The Government needs to tap into the brilliant brains featured on the Rich List - Sarah Todd
Although it is published in the spring, your correspondent has only just found time to read this year’s edition of The Sunday Times Rich List. Of course, plenty of those listed have inherited or married into money. While others do clever things with technology that are of no interest whatsoever to this country bumpkin.
One section that has been especially well thumbed in this household is the one featuring those entrepreneurs aged under 40. There are still, thank goodness, stories to be found of people who started off making things in their childhood bedrooms or selling stuff at school, like Alex Lovén who flogged cricket bats to fellow pupils and now has a sports equipment brand that has chalked up profits of almost £18m. Suffolk farmer’s daughter Jade Holland Cooper has gone from selling skirts from a stall at Badminton Horse Trials to running a ‘country chic’ business with a turnover of £9 m. Yes, she will have since picked up a trick or two from her husband, Superdry founder Julian Dunkerton, but all credit to this young woman for not sitting on her tweed-clad backside.
Understanding the numbers - the richest 350 individuals and families in the UK now hold over £784bn - is beyond this reporter’s rubbish grasp of mathematics. However, that figure is apparently more wealth than 50 per cent of the country’s entire population and more than the UK spends annually on healthcare, education, defence, policing and housing combined.
In his first major speech in the role of Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Healey, spoke about "More devolution, more public leadership and control, more investment, more innovation, more jobs.”
Never mind all that. What our leaders surely need is to tap into the sort of brilliant brains featured in the Rich List. Successive governments seem to know increasingly less about business and it's an absolute national disgrace if we don’t start seriously talking to real-life entrepreneurs and working people.
Also, is anybody ever going to grasp the nettle regarding UK taxation - or the lack of it - when it comes to the big boys like Amazon, Apple and Starbucks? Now this is radical, but what about going after them rather than small to medium-sized business owners? Or pensioners who have worked hard and saved for a rainy day? Or that increasingly rare species, the working population?
As a personal aside The Son, who turned 23 this week, has been working like billy-o. He first signed up onto somebody’s books at the age of 16, carting corn, and the amount of tax that is being taken off him after a particularly flat-out harvest really is enough to make even the most mild-mannered vicar swear.
Rather than talking to all the young people with anxiety and other issues that mean they have never done a day’s work in their lives, those in the corridors of power should be listening to what the next generation who will be working hard to keep the benefit claimants and illegal migrants in the manner to which they have become accustomed.
“If you actually bother going out to work and are under the age of 25 you shouldn’t get taxed as much as this,” said the wise one. “It’s like making you wonder why you bother.”
Also, it’s interesting to ponder, how many of those working people being taxed to within an inch of their lives might otherwise – if they had been left a little to save - have gone further in life, like starting up a job and wealth creating ideas…
Talking of ideas, the Countryside Alliance has produced a catchy advert to launch its new Campaign for the Countryside, calling on the Government to reset its relationship with rural Britain.
The rural campaigning organisation claims Labour has announced or imposed 27 policies that are harmful to the countryside and rural communities in the last two years. This list, of course, includes the Family Farm Tax.
Next Monday will see the campaign’s official launch in Westminster and all involved in bringing it together should be congratulated. As an aside, they have a young man on the team called Mo Metcalf-Fisher (it’s a name you can’t help but notice when you see it on television news interviews) and he is absolute mustard.
He seems to understand - and this is so very important - that keynote speakers such as former NFU president and crossbench peer, Minette Batters, are all well and good, but if Burnham and his backbenchers are actually going to be persuaded to reset their relationship with the countryside it’s the young stable girls, tractor drivers, dairy workers, pig people, farriers, gamekeepers, anglers and so-on who also need to have their say.