Liam Byrne
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
We're here to pick a fight with some vested interests who are not playing by the rules.
We need to be the party of a more kind of civic capitalism.
So that's fairness point number one.
Fairness point number two is in the social security system where we now have a country where it is very difficult for people to build wealth and assets.
And as I've said, the top 1% has multiplied its wealth by 31 times more than everybody else since 2010.
So the big idea in the book that came before this on the inequality of wealth is an idea, not universal basic income, but universal basic capital.
And the idea here is that you restore savings matches, tax breaks and incentives for people to build up assets, to put down a deposit on a home to call their own, to retrain, restock their human capital and to save more into a pension.
Is that being done anywhere?
It's being done in places like Singapore.
So Singapore is probably the best example.
And the way you pay for it is actually by building a sovereign wealth fund, which we're beginning to do.
If we had not given away North Sea Oil, we would have a sovereign wealth fund of ยฃ500 billion right now.
But the way that you build it now is by restoring fairness to this tax system and actually introducing...
not necessarily a wealth tax, but higher taxes on wealth.
So if you think about Rishi Sunak's tax return, which I don't know if you've read, it's not very long, it's about a page long.
The last tax return- 23%.
There you go.
2 million in income, tax rate, 23%.