Oscar Parry, Hackney and Islington Socialist Party
“If we do not do anything about this system, then very quickly the billionaires will own everything, and you will own nothing.” Gary Stevenson has built a large online following with his calls for a wealth tax, and his new documentary on Channel 4 continues his campaign.
As an indictment of British capitalism, it is excellent. Gary’s statistics are damning: The richest 56 people now own as much as 27 million of us. In 2025 alone, average billionaire wealth grew by £231 million, while real wages remain below the level of almost 20 years ago.
Gary interviews his old headteacher, who now runs a group of 55 academy schools. 43% of pupils qualify for free school meals, and his schools run food hubs because families “can’t survive week by week”. An NHS doctor lists what over a decade of cuts has taken from us: 600 police stations, 800 libraries, 750 youth centres, 1,400 SureStart centres, 8,000 bus routes, 25,000 hospital beds. Nathaniel, who crewed ambulances for eleven years, lives in a van in Bristol because his flat became unaffordable. While filming, the council served him notice to vacate within a week.
A tax on wealth?
Gary’s solution is a 2% annual tax on wealth over £10 million, raising an estimated £24 billion a year. The Socialist Party fully supports the idea of taxing the rich, which is popular among many, and no doubt will be discussed as part of the process of developing a new party of the working class. But £24 billion is roughly one week of government spending. The government spends £100 billion a year just on paying interest on its debt. Set against collapsing services and a housing emergency, taxing the super-rich 2% while leaving them owning “your house, your supermarket, the farms that grow your food, the power plants”, will not resolve what is driving down living standards into the dirt – the crisis of capitalism. The Socialist Party would go further and argue that we need to nationalise the big companies and financial institutions that dominate the economy, and place them under democratic working-class control and management – for a socialist programme to end capitalism itself.
The rich won’t give up easily
The film itself shows the rich will not politely pay up. Feudal relic Francis Fulford, sitting on £40 million and 29 generations of inherited privilege, declares: “We fight to win.” Businessman Bassim Haidar, with over £100 million in UK property, threatens: “I’ll walk away… and I’ll never come back.” Faced with capital flight and sabotage, the answer is not a modest levy but taking the banks, land and major monopolies into democratic public ownership, with capital controls to stop the rich taking their money to tax havens abroad, so society’s wealth can be used to plan production and distribution of goods and services to meet the needs of all.
Gary rightly points to the post-war decades, when the top income tax rate passed 90% and working-class households could get homes, pensions and job security. But he never asks why capital allowed those concessions. Those gains were forced from below by a mighty workers’ movement, and by bosses terrified of revolution. What was conceded under pressure has been clawed back ever since. That is the fate of reforms which leave capitalism in charge.
Will the politicians listen?
And Gary’s strategy? “We tax the rich. How do we tax the rich? We convince politicians.” Appeals to the Treasury, which declined to take part, and hopes that Labour will shift left. But new prime minister Andy Burnham has pledged to stick to the ‘fiscal rules’: more cuts. Gary is right that “the politicians won’t do it for you; you need to demand it”. The force that can is the organised working class. The 2022-23 strike wave wrenched billions in improved pay from employers who had pleaded poverty. That collective power in the workplaces needs its own political voice: a new mass workers’ party with socialist policies. That is what the Socialist Party is fighting for, not a fraction of the wealth, but a society run in the interests of the vast majority, not for the profits of the billionaires.
- Britain’s Inequality Problem… And How To Solve It: How To Get Filthy Rich, available to watch on YouTube and Channel 4
