Gary Stevenson has been dismantling “childish” arguments against a wealth tax for years on YouTube. His Channel 4 documentary, How to Get Filthy Rich, packaged his arguments as a long-form show for a mainstream audience. Journalists focused on his clash with tax lawyer Dan Neidle, who called Gary’s annual wealth tax proposal “populist claptrap.” The sensationalism around the debate, however, belies a category error: a wealth tax and a land value tax target completely different things, and both can co-exist.

Comparing acres and Apple

In their discussion, Neidle accused Stevenson of being “unable to separate [his] emotional reaction to inequality with a rational assessment of the best tools for it,” only to then propose an inadequate tool for tackling inequality: the land value tax.

Through his non-profit Tax Policy Associates, Neidle has published a modelled land value tax that would progressively replace council tax and stamp duty over a decade, charging between 1.1%–1.7% of a property’s unimproved land value. His tax is a well-designed policy for a real problem: land wealth is absurdly concentrated in Britain, and taxing unimproved land value discourages the speculative land-banking that holds up the housing supply.

But for all the strengths of Dan’s proposal, taxing land is not appropriate for tackling the particularity of billionaire wealth in the 21st century. The idea of taxing land is, in fact, centuries old, pioneered by Henry George in the 1800s, and the logic, in many ways, is sound. The inequality of today’s economies, however, requires a different analysis.

The research of French economist Gabriel Zucman on billionaire wealth, distilled in his new book We Need To Tax Billionaires, underpins a lot of wealth tax proposals. Zucman’s account traces the growth in extreme wealth to appreciation in the companies people already control, more so than land holdings. Between March 2024 and March 2026 alone, global billionaire wealth increased by around 40%. Ultra-wealthy people, nowadays, typically hold their fortunes through personal holding companies that accumulate dividends and unrealised capital gains while reporting almost no taxable income, financing their lifestyles by borrowing against appreciating shares, rather than selling their assets, avoiding opportunities to be taxed.

To infinity, and beyond the taxman

Elon Musk is the clearest example of the mechanism that Zucman described, even if at one remove from British politics. Musk’s net worth is built almost entirely from his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX, with a tiny fraction held in cash. ProPublica’s analysis of leaked IRS data put his “true tax rate” against wealth growth at 3.27% between 2014 and 2018. Musk’s wealth is overwhelmingly not in land, so a land value tax, however well designed, could not affect it.

Research from the Resolution Foundation’s Wealth Tax Commission work shows this isn’t a quirk of Musk’s portfolio. For UK families with net wealth over £5 million per adult, wealth is far more dominated by business and financial assets than for families lower down the wealth distribution. The ultra-rich then hold proportionally less of their fortune in land than almost anyone else in the country. Land value tax is a real answer to a real problem, just not the one Gary Stevenson spent a whole documentary laying out.

Ground control to Gary Stevenson

Neidle’s rebuttal fails to engage with that distinction, arguing about methods of assessment, GDP growth and capital flight, but his criticisms were on the basis of poor analysis of the wealth of the ultra-rich. Even in terms of political pragmatism, though Neidle frames Stevenson’s idea as fringe, polling finds wealth taxes to be a lot more popular than a land value tax.

YouGov found that a wealth tax on assets above £10 million has net support across voters, including Conservatives and Reform. 64% of Conservative voters think the government should do more to tax people with net wealth over £10 million, and a majority of people considering voting Reform back a one-off wealth tax.

A wealth tax then would not only be suited to the problems presented by the growth of billionaire wealth, but would be a popular proposal across the political spectrum, rather than just ‘populist claptrap.’

Featured image via Channel 4

By Hugo Harvey

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