Don’t buy the lie: Reform UK is for the super-yachts, not the semi-detached

Owen Williams

Reform UK like to present themselves as champions of the “working man.” They rail against elites and promise to speak for those left behind. Yet when it comes to asking the super-rich to pay more tax, the mask slips.

Their newest MP, Sarah Pochin warned LBC that millionaires ‘would leave’ if asked to pay a fairer share. Reform and its supporters frame this as an act of economic self-preservation – as if the UK State must tiptoe around the feelings of the super-rich to avoid some imaginary supranational catastrophe.

But let’s be clear: how did those millionaires and billionaires get so wealthy in the first place?

Off the backs of working people.

Osmosis

You don’t become obscenely rich by osmosis. You don’t wake up with a billion pounds through hard work alone. You get there by harvesting the labour of others – by taking a share of what workers produce, paying them less than the value they create, and pocketing the difference.

That’s not an attack on business or enterprise. It’s an honest description of how wealth accumulates in a capitalist economy.

Even the most “self-made” tycoon depends on vast numbers of employees and a functioning society. Roads, hospitals, schools, policing, courts, contracts and stable markets – they all underpin the wealth-generation process. None of it is conjured out of thin air by sheer will or genius.

Take the internet. It wasn’t the brainchild of a billionaire in a garage. It began as a US government project, funded by taxpayers, designed to improve military communications. That publicly funded infrastructure is now the backbone of global commerce and communication. It enables the immense riches of the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, whose companies depend on it to reach customers, coordinate manufacturing and deliver services.

This is true of countless industries. Pharmaceuticals rely on decades of publicly funded research. Financial services depend on courts to enforce contracts and police to deter crime. Manufacturing depends on transport networks and reliable power grids. Even the corner shop relies on local councils to maintain streets and collect rubbish.

Collective

Wealth isn’t created in isolation. It is social. It is collective. The billionaire doesn’t build the roads to their factories, educate their entire workforce, or maintain the legal system that enforces their contracts. Society does.

So when the wealthiest among us are asked to pay more tax, it isn’t confiscation or cruelty. It’s recognition of the debt they owe to the system that made their wealth possible.

When billionaires threaten to leave rather than pay a little more, it isn’t “patriotism”. It’s extortion. It’s a declaration that their personal enrichment matters more than the society that enabled it.

We need to stop pretending this is a noble stance.

If you truly stand for the working man, you don’t design tax policy to appease people who would abandon the country at the first hint of responsibility. You make sure those who have gained the most from our collective effort pay their fair share back into it.

Because the truth is simple.

Payback

A fair tax system isn’t punishment. It’s payback. It’s the price of civilised society – a recognition that no one builds vast wealth alone. It’s an obligation to return a share of that success to the people, the communities and the systems that made it possible. And it’s long past time we called out politicians like Nigel Farage and Sarah Pochin who claim to speak for workers while bending over backwards to protect the privileges of the wealthiest – asking ordinary people to sacrifice while the rich threaten to flee at the first hint of responsibility.

Because if you won’t stand up to those interests, you’re not for the working man at all.