Gary Stevenson’s economics offers a limited critique of neoliberalism
“I believe that the economy is rigged in favour of the rich,” says Gary Stevenson, in his documentary for Channel 4, “How To Get Filthy Rich”.
Stevenson, a former financial trader turned left wing economist, has built up a large online following with his cries against inequality.
This is the thread that runs throughout the documentary.
Stevenson’s fundamental premise is that the rich have been buying up all the assets in Britain—whether that is businesses, homes, land or property.
This concentration of wealth at the top of society pushes up prices and squeezes everyone else out.
He points to a collapse of “working class and government wealth”.
He cites a statistic that states the richest 56 people in Britain now own as much as 27 million of the rest of us.
What is Stevenson’s solution for this problem? A 2 percent tax on wealth above £10 million a year. This could raise £24 billion a year in tax revenue.
The documentary is a series of interviews with both working class people and the mega-rich.
It is at its most interesting when looking at the first group, asking how ordinary people are struggling in the current economic climate.
Gary speaks, for example, with a family who find it hard to feed their only child, school children worried about their future and a person living in a van in Bristol after soaring rents meant he could no longer afford his flat.
But among these interviews, he speaks with the mega-rich. Here a naked class interest is on display.
Stevenson meets English aristocrat and landowner Francis Fulford, who pushes the myth of trickle-down economics.
This is the idea that wealth at the top will—eventually—work its way down to the rest of us.
Billionaire and Reform UK donor Bassim Haidar, comfortably perched in his penthouse next to Hyde Park, threatens to leave Britain if a wealth tax were to be implemented.
Andrew Henderson, CEO of Nomad Capitalist, a company that assists wealthy individuals avoid taxes by moving countries, speaks frankly.
He says, “The world is going to be unequal. Do I think it is entirely fair? I don’t think life is fair.”
The issue is that Stevenson fails to adequately challenge these people, who are too often allowed to spout their drivel. And even when he pushes back it is unconvincing.
There are more significant problems. Stevenson remains hyper-fixated on a wealth tax. He is nostalgic for “the golden age of capitalism” after the Second World War, pointing to the high rates of taxation then.
But he doesn’t reckon with the structural features of a system built on the pursuit of profit, such as class divisions and competition between bosses.
It is these dynamics that fuel inequality in the first place.
The documentary, as a result, remains far too focused on the surface layer of capitalism.
It fails to get stuck into the processes that prop up the system as a whole.
And these mean that we need to demand so much more than a wealth tax.
