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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.
“Invest in Britain or I’ll force you to, minister tells pension funds”, the Guardian reports:
The business secretary, Peter Kyle, has told UK pension funds to “get off their high horses” and invest in Britain or be forced to do so by law.
Expressing frustration at the level of investment in British companies after years of government initiatives, Kyle said the UK’s biggest asset managers “should feel a patriotic duty in making Britain a success”.
“I don’t think mandation is ideal in any circumstances. But I’ll use it if I have to, because I’m in a rush,” he said.
Speaking to the Guardian on the sidelines of an event at Lloyds Banking Group’s headquarters in London, he said he was “fed up” with being asked by the City to tweak regulations to boost investment in the UK economy, only to see a lack of investment follow government reforms.
“Don’t make us come back, because we’ve got lots of other things we want to do … It feels like they are still sitting on the fence, so will more powers be needed? I hope not,” he said.
“They are representing British savers. And so they should feel a patriotic duty in making Britain a success. And not just sitting aside from the economy, in a walled-off garden. They are out there with the rest of us. They need to get off their high horses.”
Yes, the pension funds are representing British savers. Which means the only duty those pension fund managers should “feel” is the duty they have by law; their fiduciary duty to those savers to invest those savers’ money in the way that is best for those savers. Not best for Britain-as-a-whole, and certainly not some politician’s pet project that nobody in their right minds would risk tuppence on if they were not forced to do it. Best for those savers. Because it is their money. Sorry to labour that point, but it is a point Labour seem to have difficulty absorbing.
And you won’t make Britain a success by forcing people to “invest” (what a lie that word is) in the way the Government tells them to. Britain’s historical success was built on being one of the few countries where people could invest their money as seemed best to them.
Did you notice the mafia-like threat in Peter Kyle’s words “Don’t make us come back, because we’ve got lots of other things we want to do … It feels like they are still sitting on the fence, so will more powers be needed? I hope not”?
Kyle has form on that. This time last year, when he was Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, he said that to question the Online Safety Act is to side with child abusers. His specific target was Nigel Farage, but he applied the same sentiment to everyone. In his own words,
“I cannot understand how anyone can be against these measures. How could anyone question our duty to keep children safe online – particularly when it comes to child sexual abuse content and from online grooming?”
“The richest persons in Africa are heads of state, governors and ministers. So every ‘educated’ African who wants to be rich – and there is nothing wrong with wanting to be rich – heads straight into government or politics.”
– Ghanaian economist George Ayittey
Found via this tweet from Students For Liberty:
The Guardian phrases its description of what the EU is doing more sympathetically – “EU introduces €3 customs charge on small parcels to curb cheap Chinese imports” – but the end result is the same.
“The more big and active the state is, the more it is worth purchasing.”
– Deidre N McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State (page 97).
If you want to understand Andy Burnham, the only thing you’ll ever have to read is… this.
I was going to tag this as “humour”, but it’s too true to be haha funny.
Here is a story about a place I once knew. I found it via this post by “TantumErgo” in the UK Politics subreddit. “Owners of former Walthamstow pub ordered to stop using it as Buddhist temple”, the Waltham Forest Echo reports:
An unlicensed Buddhist temple operating out of a former pub in Walthamstow has been ordered to close by Waltham Forest Council.
The Confucius and Tao Association (CTA) bought the Lord Brooke, in Shernhall Street, in 2014 but was refused planning permission to convert the building into a place of worship the following year.
Contemporary reports described its purpose as promoting the teachings of Buddhism, Confucius and the Great Tao through public seminars, while working to tackle poverty and racial tension.
The council’s planning committee refused the charity’s application in early 2015, saying the use of the building as a pub was a “valued part of the social infrastructure of the area”.
No doubt many residents of Walthamstow did value the Lord Brooke being a pub, but it’s not as if they would have continued to have it as their local if only the Buddhists had not taken it over. In 2014 the pub was branded a “drug haven” by the Metropolitan Police and was “shuttered after evidence of drug use was found all over the venue.” No one has been found willing to reopen it as a pub, not surprisingly given the pub trade has been declining for years, mostly due to government actions like the smoking ban, “sin taxes” and increases in the minimum wage.
Faced with the choice between the abandoned building falling into dereliction and having it used by a group known for their harmlessness, one would think the council would jump at the chance to allow the change of use, but no, they preferred to wait for their “prince” in the form of a new landlord to come some day.
So those naughty Buddhists snuck in anyway, and started worshipping in the building so quietly that no one in authority noticed for years. They also opened a vegetarian cafe, the bastards. The Waltham Forest Echo continues:
Despite the town hall’s decision, the TCA [this is a typo for “CTA”, which stands for “Confucius and Tao Association”] appears to have gone ahead with the conversion.
It is unclear when the venue began being used as a place of worship. There is no formal signage for the temple, only for the associated Lotus Bloom Café, and historic remnants of the Lord Brooke are still in place more than a decade on.
Waltham Forest lodged a planning enforcement notice in late April, demanding the charity stops the “unauthorised use of the land and buildings as a place of worship, associated community centre, and ancillary café” and ceases “all gatherings, events and educational classes”.
So the state compulsorily closed down a pub due to it being a drug haven. The state said that the building could only be reopened as a pub. The state made reopening it as a pub a losing proposition. Then the state said that the people who had quietly reopened the building as a place of worship for Buddhists and a cafe open to all had to close it down and restore it to its previous state.
The Confucius and Tao Association ought to scatter the ground with needles and syringes for authenticity, but they are probably too nice.
I came across this post by Brivael Le Pogam on X:
I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it. But it rests on three factual errors, and it’s worth looking at them calmly.
Error 1: Elon’s fortune isn’t a pile of cash. It’s ownership of factories, rockets, and satellites. “Taking half his money,” in concrete terms, means forcing the sale of half of SpaceX and Tesla. The money doesn’t come out of a safe; it comes from the companies themselves, which fall under the control of foreign funds or states. You’re not redistributing cash; you’re dismantling a tool of production. It’s the difference between harvesting apples and chopping down the apple tree.
M. Le Pogam goes on to politely describe two other errors that his interlocutor is making regarding how the richest person in the world got that rich, and how an astonishing percentage of the the poorest people in the world have been lifted out of absolute poverty in my lifetime.
His post is well worth reading for the eloquence of his arguments. But there is another, quite separate reason to give it your attention. You see, Brivael Le Pogam never actually wrote “I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it.” He wrote, “Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent.” The thought behind them was in French, but the English words I read and admired for their eloquence were written by a computer program. Over the last couple of years we have quietly reached and passed the point where automatic translation is, for most practical purposes, invisible.
It is probably best if you do not actually read this post.
“Nourishing Justice” is a report produced by a charity (not the sort of charity that runs on voluntary contributions from the public) called “Eating Better” (Registered Charity No. 1175669). The Executive Director of Eating Better is Sarah Wakefield, the Green candidate for the Makerfield by-election upon which so much hangs. Sarah Wakefield wrote the foreword for the “Nourishing Justice” report.
I found out about the report from a GB News article called “Green candidate in Makerfield by-election wants farming to be ‘decolonised’ with ‘inclusive spaces'”. The idea that British farming needed to be decolonised confused me. Who from, the Romans? I was not convinced that GB News was giving a fair account of Eating Better’s charitable work, so I decided to check for myself. GB News was giving a fair account. “Eating Better” did indeed host a decolonial decision-making workshop called “The Gathering Table” in August 2025, co-facilitated by Diana Garduño Jiménez of a charity called “Nourish Scotland”.
“Nourish Scotland” (Registered Charity No. SC048239) is funded by a similar mixture of state money and grants from philanthropic foundations as “Eating Better”, but with the addition of some money from the Scottish government. To be clear, the organisation “Nourish Scotland” did not produce the Nourishing Justice report. “Nourish Scotland” might also be easily confused with, but is separate from, another body and another report mentioned on page 8 of the Nourishing Justice report, which says,
“The contemporary UK food system generally lacks the ability to apply race, gender, and class analysis to how food systems should change. The Sankofa Report: British Colonialism and the UK Food System delves into the numerous layers of inequalities in the current UK food system, stemming from the legacies of colonialism and exploitation. It highlights issues such as underrepresentation in the sector, food insecurity, lack of access to green space for marginalised communities and to the dominance of western epistemologies (theory of knowledge) in food research. Most importantly, the report emphasises that in order to create meaningful and lasting shifts, we must confront and address the forces that have shaped our present food system.
The “Sankofa Report” to which Nourishing Justice links is the rather grand title given to a fourteen page report on “British Colonialism and the UK food system” written by an intern called Jada Phillips at “Food Matters” (Registered Charity No.1178078). The organisation “Food Matters”, you may be surprised to learn, is a registered “charity” funded by by a mixture of public sector grants, National Lottery money, and most of the same charitable trusts and foundations as fund “Eating Better” and “Nourish Scotland”. The name of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation turns up in all three.
I think. Maybe it was only two out of three, or maybe I was thinking of another charity called Eat Scotland or a trading card game called Charity: The Gathering. Gimme a break, I’ve got three tabs up from the Charity Commission, two Annual Reports, four responses from two different AIs (at least one of which is a lie), and a splitting headache.
It’s easy to get confused between the all these bodies with wholesome-sounding words to do with food and eating in their names, but it is very important that you distinguish between them because otherwise you might think that they are functionally identical bodies whose employees get to eat pretty well by being paid to quote each other by the taxpayer.
“If everybody must be equally well-off all the time, there can be no significant movement up or down. That would rule out what might be seen as a natural trajectory from less successful to more successful, or from early struggle to affluent independence, perhaps involving personal resourcefulness or a climb up a professional ladder.”
And:
“Personal achievement and self-improvement are among the greatest satisfactions life has to offer. The possibility of moral agency and the scope for taking individual responsibility are probably the defining attributes of emotional maturity.”
– Janet Daley, Sunday Telegraph.
In the Telegraph, Charles Moore writes, “Will politicians ever realise that they can’t fix prices?”
The article begins with an anecdote to which I can relate:
When I was about 12, I thought like Rachel Reeves. “Prices are going up too much, so why,” I asked my parents, “don’t we just stop them going up?”
I cannot remember their answer, but I now know what my problem was. I did not understand what a price meant. I thought it was an order from on high (which, in dictatorships, it is). Only gradually did I come to understand it was something infinitely more subtle. It is the result – the signal – of an agreement made between someone who wants to sell something and someone who wants to buy it.
The equivalent “Why don’t we just” moment in my childhood occurred when my parents were moaning about lack of money. Less polite than the young Master Moore, I stamped my little foot and said, “If you haven’t got enough money, go to the bank and get some more.”
I blame fairy stories. I don’t recall ever believing in dragons, but I think I did believe that a Good King (or rather a Good Democratically Elected Prime Minister; I was that sort of kid) had but to say the word and there would be no more poor. I was pretty stupid for a clever seven year old. Our present Democratically Elected Prime Minister is sixty three.
After a brief explanation of what market signals are and how very bad things happen when people distort them, Mr Moore continues,
In my youth, most British politicians of both parties thought in my childish way. In 1972, Ted Heath’s Tories, shocked by the inflationary effect of the artificial boom their own policies had created, intervened to stop the merry-go-round. The Government’s Counter-Inflation (Temporary Provisions) Bill created a Price Commission and a Pay Board. All price rises were frozen for 90 days. Only one Conservative MP, Enoch Powell, voted against this profoundly unconservative measure.
Geoffrey Howe, later a great free-market Chancellor of the Exchequer, was Heath’s minister for consumer affairs. As such, he was the enforcer of every single price control. The utter absurdity of this was brought home to him when he was informed that the Vicar of Trumpington had doubled the charge for brass-rubbing in his church during the freeze. It was part of his job as the relevant Cabinet minister to prevent even that.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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