On October 6 the Evening Standard headlined that billionaires worth £120bn quit the UK over Labour tax rises. The figure is a Bloomberg index tally of net worth for more than a dozen people who left or loosened ties over two years. The headline opens on £120bn and never says whose number it is, what it measures or over what period. It is a naked number, and it does its work first: the first figure sets the scale, so everything after is read against a £120bn hole in Britain. The Standard’s standfirst and second paragraph then name the source, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and the period, “over the past two years.” The Telegraph calls it the value of assets owned by people who left or merely loosened ties. So the figure is wealth, not tax. Lakshmi Mittal alone accounts for about £30bn of it, a quarter. The Standard’s story carries no HMRC figure, no estimate of revenue lost and no count of rich people arriving; its one tax figure is the £330 million Chris Rokos paid last year. The tell is a fortune printed where a tax figure would go: when a number has no “of what”, ask what it counts before you feel it. “Exodus” and “spark” then turn a dozen departures into a nation’s flight with one cause. In the Standard the warnings come from a bakery co-owner, a managing director at consultants Alvarez & Marsal and a fund founder; in The National, from a former non-dom who advises on tax and migration. Written this way, a tax on a small number of very rich people reads as a loss for every reader’s country.
