Your report (‘I reside in Monaco’: billionaire said to have quit UK over potential wealth tax had already left, 7 October) exposes something far more troubling than billionaires fleeing Britain: the extraordinary power of the super-rich to hold an entire country hostage to the threat of their departure.
Ordinary working people cannot relocate their tax obligations to Monaco. They pay their taxes, fund public services and shoulder the consequences of a system increasingly tilted towards those who need its protection least. Yet we are expected to tremble at the prospect of billionaires taking their fortunes elsewhere. Why? Wealth does not exist in a vacuum. It is built on a society’s workers, infrastructure, institutions and opportunities.
If the wealthiest can enjoy the fruits of that society while escaping their fair share of its responsibilities, the scandal is not that they leave. It is that successive governments have allowed them to make the rules. A country that cannot afford to lose its billionaires should ask itself why it can apparently afford to impoverish everyone else.
Fernando Quintana
London
