Contrary to the popular misapprehension, Sir Keir Starmer isn’t just trying to take a leaf out of Marx’s book, presumably Das Kapital.
Fair enough, he too is driven by what Nietzsche called ressentiment, a psychological state produced by suppressed feelings of envy and hatred, otherwise known as socialist longings. In due course, Starmer may indeed remove the prefix crypto- from Marxist and go the whole hog.
But the historical figure exerting a more immediate influence on Sir Keir seems to be not Marx but Ramesses II, the pharaoh of Biblical infamy. The parallel is so obvious it’s hard to believe Starmer doesn’t genuflect every night before the picture of Ramesses on his bedroom wall.
As you recall, Ramesses’s country was blessed with a large diaspora of successful, enterprising people keeping Egypt’s economy in clover, or manna if you’d rather. Yet the pharaoh too was possessed of ressentiment, some 3,000 years before the word was coined.
Thus he mistreated that diaspora with singular disregard for their well-being and, more to the point, for his own country. The result was predictable: those frustrated people upped sticks and left, leaving ten plagues behind them.
Read Starmer for Ramesses, non-domiciled residents of Britain for the ancient Hebrews, and the similarity becomes impossible to ignore. For Starmer has also mistreated his non-dom diaspora, and he too has pushed the button for their exodus.
Non-doms are wealthy foreigners who live in Britain and pay £30,000 a year for the privilege if they’ve stayed here for a certain number of years. That system, which goes back almost to the time of Ramesses, makes their offshore assets and income exempt from British taxation.
There are some 37,800 fee-paying non-doms in the UK, out of the total number of 74,000. Multiply 37,800 by £30,000 and you get, in round numbers, a hell of a lot. Yet Starmer and his merry men (I go against biology by including Rachel Reeves in their number) wanted more than a paltry £30,000 a head. They wanted many times that amount, and thought they could get it by taxing non-doms on their global assets.
Predictably, the merry men were taught a simple arithmetic: £30,000 may not be good enough but it’s better than nothing. And nothing is what the Exchequer is going to get.
What ensued has been an exodus of millionaires, with 10,800 fleeing in 2024 and many more packing up. Thus Britain lost more wealthy people in one year than any other country in the world except China, which is rather more populous.
That’s just the beginning. A survey has revealed that two-thirds of the remaining non-doms are planning to leave for sunnier economic climes. That would constitute a huge hit on tax revenue, not to mention charitable donations.
The net cost to the public purse will be about £1 billion a year. Add to this the lower VAT receipts and council taxes, factor in the job losses (those leaches on the body of the ‘working people’ do create jobs for the said working people) with the subsequent swelling of the welfare rolls, and the picture acquires even a darker tint.
Here we approach a significant difference between ancient Egypt and today’s Britain. The Egyptian elite did all they could to prevent their non-doms from leaving. But the British elite jump on the bandwagon.
You see, our own Ramesses set out to punish with extortionist taxes not only non-dom entrepreneurs but also the home-grown kind. They too are leaving, taking jobs them, at least 23,000 to be lost by the end of Starmer’s first term. The demand for overseas residence permits has grown 57 per cent on 2023 – and 580 per cent on 2019.
The Plagues of Britain don’t end there. In fact, they barely begin. The same ressentiment drives Starmer’s gang, with Milibandit as their frontman, to expose whole industries to their insane obsession with net zero.
The oil industry is the most immediate victim, with tens of thousands of jobs lost already, and many more to be lost in short order. Even assuming, unsafely, that some of the newly unemployed will be able to retrain for a new trade in the long run, the short-term pressure on social services is crippling.
Moreover, car manufacturers are increasingly taught that making cars in Britain is no longer viable. The most immediate prompt comes from the government’s punitive tax hikes, but the cost of shifting to electric cars is also unsustainable. Hence hardly a day goes by without yet another car manufacturer announcing the closure of yet another plant, with thousands of job losses each time.
I struggle to come up with another example of so much economic damage visited on Britain in such a short time for purely ideological reasons. The sums involved are so simple that even people as manifestly stupid as Starmer and Reeves should be able to figure them out on their own.
The salient point is that they aren’t crippling the British economy because they know not what they do, but specifically because they know it very well. Ramesses couldn’t have predicted the plagues Egypt had to suffer as a result of the Exodus. But the economic devastation wrought by socialist ressentiment was entirely predictable.
If there exists one economic constant raised to the level of an unbreakable law, it’s that people flee from socialism, and the bolshier the socialism, the faster they run. Nor does it take an Adam Smith to figure out that punitive taxation coupled with the destruction of whole industries can’t produce an economic boom.
That’s why it’s wrong to say that the economic policies of Starmer, Reeves et al. are failing. In fact, if you define success as achieving the desired result, they are succeeding famously.
Their socialist loins ache for revenge against their traditional bogeymen, starting with ‘capitalists’, which pejorative term covers all wealth creators in the country. If all such objectionable people leave in emulation of the Exodus, then so much the better for this lot – and so much the worse for the country.
The ideal they see in their mind’s eye is reversion to the golden-age economy before the Industrial Revolution, when all energy was produced by renewable sources, such as wind, sun, water and human muscle. Most of the people, their rulers apart, were then paupers, but our present-day pharaohs wouldn’t mind that.
Private wealth makes an individual more independent from the state, which is why it’s anathema for people devoted to increasing state power ad infinitum, which is to say for socialists. They are equally opposed to bono publico and bono privato. It’s their own ideological bono that they pursue, and they do so with the kind of fanaticism that would make even the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs turn green with envy.
The pharaohs were blissfully unfamiliar not only with the concept of ressentiment but also with that of ideology. They did their level worst, but still managed to create a great civilisation.
Today’s answers to Ramesses can’t create anything. They can only destroy, so it’s a good job that’s exactly what they really want to do. When they die, they’ll go to the socialist heaven, while the rest of us will wail, weep and gnash our teeth.
Even if one makes allowance for some exaggeration, the results of electing a socialist government were entirely predictable. Sadly, it seemed to many would-be staunch conservative voters that the Tories had somehow lost their credibility. Just how and why that came about I am not competent to say, though one could see it happening, and I very much doubt that the average voter knows, any more that I do. But what can we do when our once reliable conservatives lose their credibility? Doubtless, in due course the Socialists will lose their credibility and be voted out. But what will then happen? Perhaps we are coming to the end of the era in which Britain can rely upon parliamentary process. It seems likely that the bold step of resiling from Europe is likely to be set at naught by this government’s subterfuge and gerrymandering.