Editorial: We are fortunate in the UK that the wealthiest 1% of earners pay so much of our tax

​One of the big myths in British politics is that the wealthy are not paying their share in tax.

That version of events, in which stupid, weak or even corrupt governments let rich people evade their responsibilities, is so exaggerated as almost to be nonsense.

It is true that the tax affairs of the wealthiest people who spend a lot of time in Britain, but are not based here, are so complex that it is hard to get much tax out of them. Also that the wealthiest companies can be so mobile, and are so important to us even when they pay only a small fraction of their income to the UK Treasury, that it can seem as if they are not paying a proper share.

The problem comes when you try to do anything about it (as Labour has found by the flight of the ‘non doms’, people whose main home is overseas). A few thousand non doms are believed to have left Britain, yet they account for less than 0.001% of the UK population. The United Kingdom has one of the most progressive taxation systems in the western world, in which the wealthiest 1% of earners pay a massively disproportionate share of overall taxes. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated that they pay almost 30% of the national revenues. Imagine the disaster to the health service, defence and other areas if that amount was significantly reduced because the top 1% found itself less motivated to work hard.

If, for example, an extreme left-wing government confiscated the wealth of the top 1% it would still not meet Britain’s financial needs.

We report on page 8 the Sunday Times list of the biggest individual taxpayers in the UK, who pay tens of millions of pounds a year each, in some cases hundreds of millions. This is not a story you often hear: wealthy Britons who stay and pay their dues.

We we hear even less about people in the 1% (as opposed to the 0.1% or 0.001%), because they tend not to be publicly known. But we in the 99% are lucky to have them.