Gary Stevenson

Do you think you have something oven ready to do now?

And Zucman said, yes, but we can't expect the Labour government to just hand the keys of the country over to Gabriel Zucman.

Obviously, the Labour Party and the government has to do a thorough analysis of those policies to make sure that they're well designed.

And I wouldn't want them to do anything else.

I want to be there kicking the tires on this, making sure that it works.

So we can't expect them to give us a wealth tax really like in anything less than two years.

And what that means is to some degrees, what we have is a difficult sell because what we are saying to Andy Burnham and to the Labour Party is, listen, we will work with you to build the institutional structure to tax the richest people in the country.

If you don't do that, they will own everything and things will collapse.

But we can't promise you that it's going to immediately fix all of your problems.

And I'm going to say to them, if you do it, I believe, I trust that the British public will be willing to back

fixing long-term problems, that the British public does have patience, that they will be willing to work with you.

And the truth is, you know, I've been doing this for a long time, and every single budget, I go around the houses, talk to the think tanks, and say, are you guys going to do anything on wealth taxes?

And they always say to me, oh, wealth tax is going to take two years.

We don't have two years.

We need to worry about this upcoming budget.

Basically, like the sort of political institution, the political economic academic classes,

basically they don't believe that the british public has the patience to accept long-term fixes and i need to be able to turn around to them and say listen the british public are not idiots they will be willing to back somebody who is serious about fixing the long-term problems so in a sense what i'm trying to do here is bridge

between the Labour politicians and say, listen, if you fix the long term problems, I will get you the support of the public.

But I also need to speak to you the public and say, listen, if these guys are serious about fixing the long term problems, you do need to back them in the context of continued short term falls in living standards.

Listen, and I wish I could give you a different message.