You're paying your share. So why does the system still feel broken?

TAXATION & INEQUALITY

Richmond is one of the most prosperous boroughs in England. Its residents pay significant tax, work hard, and invest in their families' futures. So why does public life feel increasingly threadbare — and why are we looking in the wrong direction for an explanation?

BY PADDY GRIFFITH  ·  GREEN PARTY CANDIDATE, SOUTH RICHMOND

If you live in Richmond upon Thames, the chances are you're doing reasonably well. You probably own your home, or are working hard to. You're paying 40 percent income tax on a meaningful slice of your earnings. You're contributing to a pension. You're thinking about how to pass something on to your children one day. And you're watching public services — GPs, dentists, local infrastructure, the river you walk beside — feel increasingly strained, despite the fact that you know, with certainty, that you're paying in.

That frustration is completely legitimate. But I want to suggest that we're being pointed at the wrong explanation for it.

The story we're often told — implicitly, through political rhetoric and newspaper headlines — is that the system is being drained by people who take more than they put in. The suggestion hangs in the air without always being stated directly. But the arithmetic doesn't support it. The real fiscal pressure on this country doesn't come from below. It comes from above — from a layer of wealth so mobile, so globally distributed, and so professionally managed that it has effectively opted out of the social contract the rest of us live by.

To understand why, it helps to think about who actually pays tax in Britain, and how.

Three people. Three very different relationships with tax.

TIER ONE

The PAYE earner — £20,000 to £45,000

For millions of people across the country — fewer of them visible in Richmond, many more in Feltham, in outer south London, in post-industrial towns from Sunderland to Swansea — taxation is simply non-negotiable. It comes out before the money ever arrives. Income tax, National Insurance, VAT on most of what they spend. No strategy, no adviser, no scheme. 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

This is, broadly speaking, Richmond. Professionals, business owners, senior employees who have worked hard, earned well, and started accumulating assets — equities, investment properties, pension pots, perhaps a stake in a business. At this level, options begin to appear. Many set up personal service companies, drawing dividends alongside salary. They engage financial advisers. They offset gains against losses, shelter income in ISAs and trusts, think carefully about inheritance. Their core earnings are still taxed at 40 or 45 percent — but they are increasingly engaged in what the financial industry calls "tax management." It's legal, it's normalised, and it's the rational response to the rules as they exist. These are the people who genuinely power the national economy. And they are, broadly, paying their share.

TIER THREE

The super-wealthy — assets in the millions and beyond

At this level, earned income is almost beside the point. Wealth is generated through ownership — of property portfolios, equity stakes, financial instruments, and assets spread across multiple countries. These are, in a meaningful sense, supranational operators: their capital lives beyond the reach of any single tax authority. And almost by definition, they pay the lowest proportion of their wealth in tax. Not because the rules don't apply, but because an entire industry — accountants, tax lawyers, offshore structures, family offices — exists specifically to ensure they don't have to. The billionaire class has grown dramatically over the last two decades. The multimillionaire class alongside it. Meanwhile, the revenues that should flow from that accumulated wealth into public life have been expertly redirected elsewhere.

"The real pressure on the system doesn't come from below. It comes from a layer of wealth that has quietly opted out of the social contract the rest of us live by."

The view from Richmond

Here is what makes this particularly acute for a borough like ours. Richmond is geographically and socially insulated from the sharper edges of British inequality. The people who depend most heavily on functioning public services — affordable housing, mental health provision, emergency social care — tend not to live here. They live in other parts of London, or in parts of the country that feel abstractly distant.

That invisibility matters. When you don't see poverty up close, it's easier to accept a narrative in which public spending is waste, and the people drawing on it are somehow undeserving. It's a narrative that conveniently redirects a reasonable frustration — your taxes are high and the services feel poor — toward the least powerful people in the system, rather than toward those with the greatest ability to contribute more.

The tier-two earner in Richmond — taxed heavily, feeling squeezed, saving hard for a pension and their children's future — has more in common, economically and politically, with the PAYE worker in Feltham than they do with the hedge fund manager whose firm is domiciled in the Cayman Islands. But the way our political conversation is structured, they rarely notice that. Instead, there's a tendency to look downward with suspicion, and upward with a strange kind of deference — as though the very rich must have earned not just their wealth, but their exemption from the obligations that come with it.

What the Green Party is actually arguing

When the Greens talk about taxing wealth more fairly, we're not talking about punishing success or driving away enterprise. We're talking about closing the gap between what the system demands of someone earning £35,000 and what it effectively demands of someone with £35 million in assets. That gap is not natural. It is not inevitable. It is the cumulative result of decades of political choices, lobbying by those with the most to gain, and a cultural acceptance of the idea that wealth confers the right to pay less.

Fixing it requires international cooperation — on transparency, on information sharing, on minimum effective rates for the genuinely wealthy. It requires political will at a national level. But it also requires something more local and more human: a willingness to look clearly at where the real leakage in the system is, and to stop accepting a story that blames the wrong people.

What this means for Richmond

If the wealthiest tier of the economy paid tax at a rate closer to what Richmond's professionals pay — not more, just proportionately similar — the funding available for the NHS, for local infrastructure, for the public services that hold communities together would look substantially different.

The residents of this borough are not the problem. They are, by and large, doing everything right: working hard, contributing their fair share, investing in their families and their community. The argument isn't that they should pay more. It's that others — those with far greater capacity — should finally pay their equivalent.

That's not naive. That's arithmetic.

Richmond deserves representatives who are honest about where the real pressure on the public finances comes from. Not from the people who need support, but from the structures that allow enormous accumulated wealth to flow through British life while contributing as little as possible to it.

The system feels broken because, in a specific and measurable way, it is. But the fracture isn't where we've been told to look.

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