Global elite continue to spend, spend, spend in a Labour Britain

The purchase by a Texan tycoon of an £80-million London trophy mansion, yes EIGHTY-MILLION POUNDS, nails the scare the filthy rich will flee Britain because a Labour Government puts up tax a little bit.

American designer Tom Ford, who pocketed a cool £2.2billion selling his fashion brand to Estee Lauder, isn’t packing his bags but investing in the UK by buying a Chelsea luxury pile believed to have a white stucco-front if you like that sort of thing.

Admittedly the deal was completed shortly before Rachel Reeves’ Budget so he saved a wad on the Chancellor’s 2% second home stamp duty surcharge hike. Yet the 63-year-old’s acquisition, after another magnate paid an eight-figure sum for Ford’s old Regent’s Park place, is proof the global elite’s continuing to spend, spend, spend in Britain despite public screams from filthy rich vested interests and their hired hands that Labour would drive away wealth.

Personally I’d be happy to drive to Heathrow, free of charge in my ageing Qashqai, any bloodsucking leeches who wish to sulk in a desert rather than enjoy one of the world’s most interesting, enjoyable, sanest and safest countries.

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For weeks we’ve suffered lurid headlines and heard plastic patriots threatening to board private jets never to return. Go on then, shoo. Go. And good riddance. Don’t come back.

Perhaps confusing the championing of financial interests of wealthy proprietors over the concerns of readers, the Right-wing press relished the prospect of manufactured mass departures.

Every year there is a grouplet arranging their lives around their money instead of their money around their lives.

Mullet-headed Charlie Mullins once of Pimlico Plumbers headed noisily for Spain and Dubai where he may be in for a hilarious surprise by discovering Spain, unlike Britain, levies an annual wealth tax.

Mogul Richard Desmond obtaining a golden visa in Dubai for “lifestyle” reasons is a Brexit baron, like Jim Ratcliffe before him who relocated to squalid tax haven Monaco, escaping the country they economically handicapped by ripping us out of the European Union. But little evidence exists of any meaningful exodus.

Ford’s most expensive domestic property deal of the year so far is supported by mega moves in the recent past totalling £400m.

An American businessman paid a measly £6.75m for a Mayfair house once own by Doris Saatchi. An Asian billionaire a trifling £21.5m for a Belgravia mansion. OK, all skipped higher stamp duty bills they could afford with loose change. All, however, bought into Labour Britain.

History teaches us the richest always threaten to run away if exploding wealth is checked then rarely take flight.

The top 1% have no reason to moan any way as Labour MP Liam Byrne calculates their wealth shot up 31 times more than the 99% during the Conservative era. London School of Economics researchers pinpointed careers, families, culture, attachment to home and the upheaval of shifting were all reasons to stay put.

Reeves’ limited, modest tax changes could be much bigger when most of those sitting on unspendable, obscene fortunes would still prefer Chelsea to the Cayman Islands.