The richer you are, the less tax you pay — and we've all quietly decided that's fine

The root cause of inequality is we are trained to punch down, not up (cartoon credit: Patrick Hollis)

TAXATION & INEQUALITY

The Green Party gets attacked for being naive about wealth taxes. But the real naivety lies in a cultural assumption baked into British life: that avoiding tax is something you earn the right to do.

BY PADDY GRIFFITH  ·  GREEN PARTY CANDIDATE, SOUTH RICHMOND

Let's start with the charge that's levelled at the Green Party almost every time we raise the subject of taxing wealth. We're told we're idealistic. Out of touch with economic reality. That we don't understand how capital works, how global finance operates, or why the wealthy would simply move their money — and themselves — elsewhere if we tried to tax them more fairly.

It's a reasonable-sounding objection. But I think it conceals something worth examining closely: a cultural assumption so deeply embedded in British life that we've stopped questioning it altogether. The assumption that the richer you are, the less tax you ought to pay — and that this is not just inevitable, but somehow deserved.

To understand why that assumption is so corrosive, it helps to think about who actually pays tax in this country, and how.

Three people.

Three very different relationships with tax.

TIER ONE

The PAYE earner — £20,000 to £45,000

For millions of people in Britain, taxation is simply non-negotiable. It comes out before the money ever hits their account. They pay income tax at the appropriate rate, National Insurance on top of that, and then VAT on most of what they spend. There is no strategy, no scheme, no adviser. They pay what they owe, in full, automatically. For these people, the system works exactly as intended.

TIER TWO

The higher earner — £100,000 to £200,000

As income rises, options begin to appear. At this level, people start accumulating investments — equities, property, angel stakes in startups. Many set up personal service companies, paying themselves through dividends rather than salary. Their core earnings are still taxed, often at 40 or 45 percent, but they increasingly engage in what the financial industry politely calls "tax management" — the legal, socially normalised practice of offsetting gains, sheltering income in trusts, and restructuring how money flows. This is the engine room of the British economy: hardworking, successful people who have begun, quite rationally within the rules, to reduce what they actually pay.

TIER THREE

The super-wealthy — assets in the millions and beyond

At this level, employment income is almost beside the point. Wealth is generated through ownership — of property portfolios, equity stakes, financial instruments, and assets spread across multiple jurisdictions. These are, in a meaningful sense, supranational operators: their capital lives beyond the immediate reach of any single country's tax authority. And almost by definition, they pay the lowest proportion of their wealth in tax. Not because the rules don't apply to them, but because the rules — and the entire industry built to navigate them — exist, in practice, to serve them.

This is the group the Green Party argues we need to address. Not punish, not chase away — address. Because these are also the people who own the investment funds your pension sits in, the multinationals whose brands fill your high street, and the tech platforms that extract an increasing share of what your business spends each year, often routing revenue through tax-efficient structures far offshore.

"The richer you are, the smarter you're expected to be about not paying tax. We've turned avoidance into an aspiration."

The cultural assumption nobody challenges

Here's what I find genuinely baffling. We have collectively internalised the idea that tax avoidance is something you earn the right to. That reaching a certain level of wealth comes with an implicit permission — even an obligation — to begin protecting that wealth from the society that helped generate it. The schools and universities that educated you. The roads and infrastructure your business depends on. The courts that protect your contracts and your property.

There is an entire professional class — accountants, tax lawyers, wealth managers, family office advisers — whose sole purpose is to help the already-wealthy pay less. And this is not seen as socially problematic. It is seen as prudent. Aspirational, even. People speak of it the way they speak of a good pension strategy or a savvy mortgage deal. At a certain income level, engaging a tax adviser isn't just normal — it's expected.

The inverse of that, of course, is a shrinking sense of social obligation. The further up the wealth ladder you climb, the more the walls go up. The goal shifts from contributing to the society you live in, to insulating yourself and your heirs from it. That strikes me as not just economically damaging, but as a quietly bleak way to live.

Why the middle looks down instead of up

Perhaps the strangest part of this dynamic is what happens in the middle. The tier-two earner — the professional, the entrepreneur, the higher-rate taxpayer — is often the loudest critic of welfare spending and benefits claimants. They look downward, scrutinising the cost of support for those earning less than them. But they rarely look upward and ask why the person dramatically richer than them, who grew wealthy on the back of the same economy, pays a lower effective tax rate.

Part of this is aspiration. If you believe — or hope — that you might one day reach that level of wealth yourself, you don't want to close the door. And part of it is something harder to name: a kind of deference. A sense that the very rich must have earned the right to the advantages they enjoy, including the advantage of paying less. That wealth, in itself, confers legitimacy.

This is the meritocracy myth at full stretch. The idea that wherever you sit in the economic order, you've got there through talent and hard work alone — not the family you were born into, the school you attended, the connections you inherited, or the decade in which you happened to invest in property.

What the Greens are actually arguing

The Green Party's position on wealth taxation isn't naive. It is, in fact, a direct challenge to this cultural assumption — the idea that the system as it stands is either fair or inevitable. It isn't either. The billionaire class has grown dramatically over the last two decades. The multimillionaire class has expanded alongside it. Meanwhile, the people in tiers one and two have seen their real incomes stagnate and their public services hollowed out.

Closing that gap requires international cooperation — on tax transparency, on information sharing, on minimum effective rates for the truly wealthy. It requires political will. And yes, it requires confronting the industries whose business model depends on the status quo.

But most of all, it requires us to stop treating tax avoidance as an aspiration and start treating it as the problem it actually is. The person on £30,000 a year pays every penny they owe, without question, because the system leaves them no choice. The person with £30 million in assets has an army of advisers ensuring they pay as little as possible, and we've all agreed to call that smart.

That's not inevitable. It's a choice — cultural, political, and moral. And it's one we can make differently.

Paddy Griffith is a Green Party candidate in South Richmond. The views expressed are his own.