Stop bitching and salute tax heroes

THE great thing about being mayor of London is you get to meet all sorts. It is my duty to stick up for every put-upon minority in the city — from the homeless to Irish travellers, exgang members and disgraced former MPs. After five years of slog, I have a fair idea where everyone is coming from.

But there is one minority that I still behold with benign bewilderment: the very, very rich. I mean people who have so much money they can fly by private jet, who have gin palaces moored in Puerto Banus, who give their kids McLaren supercars for their 18th birthdays and buy Cartier collars for their dogs.

I am thinking of the type of people who never wear the same shirt twice and who have other people almost everywhere to do their bidding: people to drive their cars, people to pick up their socks, people to rub their temples with eau de cologne and people to bid for the Munch etching at Christie’s.

Don’t get me wrong. I neither resent nor disapprove of such zillionaires — quite the reverse. I just wonder what it is like to be so stonkingly rich and whether you can expect to be any happier for having so much dosh.

I suspect that the answer is not really, frankly — or no happier than the man with just enough to live on. If that is the case and it really is true that having stupendous sums of money is very far from the same as being happy, then surely we should stop bashing the rich.

On the contrary, the latest data suggests we should be offering them humble and hearty thanks. It is through their restless concupiscent energy and sheer wealth-creating dynamism that we pay for an ever-growing proportion of public services.

In Britain, the top 1% of earners now pay 29.8% of all the income tax and national insurance. In 1979, when the country had a top marginal rate of 83% tax, the top 1% paid only 11% of income tax. Now, the top 0.1%— about 29 000 people — pay an amazing 14.1% of all tax.

The rich are resented not so much for being rich, but for getting ever richer than the middle classes. And the trouble is that the gap is growing, especially over the past 20 years.

It is hard to say exactly why this is, but I will hazard a guess. Of all the self-made tycoons I have met, most belong to the following three fairly exclusive categories of human being:

First, they tend to be well above average, if not outstanding, in their powers of mathematical, scientific or at least logical reasoning; second, they have a great deal of energy, confidence, risk-taking instinct and a desire to make money; and thirdly, they have had the good fortune — by luck or birth — to be able to exploit these talents.

So we are talking about the intersecting set in what are already three smallish sets of people. It is easy to see how, in an ever-more efficient and globalised economy, they amass ever greater fortunes.

The answer is surely not to try to curb them or punish them, but to widen the intersecting circles they inhabit. There are kids everywhere who have a natural, if undiscovered, flair for mathematics and the mental arithmetic that business needs. They just do not have the education to exploit that talent.

There are loads of kids with the chutzpah to be kings of the deal, and there are plenty of businesses that could be the gorillas of the future — but are held back either by the weediness of the venture-capital industry, or by something as simple as high business rates.

There is no point in wasting any more mental energy in being jealous of the very rich. We should not bother ourselves about why they want all this money or why it is nicer to have a bath with gold taps. How does it hurt me, with my 20-year-old Toyota, if somebody else has a swish Mercedes? We both get stuck in the same traffic.

We should be helping all those who can to join the ranks of the super-rich and we should stop any bashing or preaching and simply give thanks for the prodigious sums of money that they are paying in tax.

It is possible, as the US economist Art Laffer says, that they might contribute even more if we cut their tax rates — but it is time we recognised the heroic contribution they already make.

In fact, we should stop publishing rich lists in favour of an annual list of the top 100 Tax Heroes, with automatic knighthoods for the top 10. — © Boris Johnson/Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013