Daniel Hannan has been getting himself worked up in the Sunday Telegraph about the prospect of Andy Burnham's government bringing in a wealth tax. His argument, roughly, is that no country has ever made one work, that the idea Britain's rich are under-taxed is a myth, and that we already tax property more heavily than anyone else in the OECD. Keep taxing the rich, he says, and you're effectively choosing to be poor.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/29/wealth-taxes-break-britain-impoverish-us-all/
The pressure is real, the policy isn't (yet)
To be fair to Hannan, the pressure on Burnham is building. The Compass think tank has put forward a tax on net assets above £10 million, which Tax Justice UK reckons could raise around £24 billion a year.
But Burnham himself hasn't actually proposed a general wealth tax. So this is a pre-emptive strike against a policy that doesn't exist, which is a very Sunday Telegraph thing to be doing in September.
'No country has made it work' – apart from the one that has
Hannan's central claim, that no country has ever managed to make a wealth tax work, is simply wrong. Switzerland has run one for a very long time, levied by the cantons rather than centrally, and according to OECD figures reported by Euronews it raised around €9.5 billion in 2023, about 4.3% of total tax revenue. That isn't a failed experiment, it's a functioning tax in one of the richest countries on the planet.
What is true is that most European countries which tried wealth taxes have since dropped them, and the Swiss version works partly because it isn't really a tax on the rich at all. In Zurich it kicks in at around CHF 80,000 for a single person, so it hits a big slice of the middle class. The honest lesson is that wealth taxes can work, but only when they're broad and low, which is pretty much the opposite of the 'only the super-rich will pay' pitch that campaigners are making.
The property tax sleight of hand
Hannan's killer statistic is that property taxes make up 3.8% of our GDP, the highest share in the OECD. Look at what's in that bundle, though. It's dominated by council tax and stamp duty, both of which fall mostly on ordinary households. Council tax in England is still based on 1991 valuations, and someone in a Band H mansion pays only around three times what someone in a Band A terrace pays, despite the house being worth many, many times more.
So Britain doesn't tax wealth heavily. It taxes homeowners and home-movers heavily, and does so in a way that is regressive. Lumping in air passenger duty and VAT on school fees as 'wealth taxes', as Hannan does, just stretches the category until it means whatever he needs it to mean.
Final thoughts
I think both sides of this argument are guilty of wishful thinking. The campaigners assume you can tax the top 0.1% and fund everything without them moving their assets or themselves elsewhere, which the Swiss evidence suggests is optimistic.
Hannan, meanwhile, dresses up a regressive property tax system as proof that the rich are already paying their fair share. If he genuinely wanted Britain to stop 'choosing to be poor', he'd be arguing for council tax revaluation or a land value tax, rather than defending a system in which the owner of a £5 million townhouse pays a fraction of their wealth compared to a family in a two-up two-down.