Robert Peston

And what role do tax havens play in sheltering the enormous wealth of these people?

And how does one distinguish between an economy, a country that is competitive on tax and

and an economy that basically its whole approach is just to provide, as I say, a safe haven for those who don't want to pay any tax.

You wrote a paper for the G20 in which you came up with a proposal to, I think it is to impose a 2% annual levy on those whose wealth is a billion dollars plus.

Is that correct?

A hundred million plus, yes.

So just talk us through how you arrived at this as a sort of... It's not exactly a solution, but it would raise a lot of money for... Raise a lot of very useful money for governments that are struggling to fund public services.

Yeah, I think, frankly, it's the beginning of the solution.

Gabriel, this is completely gripping, but we're just going to go to a very quick break.

Just take us through the numbers.

If it was applied to those with wealth of $100 million plus, or if it was just the billionaires, what are the pots of money that would be raised?

And what do you say to those who always make the

sort of alarmist claim that if you were to do this, all of these people would relocate elsewhere and would also stop investing in the UK.

And there's another point, which is,

Whether or not this is sensible taxation, and I'm pretty sure everybody listening thinks it's an absolute scandal that these immensely wealthy people don't pay what would be seen as their fair share.

As you pointed out, they have enormous power and enormous influence.

If I were the chancellor and I were thinking about doing this, I would also be acutely aware that international investors regard the UK government's debt as...

you know, not quite as secure as they would like.

And every time there is an issue, you know, every time somebody raises something about, oh, well, people are going to be moving capital out of the UK, at that point, UK government debt prices fall, the interest rate paid by the government goes up.

And so you find yourself in a situation where for a whole variety of reasons, even if this feels like the rational thing to do, and even if you've got a chancellor on the left of politics, they sort of panic and they think, oh my God, I just can't do this.