When you’ve lost the Guardian…
How to Get Filthy Rich With Gary Stevenson review – how did this end up such an embarrassment?
This evangelising of a wealth tax should have made for a truly amazing documentary. But it allows its host to be totally out-argued by all his interviewees. Why?
[…]
The first is that Stevenson is not an appealing presenter. He has an adolescent bullishness about him that comes across badly on screen, raising a sort of fight-or-flight response in the viewer instead of encouraging engagement. The strident idealism that infuses his speech and style is hard enough to take from the young, where it at least belongs, but it sits less well on a 39-year-old – adults should have the confidence, the experience and the wisdom that offers more.
The second is that he is outdone and undone by almost all of his interviewees. Telecoms mogul Bassim Haidar, who was in the headlines last year for switching allegiance and donations from the Conservative party to Reform, does it through politeness. He invites Stevenson to address what he would do when his proposed tax caused investors like him to pull all their money out of the UK and find somewhere friendlier instead. Twenty-eighth generation landowner Francis Fulford (yes, of The F**king Fulfords and Life is Toff fame, but here in less eccentric mode) does it with robust jocularity (“The values you are basing your figures on will collapse! It’s Noddyland – it won’t work”) and inquiries as to how asset-rich but income-poor rich people like him will pay. Andrew Henderson of Nomad Capitalist, which advises clients on how to minimise their tax liabilities by moving countries, does it through sheer belligerence (“I don’t think life is fair and I think that fundamentally upsets people who talk about inequality because you feel entitled to rich people’s money”). Tax lawyer and adviser Dan Neidle deals the final blow towards the end of the programme by summing up the underlying problem of everything that has gone before. “You are unable,” he tells Stevenson coolly but firmly, “to separate your emotional reaction to inequality from a rational assessment of the best tools for it.”
This, really, is where a truly amazing documentary could have begun. Instead of Stevenson being left floundering, without convincing comebacks to any of them (was he not briefed? Was he paralysed in front of the camera? Has he simply spent too much time preaching to the choir and forgotten what it’s like to be challenged? Or is Neidle right in his frustrated pronouncement that “There’s no evidence you’ve ever thought about it!”), we could have had an hour of him being led through wider issues by a genuine expert and letting us all learn something along the way. This way was just a faintly embarrassing waste of time.
This is an honest and perceptive review from the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan – the “Mindless ‘Inequality’ Blather” tag is meant to apply to Gary Stevenson’s TV show, not to her review of it – but I cannot help wondering whether her question about Stevenson (“Has he simply spent too much time preaching to the choir and forgotten what it’s like to be challenged?”) is a coded message to her fellow Guardian journalists, and to the left as a whole.
FWIW, there already is a wealth tax, it is called inflation. Also, FWIW, I think the right is fairly guilty of preaching the choir too.
The wealth tax is based on the ludicrous idea that the government is better at investing money to create wealth than successful entrepreneurs. Witness the fact that Tesla has returned something ridiculous like 40% annualized growth since IPO whereas the government stole all the money out of their “pension” funds and now have to run it like a Ponzi scheme to prevent the torches and pitchfork crowd from burning down their nice marble buildings. If you had a salary of 30,000 pounds annually for 40 years and put that 15% the government takes at just the S&P average growth of 13%, you’d end up with 4 million quid or 160,000 quid a year at a standard 4% annual annuity draw. Instead you have to beg the government to allow you to eat the scraps that fall from the table, and hope and pray that the next government won’t cut your “benefits”.
Minor point of grammar. Where I grew up one “preached to the converted” and “sang to the choir” which seems rather more logical to me. Here in the US, in my experience one only “preaches to the choir”, as apparently does Natalie. Perhaps it is my age. Observe google ngram on the subject as to the frequency of usage.
Lucy Mangan married a Tory voter. When she had one of those regular confessional columns in the Guardian she wrote about him in a slightly patronising, semi-apologetic way women of her ilk often feel obliged to. Perhaps some of his wisdom has sunk in.
I doubt it Peter, otherwise she wouldn’t be writing for the Grauniad.