Zero Billionaires

How UK Wealth is Distributed

The top 1% hold 10% of all wealth—equal to the poorest 50% combined. The next 9% hold 33%, while the middle 40% hold 47%.ONS Jan 2025

Growth Impact: Bottom 20% vs Top 20% Income Share

Source: IMF, 159 countries. When the bottom 20%'s share increases 1%, GDP grows 0.38 points. When the top 20%'s share increases 1%, GDP shrinks 0.08 points.IMF 2015

UK Social Mobility Crisis

The UK ranks 21st of 82 nations on social mobility—behind Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands.OECD

UK Political Donation Concentration (2001-2021)

Just 10 men gave £106m—20% of all major individual donations over two decades. Four are billionaires with an average age of 70.openDemocracy

Per Capita CO2 Emissions by Wealth Group

The richest 1% produce 110 tonnes CO2 per capita annually—nearly 70 times more than the bottom 50%.Oxfam 2023

Top Marginal Tax Rates: 1950-2025

The Zucman Blueprint: A Minimum Tax on Billionaires

In 2024, at the request of Brazil's G20 presidency, economist Gabriel Zucman (Paris School of Economics / UC Berkeley) published the first international blueprint for taxing the ultra-rich.Zucman, G20 report 2024 Its core finding: because billionaire income accrues mostly as untaxed capital gains inside holding companies, billionaires pay an effective tax rate of roughly 0.3% of their wealth — proportionally less than nurses, teachers and factory workers pay.

His remedy — a coordinated 2% minimum effective tax on wealth above $1 billion — would affect around 3,000 people worldwide and raise $200–250 billion a year, plus a further $100–140 billion if extended to those worth over $100 million. Only billionaires who don't already pay the equivalent of 2% of their wealth in income tax would owe anything.ICIJ 2024

G20 leaders responded in the 2024 Rio Declaration by committing to "engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed".G20 2024

Enforcement Is Now Possible — the Research That Proved It

Zucman's The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015) estimated that around 8% of the world's household financial wealth sits in tax havens. His subsequent work with Annette Alstadsæter and Niels Johannesen, using leaked records (HSBC Switzerland, the Panama Papers) matched to Scandinavian tax data, found the wealthiest 0.01% evade about 25% of the tax they owe — versus ~3% for everyone else.Alstadsæter, Johannesen & Zucman 2019

The crucial change since Europe's old wealth taxes died: automatic exchange of financial account information now operates across 100+ jurisdictions under the OECD Common Reporting Standard, ending the bank-secrecy era in which those taxes were designed.OECD Evasion, Zucman argues, is a policy choice — not a law of nature.

What Optimal-Tax Research Says About Top Rates

Piketty, Saez & Stantcheva estimate the revenue-maximising top marginal income tax rate at around 83% once all behavioural responses are counted — close to the rates the UK and US actually levied during their fastest decades of growth.Piketty, Saez & Stantcheva 2014

In The Triumph of Injustice (2019), Saez and Zucman documented that the 400 richest Americans now pay a lower total tax rate (all taxes combined) than the working class — the first time in a century.Saez & Zucman 2019

The Policy Ladder: From Minimum Tax to Wealth Cap

You don't have to back the cap to start climbing. Each rung raises revenue, builds enforcement capacity, and tests the sceptics' predictions against reality:

1. A 2% minimum effective tax on billionaires The internationally endorsed first step: Zucman's G20 blueprint, aligned with the Rio Declaration. Billionaires who already pay 2% of their wealth in tax owe nothing extra — this simply ends the anomaly of the very richest paying the lowest rates.Zucman, G20 report 2024
2. Progressive annual bands on wealth above £100 million Using the valuation and collection machinery designed by the UK Wealth Tax Commission.Wealth Tax Commission 2020 Independent costings for broader UK wealth-tax reform range from £10bn (IPPR) to £50bn+ a year (Tax Justice UK).Tax Justice UK
3. A 100% marginal rate above £770 million — the cap In practice the cap operates as a high annual rate on wealth above the threshold: our revenue model applies 8% a year. Because 8% exceeds typical long-run investment returns, fortunes above £770m gradually decline toward the cap rather than being confiscated overnight. The 100% figure describes the destination; the annual rate describes the transition — and generates the £8–12bn a year.

How We Calculate £8-12 Billion Annual Revenue

Revenue projections are based on rigorous economic methodology and multiple verified data sources:

Result: Wealth above the £770 million threshold yields £8-12 billion in net annual revenue after accounting for enforcement costs and conservative avoidance estimates.

Note: £8–12bn is the campaign's own illustrative estimate using the methodology above. For independently published costings, see IPPR (~£10bn/yr from a 0.6% tax above £2m) and Tax Justice UK (~£50bn/yr from a comprehensive package) — both cited in the fact box below.

Current UK Wealth Taxes Are Inadequate

The UK already has some wealth-related taxes, but they're limited in scope and easily avoided:

What £12 Billion Could Fund Annually

Historical Precedent: High Rates Work

US GDP growth averaged 3.7% annually from 1947-1973 with 91%+ top rates vs 2.3% from 1980-2018 with lower rates.Piketty & Saez

Redistribution Fixes the Symptom. Predistribution Fixes the Machine.

The concept comes from Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker: instead of letting markets mint extreme outcomes and correcting them with taxes afterwards, change the market rules so the concentration never happens.Equitable GrowthRoosevelt Institute The most authoritative UK statement is the IPPR's Commission on Economic Justice — business leaders and the Archbishop of Canterbury among its commissioners — whose organising principle was that the economy should "democratise wealth at its source, not simply redistribute it".IPPR, Prosperity & Justice 2018

A billionaire is not a natural phenomenon. Every ten-figure fortune is produced by a small number of identifiable machines — concentrated firm equity, monopoly rents, intellectual-property monopolies, financial engineering, land rents, dynastic inheritance, and a legal code that shields it all. Each machine has an off-switch, and each off-switch has serious scholarship behind it:

1. Share the Firm Before the Fortune Forms

Billionaires exist chiefly because founders and shareholders capture close to 100% of a firm's equity growth. Ownership-sharing splits that stream at source. Germany has required worker seats on company boards since 1976 — near-parity in large firms — and the evidence review finds no efficiency cost.Jäger et al., IZAHarvard Law corp-gov forum Elizabeth Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act proposed 40% worker-elected boards for large US firms; Piketty's Capital and Ideology goes to 50%.O'Neill on Piketty

The UK has already built the machinery. Since 2014, a founder who sells to an Employee Ownership Trust pays no capital gains tax — and hundreds have chosen to diffuse their wealth to staff rather than exit as centimillionaires (Richer Sounds, Riverford).EOTs Labour's 2019 Inclusive Ownership Funds proposal would have scaled the idea: firms with 250+ staff transferring 1% of equity a year, up to 10%, into worker funds paying dividends.People's Policy Project

The UK think tank dedicated to designing these models is Common Wealth, founded by Mathew Lawrence (co-author of Owning the Future).Common Wealth

2. Stop the Rents: Monopoly, Patents, Buybacks, Land

Much of what looks like wealth creation at the very top is wealth extraction — what economists since Joseph Stiglitz have called rent-seeking.Stiglitz The Balanced Economy Project's Davos report Taken, Not Earned traces how monopoly power sits behind most of the world's largest fortunes.Balanced Economy Project 2024Open Markets Institute

Dean Baker's Rigged puts numbers on the rules: patent and copyright monopolies, corporate-governance failures and financial-sector privileges redistribute possibly $1 trillion a year — 5% of US GDP — upward. No modern IP regime, no Microsoft-scale personal fortune; the alternatives are shorter, weaker patents and publicly funded research.Baker, Rigged (free download)PBS William Lazonick showed S&P 500 firms spent $2.4 trillion — 54% of profits (2003–12) — on share buybacks that inflate executives' stock-based fortunes; buybacks were treated as illegal market manipulation in the US before 1982. Restricting them is a direct brake on billionaire formation.Lazonick, HBR 2014

And the oldest rent of all: land. UCL research shows rising UK wealth inequality is driven principally by land values — property is half of all UK household wealth, and the top 10%'s property wealth is nearly five times the bottom half's combined. A land value tax captures gains no individual created.Ryan-Collins, Lloyd & Macfarlane

3. Rewrite the Legal Code That Shields Fortunes

Columbia law professor Katharina Pistor's The Code of Capital shows that wealth is "coded" into permanence by private law — trusts, corporate forms, bankruptcy priority — assembled by lawyers to shield assets from creditors, spouses, and tax authorities across generations.Pistor, Columbia Reforming trust law and asset-shielding vehicles is upstream of every tax on this page: it determines whether fortunes can hide and compound at all.

The public also has a claim before fortunes form: economist Mariana Mazzucato documents that taxpayer-funded research seeded most breakthrough technologies — the internet, GPS, touchscreens, key vaccines. If the state took equity stakes or royalties in what it funds, publicly created value would stop privatising into individual fortunes by default.Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State

4. Spread Capital at the Start — and Break the Dynasties

Prevention has a positive half: if capital ownership is broad from the beginning, no one needs to accumulate a controlling share of everything. Piketty proposes "inheritance for all" — a universal capital endowment of roughly €120,000 at age 25, so property circulates instead of concentrating.Piketty interview Hamilton & Darity's "baby bonds" — trust accounts at birth, scaled inversely to family wealth — moved from a 2010 academic paper to live US state pilots.Hamilton & Darity 2010Urban Institute The Resolution Foundation proposed a UK £10,000 citizen's inheritance at 25 — and Britain actually ran a small version, the Child Trust Fund, from 2005 to 2011.Resolution Foundation

At national scale: a citizens' wealth fund — a public fund holding a diversified slice of the market and paying every citizen a dividend. Alaska has paid one since 1982; had Britain saved its North Sea oil receipts as Norway did, it would hold a fund worth £500bn+ today. The IPPR Commission formally recommended one for the UK.Lansley & McCannPeople's Policy ProjectIPPR

On the dynastic side, the OECD itself — hardly a radical body — endorses inheritance taxation to "prevent the build-up of dynastic wealth", noting the share of inherited wealth in total private wealth is rising.OECD 2021 UK inheritance flows are set to double within two decades, while under a third of people expect to receive one — the next generation of extreme wealth will increasingly be born, not built.Resolution Foundation The favoured reform — from the IPPR and Resolution Foundation — is a lifetime receipts tax: tax what each person receives over a lifetime, not the estate, and use it to fund the universal endowment. Inheritance for the few becomes inheritance for all.

The Scale of Solvable Problems

The UK's richest 350 people hold £784 billion (Sunday Times Rich List 2026). Global billionaires hold far more. Here's the scale of what such sums could achieve:

The Math: Billionaire Wealth vs. Global Problems

Cost-Benefit Analysis: Prevention vs. Management

Research consistently shows that solving these problems is far cheaper than managing their consequences:

Crisis working with PwC found ending homelessness would deliver benefits worth £26.4bn while costing £9.9bn over 10 years—a net benefit of £16.5bn. We spend more managing poverty than it would cost to end it.Crisis UK

Cross-Party Support for Wealth Taxation

YouGov polling (July 2025): 75% support 2% wealth tax on assets above £10m. Only 13% oppose.YouGov 2025