Lefties who say they hate billionaires are just jealous

Watching the rioters in my hometown of Bristol, I had to laugh; the last time I saw their kind was at the Extinction Rebellion protests, bunking off from skiing trips to prevent the proles from getting to work. Middle-class youth rebel into toy-town insurrection – but workingclass youth rebel into ambition.

Growing up in a Communist household in the English working class of the 1970s, it’s fair to say that my horizons would have struck your average pit pony as limited. After my bright cousin was told by the “careers officer” (are they “tsars” now?) to “come down to earth” when she said she’d like to be an air hostess, there was no way I was going to confide my dreams of being the next Dorothy Parker.

When I got my dream job as a writer at 17, the fun was just beginning; over the years, I was treated like everything from an exotic pet to a halfwit because I’d never been to “uni”. Then the 1980s rocked up and suddenly ambition was almost a religion; the self-anointed great and the good could sneer, but after decades of being promised jam tomorrow by our middle-class masters in the socialist struggle, it felt great to break free.

Though it took me till 2019 to actually vote Tory (Brexit!), spiritually I never went back; I have a real thing for flagrant capitalists, finding Lord Sugar saying “My tax bill was £56 million last year. Many people would go abroad and dodge it. But I love living in England. And if you pay £56 million, don’t forget about the £130 million you’re left with” as thrilling as I once found Marc Bolan’s cheekbones.

So I won’t be joining the monstering of Denise Coates, the Bet365 founder who earned £469 million last year (“How much is too much?” asked the BBC; “grotesque” said a Lefty journalist). The Labour-supporting family business is now Britain’s biggest taxpayer, coughing up more than £615 million to HMRC in 2020, as well as giving £85 million to charities. While Coates isn’t my favourite sort of super-rich (like Trump, she inherited some of her wealth, so doesn’t have that rags-to-riches glamour), she serves as a handy litmus test for the mean-spiritedness of others.

I know many people without ambition who are fine with that and I don’t condemn them. But I also know a few who gripe ceaselessly about the rich and of whom I always think: “You’d love what they’ve got – and you’d give away less than they do.” I’m convinced that a lot of the hysterical hatred aimed at Bill Gates is that his critics know in their desiccated hearts that they would be nowhere near as generous to the wretched of the Earth – so he must have an ulterior motive.

When completely unregulated, capitalism can be a horrible thing – the worst economic system except for all the others, as Winston Churchill said of democracy. But it’s also a fact that capitalism raises people out of poverty as surely as socialism forces them into it. One reason the Red Wall fell was because the working classes felt increasingly patronised by the metropolitan Lady Mucks of Labour to the extent where they y believed that an Old Etonian understood their hopes and fears better than a comrade could.

“You can do this” is always going to be a more attractive message than “You can’t do this without our help”. As with the wall of red, so with the one in Berlin; the traffic was all one-way, as today immigrants vote with their feet and clamour to enter the most capitalist of countries.

In this age of virtue-signalling, some filthy rich people are better than others; the Wokescreen covers a multitude of sins. Think of the celebrity Lefties and their perfectly legal tax avoidance. Or Konnie Huq, demanding that billionaires be cancelled as: “It’s crazy that we have people who have very little, and then we have billionaires. I’d implement a cap and all that money can go to good causes instead.”

Why not start the cap, at, say, £12 million – roughly a million less than the estimated combined net worth of Huq and her husband Charlie Brooker (as reported last year)?

It’s time the Left realised that there’s nothing inherently virtuous a about having all the get-up-and-go o of a draught excluder. And that a r rich person who says greed is good a and pays every penny of their tax is worth a million rich people who say they’re hippies at heart and dodge it.