Robert Peston

I mean, you became, I think, almost a household name in France because this proposal in I think it was 2024.

at a time of the great chaos around forming a government in France, the left in France said, as a price of supporting the government, that they should do the Zucman tax.

And then Arnaud, the richest man in France, started a campaign against it and nothing happened.

And so if it couldn't happen in France, in your home country, why do you think it might be practical here?

And can I ask you, do sort of leading politicians on the left, have they talked to you?

I mean, the Greens, I think, would sign up, no question, to your proposal.

But have you talked to anybody in Labour about this?

Can I just ask you on that?

Because you would argue that it would have pretty broad support.

So what would Le Pen or Bardella say about this?

Even though a lot of their supporters would presumably be in favor of it.

And I think you said that if we did this in the UK, it would raise roughly 15 billion pounds.

Now, 15 billion pounds, it's a lot of money, right?

But it is less than a tenth, for example, of what we spend on our health service, right?

It's useful, but it's not going to transform the public finances.

Would you see this...

as a sort of first step on a path to rebalancing how we do taxation.

Because if you look at an economy like the UK, it seems patently obvious that we tax work too much and we tax assets too little.

I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's not transformative.

We've got this possibility that the Prime Minister is going to be replaced.