One of the rising stars of the new intake of Labour MPs has defended Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ decision to rule out a wealth tax against the richest.
Torsten Bell, a former Treasury official and chief executive of the economic think tank Resolution Foundation, said a wealth tax would not raise “significant revenues”.
Reeves has previously rejected calls for a tax on the country’s wealthiest even though she has claimed there is a £22bn black hole in public finances.
Supporting the Chancellor’s position, Bell said it was not helpful in the wealth tax debate to compare the UK with the US, as the US has far more billionaires.
“On the tax side it is very fashionable on the left to say ‘let’s just have a wealth tax’,” he said.
“For some of us who have spent 20 years working on tax policy, I think that is something that is exciting for them to write in books and not very useful in terms of helping govern the country. There are two reasons why that is.
“The short reason why that doesn’t work in the UK is two words, Jeff Bezos. He does not live in the UK.
“And, yes, we do have some very rich people. But our wealth is nowhere near … we don’t have the globally rich people that the US, particularly, has lots of.
“You will have a brand new wealth tax and you are not going to bring in really significant revenues in the UK.
“Secondly, doing it is really hard. I am fed up of people saying Government should do this then not getting remotely interested in the hard job of getting homes built… taxes that actually raise money.”
Bell, who was elected the MP for Swansea West in July and was the Labour Party director of policy under Ed Miliband’s leadership, also criticised successive Conservative governments for failing to deliver.
“There has been enough game play over the 14 years,” he said during an event at the Cheltenham Literature Festival to promote his new book, Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back.
“It’s hard to do, and if you can’t overcome the hard job of doing it well, so it is just a bit of virtual signalling, I’m afraid you can get stuffed and shouldn’t be in politics at all.
“It does matter when things are hard. That’s why for 14 years the Tories promised to build homes and didn’t.
“I’m fed-up of politics of the like of Nigel Farage, who says it is easy. That was also the problem with Boris Johnson – boosterism – saying Britain is a world beater is the way we make it a world beater.
“We have got to get serious and grow as a country, doing the nitty gritty and actually do things.
“If you want to grow taxes on the wealth side we have got a lot of wealth taxes already, like inheritance tax, capital gains tax, stamp duty.
“Sort out those taxes is the first way you officially start taxing wealth, stop dreaming of your wealth tax because you are just going to waste years.
“I have spent 20 years in this business. In the middle of the last decade, I watched the left wander off for years discussing the value of the universal basic income and how robots were going to take all our jobs. That was fun for them at their conferences.
“There was no investment happening in Britain, we didn’t have any robots happening at all.
“There is no plausible way of delivering universal basic income and at the same time poorer households have seen the poverty rate go up.
“How about we actually focus on what’s happening rather than what you enjoy talking about?”
Reeves is due to deliver her first Budget on October 30 and used her conference speech last month to warn of “tough decisions”, but rejected a return to austerity.
“Yes, we must deal with the Tory legacy and that means tough decisions, but I won’t let that dim our ambition for Britain,” she said.
“So, it will be a budget with real ambition, a budget to fix the foundations, a budget to deliver the change that we promised, a budget to rebuild Britain.”
