Britain, in its infinite wisdom, has finally stood up to the non-doms. The message? “Take your billions, your ballet funding, your school endowments, and your discreet family offices… and shove off.”
And off they go. To Milan, Dubai, Lisbon, where the sun shines, the taxman smiles, and no-one makes you feel guilty for owning five homes and a minor Old Master.
Let’s not be naive – these weren’t just wealthy residents. These were Britain’s unofficial patrons. The quiet philanthropists. The hedge funders who paid for children’s cancer wings before brunch. The art collectors who kept the Tate Modern from becoming just another brutalist echo chamber.
But now, thanks to a dose of inheritance tax zeal and the moral high ground of “fiscal fairness”, we’ve decided to drive them out like they’re wearing top hats in a vegan cafe.
And what do we gain? A fleeting sense of justice and a Treasury spreadsheet that assumes the rich will sit still while we tax their legacies. Spoiler: they won’t.
One entrepreneur summed it up beautifully while applying for a golden visa in Dubai: “I didn’t spend thirty years building a business in Britain to have my kids punished for it.” Quite.
Meanwhile, Britain remains proudly open for business – as long as that business is a start-up with no revenue, a three-year runway, and a founder who’s happy to be taxed like a tech giant despite having zero clients.
We used to attract brains, capital, culture. Now we attract property developers with vague plans and TikTok influencers on global tax breaks.
So here’s to the non-doms – our once-loyal, tax-contributing, gala-attending elite. Britain didn’t just lose their money; it lost their job-creating enterprises, their philanthropic muscle, and their quiet, consistent investment in culture, innovation and growth. We’ve traded the theatre of aspiration for a silent stage and empty box seats.
Now, in place of capital and confidence, we get moral lectures and budget flat whites – a nation proudly pricing itself out of prosperity, one tax hike at a time.
