r/GarysEconomics

“What a friend we have in Kemi,

All our sins and grief’s to bear.”

 

My apologies to the Christians among you, but the very rich really do have a friend in Kemi Badenoch despite their many sins and grief’s.

SINS: Greed has to be right up there. In fact it is one of the seven Deadly Sins of the Bible. Greed is considered deadly not because it is the worse sin, but because it’s seen as a root vice – something that distorts judgement, corrodes compassion, and leads to other moral failings.

 Excessive self-interest is a second sin. Accumulating wealth far beyond any practical need while resisting higher taxation or fairer distribution is simply immoral, especially when others suffer as a result of your personal avarice. Many of our super-rich structure their lives (residency, trusts, offshore vehicles, etc) to minimise tax contributions to the very society they profit from.

 Hubris is a third: There is an assumption that financial success proves moral superiority, intelligence or entitlement to political power. It doesn’t.

 Exploitation: accumulating wealth by employing labour practices that keep wages deliberately low, job prospects insecure, poor working conditions, and unions weak.

 Evasion: using loopholes in the law to avoid taxes whilst insisting they have “done nothing wrong” and are simply “playing by the rules”.

 Detachment and neglect: living in a social bubble so insulated that ordinary hardship becomes invisible or abstract. In this way they can ignore the social consequences of the inequality they are responsible for – under-funded public services, child poverty, housing shortages, two-tier education system, etc.

 Hypocracy: while publicly supporting social causes they privately petition, lobby and structure their finances to avoid contributing  to them.

 Put in a nutshell they take from a society they refuse to sustain, wherein they enjoy the benefits of Britain while dodging the bill.

 What about the “grief’s” they have to bear?

 Well, to be honest, not many the rest of us are burdened with. According to Binder Dijker Otte’s  (BDO) “WealthAnalysis: A psychological study of trust in the lives of the wealthy” (2026) the super-rich are loaded with non-material griefs. Their biggest worries being uncertainty, conflict and instability, not tax bills.

 They trust no one, not even members of their own families. A staggering 90% of wealthy families reported disagreements over wealth. They suffer emotional grief at the thought of tax avoidance relocation moves. This produces stress, guilt and fractured family geography. The majority worry about inheritance tax, land value tax replacing council tax, and a reduction in the lifetime gifting allowance. Surprisingly, only 2% of the very wealthy thought UK tax levels were unreasonable or too high.

This hasn’t stopped Kemi Badenoch coming to their rescue. She has promised to abolish inheritance tax, and said that couples should be able to leave an additional £1million tax-free, on top of the value of their home. She plans to cut employer national insurance payments, and give the wealthy full access to child benefits. In addition she has promised there will be no mansion tax (even though one doesn’t actually exist).

 The super-wealthy really do have a friend in Kemi. She is handing them at least £6 billion in tax cuts. This massive sum of money, says St Kemi*, “is to be paid for by cuts…including the welfare bill.”*

 I have been accused on this forum of being “ignorant” and maybe I am. But surely, a tax break is no different in substance to welfare payments? Both a tax break and a welfare payment make someone better off, maybe in different ways, but someone ends up with more money in their pocket. What I truly do not understand is why it is laudable to give the already rich more money than it is to help the poor? In fact, in this instance St Kemi deliberately intends to make the poor poorer by taking money from their pockets to swell the coffers of the rich.

 Clearly, Kemi Badenoch and the Tory Party fully advocate this verse from All Things Bright and Beautiful:

 “The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly,

And ordered their estate.” 

 Kemi Badenoch has criticised Burnham for wanting “a return to the 1970’s for Gods sake”: she wants to take the country back to an even earlier period when the poor, begging bowls in hand, knew their proper place.