role as Tory leader over the past year or so. But I’m afraid that for me – and I believe millions like me – the Tory party is fundamentally done for.
They’ll win back a few seats here and there, but after 14 years of failure and Left-wing governance, they’ve lost the bond with ordinary working people that they had back in Mrs Thatcher’s day.
No, we need a clean break with the past. A new party and a new approach. I think it’s going to take someone like Nigel Farage to build Britain up again. The old parties have been taken over by teams of professional politicians who’ve never had a real job and have no life experience.
When I look at some of the Labour backbenchers, I can hardly believe my eyes: university graduates who became ‘special advisors’ at the age of 22 and then MPs and ministers, with huge multi-million pound budgets, a few years later. That’s just crazy.
With Reform you get all sorts, from small-business owners to experienced entrepreneurs, as well as people from the professions. As things stand, I won’t be coming back to Britain until Nigel Farage is in Downing Street.
I am fortunate in that I have been able to move away and set up a life elsewhere. But for millions of other Britons, especially around my age (73) and a bit younger, this is not an option. They have no choice but to stay in a country that is sinking before their very eyes.
My advice to young people, however, is simple. Get out if you still can – and if not, stay and fight to turn things around.
Leave a Comment