In short
Podcast Summary: Making Money - Episode: Labour MP: Why this Budget must tax the rich
Episode Overview In this episode of the Making Money podcast, hosts Damien Jordan and Timeyin Akerele engage with Liam Byrne, a Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and author of *The Inequality of Wealth*. The discussion revolves around wealth inequality in the UK, the implications of the current economic situation, and potential solutions to create a more equitable society.
Key Themes
- Wealth Inequality
- Current Statistics:
- Only 8% of the nation's wealth is held by individuals aged 20–40, highlighting a generational divide.
- Since 2010, the wealth of the top 1% has increased significantly, outpacing the rest of the population.
- Impact on Young People:
- Many young individuals struggle to afford housing, education, and savings for retirement due to rising asset prices.
- The Need for Tax Reform
- Proposed Wealth Tax:
- A discussion on implementing a 1% tax on assets exceeding £10 million, which could generate billions for public investment.
- Funding Solutions:
- The revenue could be used for a national wealth fund, similar to Norway's model, providing dividends to young people for housing deposits.
- Political Climate and Corruption
- Influence of Money in Politics:
- Concerns about the growing influence of wealthy individuals and corporations in politics, potentially undermining democracy.
- Need for Transparency:
- Calls for stricter regulations on political donations and more transparency in campaign funding.
- The Role of Government
- Devolution of Power:
- Advocating for a shift of decision-making power from Westminster to local governments to better address regional issues.
- Investing in Infrastructure:
- Critique of failed infrastructure projects (e.g., HS2) and a call for efficient use of public funds.
Discussions and Arguments
Why Tax the Rich?
- Liam Byrne argues that taxing the wealthy is essential for addressing the growing inequality and providing resources for public investment.
- The concept of fairness in taxation is emphasized, suggesting that those who have benefited most from the economic conditions should contribute more to rectify the imbalances.
The Danger of Inaction
- Potential Consequences:
- Without action, the divide between the wealthy and the rest is expected to widen, leading to increased anger and division in society, and potentially to the fracturing of the UK.
Perspectives on Financial Education
- Emphasis on the necessity for improved financial education in schools to empower the next generation with knowledge about managing personal finances and investments.
Personal Experiences and Anecdotes
- The hosts and Liam discuss personal stories and observations from their respective backgrounds, illustrating how systemic issues affect citizens differently based on class and region.
Conclusion Liam Byrne's insights on wealth inequality and proposed reforms spark a critical conversation about the future of the UK economy and the need for systemic change. The episode underscores the urgency of addressing these issues to foster a fairer and more equitable society, especially for younger generations.
Contact and Resources
- Listeners are encouraged to reach out for financial advice and resources through the Making Money podcast’s financial adviser service.
Additional Information
- For further insights on personal finance, investments, and wealth-building strategies, listeners can explore the sponsors and platforms mentioned in the episode, including MoneyWeek Magazine, TaxZap, Vanta, and Odoo.
---
This episode serves as a call to action for listeners to consider the implications of wealth inequality and the necessary steps to create a more just economic system.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:01You know what I love, Damo? Things that save me time. You don't have YouTube premium, mate, so I just don't believe that. Granted, I'll give you that one. However, I've got one for you. A great time saver in personal finance is Money Week magazine. They spend a lot of time distilling the biggest stories in personal finance down into consumable chunks, so you don't have to scroll and scroll. They give practical tips on savings, investments, pensions, the UK economy, the global economy. It's like your five a day, but for finance. If you want to give Money Week a try, you can get six issues in print and the app absolutely free by visiting moneyweek.com forward slash money.
0:34After your trial, you'll save an extra£5 a quarter on the subscription, which is exclusive to Making Money listeners. And that's moneyweek.com forward slash money. But there's a link in the description if you just want to click that. I'm now far more worried about what is at stake. I genuinely think if we do not fix this now, we are going to be in a terrible, terrible place over the next 10 years. Liam Byrne is the Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihill North. He's written a book called The Inequality of Wealth. Why does wealth inequality even matter? How can we tackle it? And what happens if we just do nothing?
1:09So a 1 % tax on the assets of those who own more than 10 million. And let's not forget why the top have done so well in the last 10 to 15 years. If we are going to fix this country and it is broken, it's not free. I love the book. I had a good listen to it yesterday. Great. Thank you. Has Keir Starmer read it? I don't know. He's certainly got a copy. Has he got a copy? Not a signed copy like mine. Well, actually, it is signed. Is it Takia? It is definitely Takia. Do you, you know, you don't know if he's read it. Do you think that him and the Labour Party are aware of the inequality problem? Oh, 100%.
1:48I mean, if you think about the journey that most of the new government have been on, a lot of them were elected in about 2010. They've gone through the really tough years of what I call the ABC of British politics, austerity, Brexit, and then chaos of Lyft Trust. And a lot of them kind of cut their teeth in the kind of social organisation that members of the Labour Party tend to get involved in, organising food banks, organising charity drives, benefit awareness campaigns, that kind of thing. A lot of us, in a way, are social workers, because we believe in society. And if you believe in society and you get involved in the kind of politics that we believe in, you're ultimately a social worker.
2:25It's something that Clement Attlee actually wrote a book about after the First World War. And so I think if you look at the programme that has been set out in the King's Speech, there's a few components that speak to some of the ideas in the book. There's a lot that wasn't in the King's Speech that I think the government needs to kind of pursue. But they've got a reasonable platform now and the key is now obviously a budget that makes a difference. Why do you think the manifesto was so light on tackling? It didn't read like a tackling inequality manifesto. I think, you know, when you're writing manifestos, if you look at the big change manifestos since World War II, so 1945, 1964, 1979, 1997, most of those manifestos were quite short documents.
3:03And what they tended to do is to offer an argument to the British people to say, look, we are in a right mess. We're going in the wrong direction and a change of direction is now needed. And that was very much the story of the Labour manifesto this time round. Now we've got power. It's up for people like me to kind of say, well, look, with that power, we need to transform our country and make it a more equal place and if we don't we're in serious difficulty and that's why the book was written um when it was that's why it came out in january this year and and that's why we're launching the paper back now how bad is the wealth inequality problem because i mean there was a statistic i saw only eight percent of the wealth is held by people aged 20 to 40 in the country which is well young people you're right young people are Yeah, young people are absolutely at the sharp end.
3:47So look, so the good news is it's not as bad as the days of Downton Abbey. It's, you know, it's not as bad as it was in the 1920s and 1930s. But something really profound happened in 2010. So in 2010, things began to change quite radically. Since 2010, the top 1 % have multiplied their wealth by 31 times more than everybody else. And the people who are at the sharp end of that inequality are young people who can't afford a house, can't afford an education, can't afford to repay their student debt, can certainly not afford to repay their pension. And what we saw in the election results is something quite interesting.
4:23What we saw is that a big part of that anger that went into the reform vote was in those places where deprivation is worst. So if we're serious about defeating populism, we have to fix wealth inequality. And we have to start creating a different kind of future for our young people. One thing that surprised me maybe, I think people of our generation can often say that the people of the generation above us had it all great, but you showed within your research that anyone born after about 1964, so there isn't a boomer, there's just been a decline in prosperity of essentially everyone that's come after that point.
5:01Yeah. So there's two things going on here. So one, those who kind of started work, you know, after the 1970s, Certainly after the 1980s, they're competing in a global labour market, which is a billion people big, because after China joined the World Trade Organisation and this huge migration from the farm to the factory in China, added hundreds of millions of people to the labour market, couple that with capital mobility, you've now got a global market in which we're all competing as workers. That has kept a cap on wages. And if you add into that some of the laws which haven't encouraged trade unions, you get a real problem on the wage front.
5:37But second, it's just become really difficult for young people to buy assets, whether that's a pension, an education or a pension. And part of the reason for that is assets are now much more expensive compared to wages. So when I was born back in 1970, the wealth of the country was about three times the annual wages of the country. Now the wealth of the country, and therefore the asset prices, are 10 times the average wages of the country. So what that means is assets are just now far, far more expensive compared to the wages that anyone can earn. And important. And important. In terms of life outcomes.
6:15Exactly. Inheritance and things. Feeling of security. Your freedom. Your agency. Your options. Your opportunity. You know, there's a big old debate about freedom in politics. But the truth is that there isn't any freedom worth its name without security. And there's no security without wealth. Do you think someone can come from a working class or whatever that means or a lower income background and prosper in this country now? So I do. And the book before this was a book called Dragons, which was an economic history of Britain told through the lives of 10 of our greatest entrepreneurs. And, you know, that does tell you that it is possible that, you know, the rags to riches story is possible.
6:52But the truth is it's unusual. You know, most of our most successful entrepreneurs don't come from the most humble working class roots. They come from middle class roots. they've had the resilience to fail and fail and fail and then succeed you know so i was lucky i went to a pretty violent comprehensive school in harlow but thanks to a fulbright scholarship i went to the harvard business school i was the only kid from a british comprehensive school there and when i was raising money for my business at the end of the dot-com boom i couldn't get money from american venture capitalists because they said look unless you failed three times we don't think you've learned enough to invest in but if who can afford to fail three times you know well actually middle class kids can working class kids it's a hell of a lot tougher it's not impossible but it's a hell of a lot tougher yeah i've seen a criticism of this recently online this fail culture where people are like you need to fail all the time and yeah you know if you're from a background where you've got nothing to fall back on you might borrow the only bit of money you can off your mom you can't go back to and go oh that one didn't work but you know the next 10 years it's quite a short conversation yeah yeah yeah yeah so i would like to ask her there was a quote in the book can i just read it yeah i think i like i said i did really enjoy the book i liked how you started by looking at extreme wealth and you used your experiences of going to like rolls royce and things like that that was wild kind of show and see how super yachts built that really is mind-blowing you described it as i i don't want to cut i want a car that's sort of a ferrari sort of a lamborghini and that's what private yachts are right a million man hours into a boat.
8:21It's a kind of unimaginable levels of wealth that you could fully customise a boat, right? Yeah, most people aren't exposed to that. But you said that corruption begins when wealth seeks power to protect fortune. Yeah. I think most normal people, I don't know how to describe them, but 99 % of the UK population feel that there is that kind of corruption. Do you feel as someone that's part of a Labour Party that exists? I do, and I feel it more now than I ever have at any point in the last 20 years. So, you know, I've been in and around politics for 35 years. That's amazing. Thank you. I've been around politics for 35 years.
8:58I've been an MP for 20 years. I've never seen the kind of money that we now have washing around Westminster. And it's insidious. And it's also not quite, it doesn't quite present in the way you'd expect. So it's not people turning up to the House of Commons with checkbooks, you know, stepping out of a Rolls Royce and writing politicians a check, it's kind of much more subtler than that. It's people pumping millions into TV stations or think tanks that don't disclose their funding. It's people who organise leadership campaigns, who put money into leadership campaigns, who crucially make sure that their preferred candidate wins a particular election.
9:37So it's much more subtle. It's fought in a battle of ideas. It's fought at the battle of candidates. and that's not quite obvious to the British public but the amount of money that is going into British politics now is mind-blowing. I ended it up. It's about a billion pounds. Over a billion pounds has now gone into British political parties since we started a register and a really surprising amount of that comes from a very, very small number of individuals. Am I worried about that? Do you see it as almost like an Americanisation of politics where they rely on these massive donors and campaigns cost a billion, don't they, just to go on tour?
10:13Yeah, 100%. And I talked to Bernie Sanders about this. The Bernie Sanders interview was quite an interesting one. I mean, Bernie is to the left of me, but he's really interesting about the impact of big money on American politics. And he was the one who said to me, look, if you think about this, if you're, let's say you're a chip manufacturer or a pharmaceutical company, you're trying to lobby for rules, and you might spend tens of millions of pounds on trying to influence those rules. But if you get the rules you want, those are billions and billions in economic returns that you're going to get.
10:44So in the scheme of things, the amount of money that you invest in lobbying is actually quite small compared to the prizes that are on offer if you get public policy in a place you'd rather like. And what do you think the solution is to that? To give a voice to people that don't have that kind of economic return of, you know, someone on a council estate up north. Yeah. There isn't that payoff of, well, if I throw£100 at this, I might earn£1 ,000. Or indeed in Horshill and Salliehall North. No. So I think, one, you've got to expose it. Two, I think you need much tougher limits on who is allowed to give.
11:15Once upon a time, I was not in favour of state funding of political parties. I think I kind of am now. The Germans have had this quite successfully for a while. If you really want to insulate your politics from the impact of big money, then that might be a step that we have to consider. And, you know, there are some really mad loopholes that we've got. So there is a very... We're not under parliamentary privilege on this podcast, so I'll be careful in my language. But, you know, there is an individual who is deeply involved in one of our political parties who is deeply connected and has family connections back into Russia.
11:49And where we saw, and this is a New York Times story, where we saw money moving out of an individual's bank account in Russia into the bank account of UK Citizen and then into the coffers of one of our main political parties. And right now that's perfectly legal. It's morally wrong, but it's currently legal. So there are kind of, you know, mad loopholes like that that we should be trying to fix as soon as we can, really. What parties do you think are benefiting most from this flow of money? So look, in the past, it's been the Conservative Party and reform. But if you look at the amount of private donations that's come into the Labour Party, you can basically see that money follows power.
12:26And do you know what? That has been true since the Roman Republic. You know, you go back to the works of Cicero and Sallust, you know, they warn about the risks of big oligarchs in politics as a destructive force. And this is just an eternal truth in our politics. And it's, I'm afraid, more true today in British politics than I think I have ever seen in the last 20 years. Well, is democracy not that every vote is worth the same amount? In a system whereby people can buy influence, then that destroys democracy, right? 100%. And it's just, I think, you know, it took me a while to map this and understand it.
13:03Because it's not just donations to political parties that you should worry about. In today's media landscape, you've got to worry about people pumping millions into loss-making TV stations. Some of those TV stations route significant amounts of money to particular politicians to pay them to be presenters. But equally, at the level of ideas, most think tanks don't declare where their money comes from. And yet, you think about a think tank that might be drawing its money from a particular kind of individual. It then produces a grand report with lots of graphs and analysis and infographics. That's a talking point on the BBC, gets picked up by the newspapers.
13:41It's part of the influence operations. And so I think, you know, we have to look far more at who is paying for influence in our politics beyond simply looking at who is making, you know, who is writing a cheque for a particular constituency party. It's more subtle than, oh, they made a donation. Because I think a lot of it is like, this person made a£500 ,000 donation to the Conservative Party. What you're saying is this guiding hand of influence. Exactly. That money that goes to a political party is the tip of the iceberg. And actually what people need to pay far more attention to is the iceberg underneath the water.
14:15You look at the City of London as one big cesspit of dirty money in a sense. That's the impression you gave of it as well. And then this interaction with politics and London. And it's not just politics, is it? It's the finance world facilitates. Yeah. I mean, I was traveling actually through the Caucasus this summer and I was talking to Russians, some of who were fleeing the draft in Russia, but others were basically relocating from businesses in Russia. You know, they'd headquartered in Dubai. They were running their operations out of Armenia. And, you know, they talk very openly about how London is such an attractive place to kind of come and live, to come and work, to come and invest in property, to send your kids to school, to get involved in, you know, greenwashing your reputation by investing in, I don't know, a charity.
15:01or a university college, getting involved in political fundraising, that kind of thing. So, you know, there really is a bit of a playbook now for how people launder dirty fortunes, and involvement in politics, I'm afraid, is one of the tricks of the game. Or football. Premier League is pretty good for it, yeah. Yeah, football's got some really big questions to confront. So we're going to get on to solutions in a second, but I do just want to talk more about the problem, because I think people know inequality's bad, but I think to hear it from someone like yourself, this is what they want to hear.
15:29And I just, I don't know why, personally, the Labour Party haven't been more forthcoming about this point. Because we've seen the rise of populism. Yeah. And you've mentioned it there. It seems easy to me for Labour to come out and say, we think this is an issue and we're going to solve it. And they would win a load of votes. Why did they not do that? Well, you're preaching to the converted. I mean, I agree with you. Yeah. But, you know, that's why I'm in politics. That's why I'm staying in politics. That's why I'm still a member of the Labour Party. That's why I'm on the back bench, not the front bench.
16:00It's why, you know, I was lucky enough to win an election to chair a select committee, because I want to use that platform in Parliament to campaign on this topic. Because if we don't act now, this is about to get much worse. So if we don't act today, we will see the wealth of the top 1 % just boom further. And that has real risks for our politics. The corruption that we begin to see today could get 10 times worse over the next few years. So, you know, in a way, we're kind of at a bit of a tipping point. And, you know, some of the work that I'm publishing soon around the rise of populism in the last general election clearly shows that there is a relationship with wealth inequality and deprivation.
16:39The reform vote, for example, is much bigger in constituencies that are poorer. For every 10 point fall in deprivation, there's a 10 point fall in the vote for reform. That is telling us something. It's telling us that people are angry at trying to send a message. And the message they're trying to send is we're sick of being left behind. We want to live in a fairer, more equal society. Do you think Brexit was a similar? 100%, 100%. You know, I mean, my constituency voted just slightly for Brexit. And all of the conversations I had with people on the doorstep basically came back to, we do not think the system today is working.
17:17we need to blow it up and do something radically different. And in a way, Brexit was a kind of a cry for help as much as anything else. Are you from Birmingham originally? No, the holy town of Warrington, just outside, 13 miles from Anfield. What makes it holy? What makes it holy? I was born there under the... Not quite in a major, in Warrington General Hospital. But I have five generations of family in Birmingham back to 1893. Yeah, because you mentioned Birmingham. I'm originally from Aston in Birmingham, but I live in Southport now, which is the holy town of Southport. yeah yeah god's country but you must recognize this then amongst kids you grew up with massively passionate around i mean like what i've essentially seen is the ignore just the north be ignored yeah you know a time and time again um devolution and and just knowing that great people live in where i'm from yeah and then seeing their hands tied behind their back we give a lot of that conversation on this on here because i do think that you know we look for all these we look for growth and we You look for productivity, but you've got 90 % of the UK population that aren't even at the same level as the people in London because they don't have the same tools.
18:23I have bad internet. I don't even have broad, like, fibre internet in my house when I run a media company. The transport aspect is crap. Yeah, yeah. Try getting to London. It's hard to get around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can fly to Paris or whatever quicker than I can get to London from Manchester. And when you look at the wealth stats, the wealth stats show almost no progress in the wealth of different regions. So almost all of the wealth that has been created in the last few years, I think it's about 70, 80 % of the wealth that's been created since about 2010, 2008, 2010, has been in London and the southeast.
18:55Now, that's telling us something. I mean, are people in the north less hungry for success than they are in London? The industrial revolution. Exactly. So what is missing there? All sorts of things are missing. And that's why one of the big arguments in the book is we've got a radically devolved power and resource out of Westminster and Wild. Is there an appetite for that within central government, within organisations that control that power at the minute? Whitehall, you know, we've had criticism of these bodies where people have said there's basically 100 people there that are masters of the universe.
19:27They don't want to give that up. Well, the words are in the right place. So Labour's committed to a big devolution bill that in theory should get power and resource out of Westminster Whitehall. But I tried to do this in 2009 when I was in the Cabinet Office and was defeated by an unholy alliance of civil servants who wanted to keep that power and resource in the centre. And, you know, you hear prime ministers and former prime ministers say, wow, one of the big frustrations is, you know, you can't grip the levers of power. And that sort of betrays an attitude, which is we've got to try and hoard all the power and resource in Westminster and Whitehall because the people at the top, they know best.
20:00And I don't believe that. I think the people at the bottom know best. Yeah. I mean, what makes this different now, though? Because the rich have always got richer, the wealthy have always got wealthier, and London's always been making decisions for the rest of the country. So what makes you think now this Labour government or anything will be different now going forward? Because I do think that was the mandate that we were elected on. So when Keir Starmer launched Labour's manifesto, it was about a wealth creation boom. We wanted to create a revolution in wealth creation, you know, not for those at the top, but for all.
20:35So in a way, the pledge is in the right place. And it's now down to people like me and the public to help make sure that Labour's held to account for that and delivers on that. But second, you know, I come back to this point that if we don't sort this now, we are heading for really difficult times. Populism is already bad. Populism melts the joints that hold nations together. Populists aren't good leaders. Look at, you know, what Donald Trump has done. They destroy institutions. And the opposite of populism is separatism. Because if you've got populists in power in the capital, there will be all parts of the country who just look at it and think, well, we're not having that, thanks very much.
21:16We're heading our own way. And you can see this all over Europe. And that's what I think you would see in Britain. So I do genuinely think the integrity of the United Kingdom is at stake here. If we don't fix this, we will get a politics that is so febrile, so difficult, so angry, that the UK will start to fracture. Last time we recorded, Tomei, and you were having some real dramas with your accountant, so how's that been going, mate? They're sacked. So drama sorted. They're a big corporate firm. They didn't really reply to my emails very quickly, like took a week or two at times. And they charged me way too much.
21:52I mean, I've got pretty simple taxes, and yeah, they were charging me thousands. They saved me some money, but yeah, I had to move on. Slow and expensive. Pretty much, yeah. This is one of the reasons that we're really happy to be partnering with TaxApp. It's a tech platform that makes self-assessment simple. Whether you're self-employed like me, a freelancer, or a director like Demo, big dog. Instead of sending endless emails, bills, and spreadsheets to your accountant, you just connect your bank, answer a few questions that are only relevant to you, and your tax return can be ready in as little as 15 minutes.
22:19TaxApp is really easy to use, and it's HMRC-recognized software. So it's safe, secure, and legit. The price is also decent. So if you're self-employed with one income stream, it's just£89 as a one-off fee. No big accountancy fees. And we also have a discount code, of course. If you need to file a self-assessment this year, give TaxApp a try. We've left a link in the description and use the code MONEY10 for 10 % off your first tax filing. That code is MONEY, M-O-N-E-Y 1-0. So, Mr. O 'Carolet, I hear you are a salesman. Elite salesman, yes. One of the best, they say? I've got a little bit of experience in the game, yeah, I could say.
22:56done a few deals a bill a bill what would your compliance team say about you? they would say that I am always nagging them and that essentially I just have I have beef with compliance I love the team compliance slows down all my deals because every time I get to the finish line they've got to check documents KYC GDPR and it's just a nightmare it slows the deal down by like two, three weeks it's always on both sides as well isn't it? sometimes it can be blocked on the other side exactly well that's where today's sponsor can help Indeed. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get secure and compliant fast.
23:30And they stay that way. They do it by automating compliance with over 35 security and privacy frameworks like SOC2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA. Yeah, all of them. And this saves businesses so much time and money. According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers save over half a million dollars a year in costs. Not bad. And they also help you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster, which is great because everybody hates filling out forms. If you're a business that needs to prove security and compliance, visit vanta.com forward slash making money to sign up for a completely free demo today.
24:03That's vanta.com forward slash making money. There's a link in the description though, so you can just click that. Can we outline what we mean by the rich? Because one thing that I think politics has done a pretty bad job of is pitting people on 20 grand against people on 125 grand. You know, these are the rich. Whereas actually, you're talking about the 1%. Is it more than 0.1 %? I think it is. So some of this debate comes into view on the debate on wealth taxes. So there's a group that I kind of hang out with every so often called Patriotic Millionaires, who are a group... What a party that would be.
24:39I know. Happy about being a millionaire. They had quite an interesting reception last week. But this is a group of people, right, who have all done really well and who believe that patriots pay their taxes. They believe that wealthy people should be paying more tax and they're coming together to say, look, if you put taxes up, you're not going to have a flood of millionaires leaving the country, as some newspapers would have you believe. It's actually the right thing to do. And one of the ideas that is knocking around is this notion of a wealth tax, so a 1 % tax on the assets of those who own more than 10 million.
Read the full transcript
25:12That's 22 ,000 people. That's not a lot of people. You couldn't even fill a football ground with that. You could not. Not Premier League ground. Not even in Birmingham. Definitely not a man to say. Definitely not a man to say. But you know, that would raise you billions of pounds if you did that. And, you know, the argument I say in the book is, look, rather than just put the proceeds of wealth taxes into general government spending, let's put it into something that looks and feels a little bit like the National Trust. Because people are genuinely worried that governments waste money. We've got to recognise that that is a fear that people have.
25:49But if you put the proceeds of those kind of wealth taxes into something like the National Trust or like a sovereign wealth fund, you would quite quickly be able to build up a fund of about 200 billion. That would take you about four or five years. And 200 billion is the kind of magic number in a way for me because that would allow you to pay a dividend, a one-off dividend every year of£10 ,000 to every 25-year-old in the country. £10 ,000 is the average shortfall on a deposit to buy a house. So maybe this is the wrong idea, but it's a provocation. And if it's the wrong idea, my challenge to people is, okay, fine.
26:27You tell me a better idea for how we're going to help young people get a foot on the housing ladder. Because I know that we've got to build more houses, but you can't fix this problem simply by building more houses. Because people will buy them up and house prices will still continue to rise. You've got to actually fix people's lack of money to put down a deposit to buy a house. You've got to have longer mortgages and lower fixed-term interest rates. All of that's true. But you've got to fix the deposit problem. Bank of England says the lack of a deposit is the biggest barrier to young people getting on a housing ladder.
26:57And there is a choice for us. We could say to people who have done super well over the last 10 to 15 years to pay a little bit more tax, perhaps as a one-off on their fortunes, and use that money to help young people get a stake in society. And let's not forget why the top have done so well in the last 10 to 15 years. We've put a trillion pounds of quantitative easing into the monetary system. That's held interest rates down by, on average, about 1%. If you were lucky enough to own assets during that time, you've seen your fortunes boom. You call it alchemy, the closest thing to alchemy. It's the closest thing to alchemy.
27:33And so let's call it a windfall tax. It's a trillion pounds of money backed by British taxpayers. but the prizes from that investment has gone to a very narrow section of society in particular the 22 000 people with the biggest fortunes um how much money do you think 22 the tax of 22 000 at one percent would raise it raises you somewhere between three and five billion a year yeah how would you get to 200 billion off three to five so you do a couple of things you put together um a lot of the state assets that we already own so things like the crown estate you know the crown State owns things like the riverbeds and the seabeds out to the 12-mile limit.
28:12Very valuable now that we're building wind farms on them. There's a lot of other assets that the government has got. You could probably get about 80 billion, 60 to 80 billion quid's worth of assets put together. You would then, I think, do three or four different kind of taxes, so a one-off wealth tax, equalising capital gains tax and income tax, like Nigel Lawson. Ask people to pay national insurance contributions on investment income, which they don't do at at the moment, close a few of the loopholes in inheritance tax. Altogether, that raises you somewhere between about 15 and 20 billion a year.
28:45If you then add that to the state assets that we can already put together, and you deliver a return of about six to 8 % a year, which is the average return of a sovereign wealth fund, by the time you're getting to year five, you're getting, I think it's about 180 billion you're kind of getting to. So you can, the point is you can see a pathway to this it's not impossible it's not magic uh and the question is well look if that's not the answer well then what is yeah i've always you know i've advocated for um deposits into into junior sips at birth for kids to you know benefit from compounding similar kind of thing it's like a sovereign wealth from compounding yeah yeah and then you you remove the pressure maybe to save as much for pensions and then people can use that money for other things because it's we're leveraging time right and we look at i look at like what we did with north sea oil and we reduce taxes and then is it norway that just have now the biggest sovereign wealth fund if we if we hadn't just pissed away the proceeds in all seed oil we would have a sovereign wealth fund worth half a trillion pounds today yeah when when you say closed loopholes and inheritance are you talking about for the super wealthy who are finding ways around it because i know the average person The most hated tax.
29:54Indeed. Yeah, we'd like, yeah, no one likes inheritance tax. And I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about, you know, if you put your fortunes into farmland and you transfer your farmland to your children, or indeed in business investments. The Gravesville estate. For example, you can avoid a lot of those taxes. You can put the money into an offshore pension pot and avoid inheritance taxes. And so, do you remember the big debate about whether the king would pay inheritance tax when the late queen died? The irony is that if the king had decided to pay inheritance tax, he would be the exception, not the rule.
30:29Because the payment of inheritance tax collapses after about two million. And so if you can afford the best lawyers and best financial advisors, it's free. So it's really unfair. Yeah, it's unfair. My friend's mum passed away and he got left the house, but then he can't afford to pay the inheritance tax. So he had to sell the house and move out. So whereas if he was a multimillionaire, he'd find ways around it. So it feels like it hits the average person more than... And this is part of an argument about what I call restoring fairness to the tax system. So not a lot of people have read Rishi Sunak's tax return.
31:01It doesn't take long because he only publishes a page of it, which is the summary. But, you know, Mr. Sunak's a successful guy. He earned two million quid last year, or in the last tax year that he declared. Rate of tax he paid on that? 23%. I paid more tax than that. I bet you both paid more tax than that. That's crazy. And so my point is, well, look, how can that be right? And if that radical old socialist Nigel Lawson had equal rates of tax on capital gains and income, is it so left-wing to propose we go back to that? Not at all. What do you think of people then that say, it doesn't matter how rich people get, because we should incentivise people to get rich, what we should instead do is just focus on everyone having a basic level of, you know, income and protection as such.
31:44So rather than going, no, no, you're too rich now. so look i mean i there is a book knocking around at the moment which is quite intriguing called uh limitarianism which says that you know there should be an upper ceiling on how rich people can be and i and i don't believe in that because i do think um you should have the lure of super returns to encourage people to innovate this was an argument joseph schumperde made in the 1930s outliers deliver the returns right and like you need a jackass to go out and to disrupt things but equally I also believe that those with the broadest shoulders should carry the biggest burden.
32:21And I had this discussion actually with Rishi Sunak at Christmas at the liaison committee and I said, so do you think it's fair that you should be paying 23 % tax? And he kind of said, well, it's the regime that Gordon Brown introduced. And the questioning then moved on. Yeah, so I didn't get the chance to say, I know, but that was before you put a trillion pounds worth of quantity of easing into the monetary system. So some things have changed since 2010. So I think that this is an argument that people are up for. And I think there is political support for asking those who have done really well, because of low interest rates over the last 10 years, to pay a little bit more.
33:01But you set out in your book that wealth makes people change on a chemical level. It does. I was surprised about that. They change as humans. The poorest people in society are the most generous. And so it's almost like you can't expect the rich to come round to this because... To go willingly. It's almost evolutionary. You tell, I mean... No, I mean, so this is research that's come from University of Berkeley in California. And I was so gobsmacked when I read it that I spent a bit of time talking to some of the academics who had researched it. But basically, the research shows that those who have become really successful, the brain chemistry does change a little bit and it encourages more selfish rather than altruistic behavior.
33:48And people play, the favorite way to test this is called the loaded monopoly game. So people set up a game in Monopoly and they basically skew the rules so that some people are able to really do well by kind of cheating. And what they observe is that their behaviour begins to change. They get bigger. They get bigger, they expand, they sort of, you know, sort of... Pop up their chest. Steal all the twirl bites. You know, it's really quite interesting. And that's why things like Patriotic Millionaires are sort of so interesting, because this is a lobby group of people who are very, very successful and who are leading the argument that those who have done really well should pay a bit more tax.
34:27So politically, this is obviously going to be really difficult. But again, I come back to the point, and this is the point I make to very successful people. Look, if we don't fix wealth inequality now, what the hell do you think is going to happen to the country that you're trading in over the next 10 to 15 years? It's going to become angrier, harder to govern, and that is going to be bad for business. So even out of your own kind of self-interest, if you want to be trading in this country in a harmonious society where people get on with each other and buy the stuff you're making, then we've got to fix this problem.
34:59You discussed this sovereign fund or commonwealth fund. Yeah. Who would run it in your idea? So government have to set it up, and Labour is legislating for a national wealth fund, which is currently too small in my view, and they haven't said anything about where the dividends would go. So I think it should be an independent fund. It should be something that is obviously under some kind of treasury guidance because it's on our books. It will be a public asset, so we've got to account for it but it should be independent of government and it should be set up with the aim of paying dividends out to young people in a probably in a match for their savings or as a tax break there was an argument that a friend of mine david willits was conservative made a few years ago which is that you would give the money to as cash to people i did some polling on that and it proved quite unpopular but if you if you give that money to people as a as a match for their savings or as a tax break, it goes from very unpopular to very popular.
36:01So I think we've got to be smart about how we get the public support for this, not least because we want this to be something sustainable over a long, long period of time. I mean, this should be something that becomes part of the constitution. Something to be proud of, like an NHS or like, you know, part of a national identity thing. Because I think in Norway, there was a populist movement that emerged where they basically said, we've got like a trillion quid in. let's let's let's spend it yeah and the way they tackled that was instead of saying it was a wealth fund they said it was the like the nation's pension and then people were like oh no you don't blow the pension you can't do that because they were like look we could build all these bridges and trains and so they they had to create national pride behind the movement that's exactly right and i said there was a similar example in sweden um where they did where the swedes did end up actually dissolving it i think in the uh in the 1980s so you have genuinely got to make it independent it's definitely got to be like as you say that's a really good phrase like like the nhs it's got to be something that is there for the long term for the future and it's got to be one of the ways in which we help the younger generation get on and this is you know i notice this a lot now talking to um talking to pensioners that they do know that their grandkids are in a real bind and they do want to try and do something to help them but they're just not quite sure how how would you um go about giving it to young people.
37:20How do you define young people? We're young. Yeah, I'm still a spring chicken. I'm 36. You're both 24, right? I'm 24 for this purpose. Yeah, I am now. But on that point, we graduated uni in the financial crisis. We've seen nothing but collapses. I mean, I think people look at us now and go, oh, well, you're okay. But we're not. People in our age group are definitely not well off, you know, and they don't own homes. And I think people say young and you have a risk of cutting out a whole generation of millennials that then get to retirement and a scotland. Yeah, and this is a pickle, right? So the argument in the book, argument for discussion, is let's start with 25-year-olds.
37:56But that would have to be a national debate. You'd have to say, right, we're setting this thing up for the first time. Who should be in the first cohort? The second thing, though, that we have to do is we do have to make sure that everyone's got a bank account. So there are a quarter of people in our country who have net savings of less than£100, right? That is a lot of people with very little. So some people have said, look let's have a universal basic income let's just give 10 to 11 grand to everybody every year and I looked at this and it's just not affordable so that's what took me to this idea of universal basic capital there is a system that has just been tested which basically opens automatically for you a bit like your auto enrollment pension it auto enrolls you into a bank account and it takes you know three quid off a month and they've run this for four years now and it's proved phenomenally successful.
38:45So over four years, people keep their bank accounts open, something like 95 % of them keep their bank accounts open. They have built savings up of over three to 400 pounds. That is what I suggest is the kind of the foundation on which we build. We then have to do the third thing, which is to look at all of the different tax breaks for savings, because at the moment, they benefit those who have got a lot, and they don't help those who have nothing. So there's about 2 billion quid's worth of tax incentives for ISAs, for example. Most of that money goes to people with over£100 ,000. If you've got very little and you're trying to get a savings match on something that you're squirrelling away, there's almost no reward for you at the moment.
39:26So if you've got universal bank accounts, a dividend coming from a national wealth fund, and you've got a progressive tax system, then I'm not saying that's a magic bullet it's not going to solve everything but at least you've got a system on which the country can begin building the wealth of those who have nothing so there's 1.8 trillion pounds in the uk sat in cash savings which is just rotting and 300 300 billion is in cash isis and if you look at the distribution of cash isis or people who only use cash isis it's predominantly the poorest so they they basically don't know they've got a personal savings allowance they take their money and they bang it in a cash isa.
40:04Don't you think that a better thing to do would be to educate people on the power of the stock market and get them to take cash savings and move them into the equities portion? I do. And I think if we had a system where, I don't know, say at the age of 18 or when somebody started work, if they didn't have a bank account, one was open for them automatically, that would be the trigger for a revolution in financial education at school. It should be part of your PGSE studies. Even bigger than that. It's life. You know, we spend 80 % of our day working to get money, and then most people have no idea what to do with it, and they just blow it all.
40:42We don't have any financial education at school. It should be like maths and English are compulsory up to GCSE. I think it is on certain curriculums, but only 47 % of kids actually receive the education, and most of them don't remember receiving it. You know these figures better than me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they did just my job. If you survey teachers as well, they basically say, I don't feel comfortable teaching it because no one's ever taught me. You know, history teachers learn the curriculum. They're kind of like, I don't really get this. That is really interesting. I did do a couple of surveys of teachers about the future of work a few years ago.
41:16And one of the questions was, what do you think is missing from the curriculum that we ought to be teaching kids about? And actually, financial literacy topped the table. Yeah, there is resources. Martin Lewis created a resource. But even he was told, you've got to pay for it, which is a joke, right? This guy's like, I'll put something in the government. And the government will be like, yeah, you pay for it, though. So we can agree that education needs to improve. I do also think that stuff can fall on deaf ears. You know, you tell a kid at 14, say for retirement, they'll be like, I'm going to live forever.
41:43So I don't need to think about that. But yeah, let's get back to the... But peer effects are important, right? And so I think if you've got a bank account that you know as a young person, there is going to be either you open your own bank account or a bank account is going to be open for you. this is coming um there is going to be state aid available to help you save if you do the right thing um and you've then coupled that with a program of education i think in a funny way there are peer effects that we can harness now that weren't necessarily available you know when i was a school you know there are some good things that you can use social media for and i think this is potentially one of them oh i mean there's plenty of good i mean a million people a month watch my content.
42:25So there's a lot of influence there. And I think also as well, the message is getting through to younger generations that it's on them. I think, you know, older generations could kind of accidentally stumble into a relatively good retirement through defined benefit pensions and things. That's not available. And I do think that millennials and Gen Zs and younger, they are more actively engaged in finance. The problem is they end up sometimes stumbling across bad influences. But I think the media focuses too much on the bad and not on the good. They make every Finfluencer out like they're shilling crypto when they're not.
42:56You know? It's not the case. That's their job, though. It's all sensationalism. So then I speak to politicians, and they're like, oh, so, you know, what is this ticky-tock, and are you talking about crypto? It's like, we still haven't brought them up to speed with the fact that it's so true. No, it's just modern media, right? And it's good. And people are learning, and they're seeking out this information, and they're empowering themselves. but anyway the point about empowering themselves is really important though because you know if you want to safeguard someone's power you've got to give them security and there isn't any security without wealth no so why then were there no wealth taxes from Rachel Reeves well we shall see in the budget
43:46I don't I don't but what I do know is that me and many others will be making that argument hard ahead of the budget. Because look, if we're all in it together, then we all need to be in it together, right? And there are some people, as I say, who have done supremely well over the last 10 to 15 years because of a trillion pounds worth of quantitative easing. And there is a very strong case that there ought to be a windfall tax on those fortunes. And if you do it in the right way, this is not money into the black hole of public spending. This could be money investing into the next generation. Political appetite for tax on corporations exists because, you know, we have windfall tax on energy companies.
44:23But then when it's individuals, people kind of, there's always a debate about, is that the right thing to do? It goes back to something you said earlier, which is, you know, we worry about damaging the incentives to work hard and succeed. And we should be worried about those things. So you have got to get the balance right. But at the same time, we've got to recognise that there has just been a mother of all windfalls for a very lucky small number of people. and now in difficult times, we need to ask them to put their hand in the pocket. Can I flip this on the head of someone? So I pay a lot of tax.
44:54Not as much as these people, but I know that the rich was... Not as little as Rishi Tino. Exactly. Yeah, but he would probably still say 20 % of 2 million is a lot of money. And, you know, to the people out there that pay low marginal tax rates, but pay millions in tax, they might go, this country is falling apart. Why should I put more into the system when nothing works? The public services are crumbling. You know, what would you say to those people? How do you think we're going to get out of this hole? I mean, you know, there isn't a magic wand in this life, you know, and if we are going to fix this country and it is broken, it's not free.
45:24We're going to need to do things differently. We're going to have to be more efficient. We're going to have to be more productive. But it's going to take more investment, too. You know, the reason that our country is in a cyclical and structural decline right now is not least because we have such low levels of investment. And, you know, this is something that the Tories have made a mantra of. So, you know, they've had a demand side strategy since 2010, cut taxes and the investment will bounce back. And guess what? The investment has never bounced back. And the argument is highest ever it's ever been.
45:54The tax burden is the highest that it's ever been, not least because we're having to pay such very high levels of debt interest, well over 100 billion. But, you know, we have got to raise the public investment rate. It's one of the lowest in the G7. We've got to start investing in the kind of capital that makes the country more efficient. That's true in the NHS, it's true in the railways, it's true in technology. And if you do it in the right way, public investment can crowd in private investment. Can we talk about the waste point then? Because if we use HS2 as an example, this would be a big infrastructure project that promises all of the things that you talk about.
46:30But actually, it was just a massive waste of money, wasn't it, in the end? Even if it was a good idea or a bad idea, let's leave that. Let's stand by the fact that we spent billions and did nothing. We spent far too much. So actually, I was the chief secretary that signed off High Speed 2 back in 2009 with Andrew Adonis. And then it was at about 30 billion. And it's now... 100 billion was the... An awful lot more. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, High Speed 2 kind of goes under my constituency. I'm a big supporter of High Speed 2 because it's going to revolutionize the wealth and welfare of East Birmingham.
46:57But when you go down in these tunnels, you really understand why it's so expensive. I mean, they basically decided to build the biggest underground system in the world. I mean, I think you're outside in fresh air on high speed too for about 15, 16 minutes. The rest of it is in a tunnel. And the way they're building these tunnels is like they're kind of purifying the earth that kind of comes out of it. These are platinum plated environmental standards and perhaps that's a good thing. But did we need to put a tunnel under the Chilterns? You know, there was some big kind of political decisions that were taken that radically increased the cost.
47:36And I just don't know how the Chancellor of the Checker at the time just sort of said, I don't know, just spend what you like. You know, they didn't kind of say, no, no, this is the cap and you can't spend more than that. You need to tell us how to build a railway for this much money. Not just wave on whatever new spending request came in. They just kind of lost control of it. Because, you know, as a citizen of the world, you go to other places and you go somewhere like China and you see them build a bridge in a week, basically. And then you come to England and it's like we've been debating in this bloody railway for a decade and no one's done anything or silver side crossing yeah what is going on germany have got their trains running efficiently like to the second yeah it's the same motorways trains all of them on point so why are we so incapable of of delivering these infrastructure projects so we are uh you know so the so the benign answer to this is that we love property rights um and the challenge therefore is that we've then created this slightly bonkers planning system that means that you've got to debate people's property rights ad nauseam.
48:37And so the planning system is just sort of so crazy. I mean, there was one, I think it's the Thames Crossing that they're proposing. It's just like thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of planning applications that have to be gone through. And the only people who make real money out of that are the lawyers. I'm not anti-lawyer, but I'm just saying. Keir Starber was, wasn't he? Keir Starber was a lawyer. Yeah, yeah. He was a rights lawyer, invisibly. Yeah, well, yeah. Not planning or not. No, I mean, they've said they want to simplify planning, don't they? Yeah, and there is an active parliament that's going to come to help us do that.
49:08Do you think we can simplify these systems that are just so convoluted and complex? I don't think we can. Planning, tax? We haven't got a choice. I mean, you know, the money is so tight right now. If we don't sort this out, if we don't simplify this, we're going to be having this kind of conversation in 10 years' time. And we just haven't got that time to waste. The UK tax legislation is something like 10 times bigger than the complete works of Shakespeare. Right. Yeah. And I think the Hong Kong one is 257 pages, whereas ours is 10 ,000. Yeah. And who is ripping that book up? Yeah. Where are we going to start?
49:40So there was a good idea that George Osborne had, which was the Office of Tax Simplification. And I don't quite know why it just didn't deliver, but it didn't. They found out it was too complicated. I think the tax system is now more complicated than it was in 2010. And one of the reasons for that is that obviously people keep adding exemptions and sort of different schemes to do this and that. And you have to keep plugging the new loopholes that emerge as clever people find ways around the rules. But you're right. I mean, the tax system has got to be simpler. And, you know, look, what are we trying to do here?
50:06We are trying to create. We want it to be. We want Britain to be one of the best places to invest. We want Britain to be one of the best places to be an innovator, an entrepreneur, an inventor. But we've got to kind of couple that, frankly, with a strategy to get us out of the hole we're in at the moment. and crucially make sure that we're building wealth for the next generation yeah yeah let's see because yeah you know i'm an innovator i'm an entrepreneur i employ 12 people i i run a media group of companies from my spare bedroom that gets millions of views a month yeah but i have poor internet and i can't get to london quickly you know so it feels that the open reach have said that we'll get internet by 2026 i'm why is that so i mean i went to an i went to a log cabin in Iceland on a glacier and I had faster internet than I do in Southport.
50:53So I approached this with a big dollop of scepticism because I think from the North we get promised a lot of things that never happened. And the truth is that if you kind of said to leaders in the North, right, this is what your budget is, you now decide how you're going to spend it. You would get problems like that fixed 10 times faster. I mean, Burnham fought for a decade just to get the buses. Yeah. How many times did he have to go to court? How much did the lawyers cost? and instantly better just to run a bus network yeah yeah yeah yeah mad it is mad well i'm glad you agree because it feels like sometimes this is experience that is born of being a cabinet minister so you know if there's one thing that being a cabinet minister teaches you is that departments always defend their turf they really are not keen on collaborating with others and they tend to think that they know best but it's it's mad when when the public have voted you, I say you as your party, into power that you then don't have the power.
51:47You know, it's like they've given you, they say you run the country and then you're like, oh, we can't run the country because these guys actually run it. No, but I think where we need to be is actually giving that power away. We need to be devolving power. I think Andy Burnham and Richard Parker in the West Midlands can make better decisions about their regions than civil servants can in Westminster and what? And crucially, they can put different budgets together in a way that is much, much harder to do in Westminster and Whitehall. So, and just, I mean, my final point on this, I'm mildly obsessed about this.
52:19If you think about the world that we live in today, right, it's quite complicated. Conflict in Russia, rise of China, need to rearm, quite big decisions, climate crisis. We need Westminster and Whitehall focused on tackling global issues. And that means that they haven't got the bandwidth to worry about the unit cost of apprenticeships in Southport, frankly. They need to just figure out what they need to focus on and devolve power and resource over everything else to people who are on the front line. Seems common sense, doesn't it? I like to think so. My uncle was in the army and he was quite senior and he was all about logistics.
52:57So he would set up, you know, like a camp bastion or whatever. So big projects, multi-billions. And I said to him, would you control it all centrally? He's like, it's mental. You couldn't do it. You couldn't run a project. You couldn't tell the truck driver where to park. You just got to trust that they can make a good decision in a day. And it's like the country is far more complicated than those projects. And we're running it from a central location. If you think about the economy of Manchester and the Northwest, it's bigger than some European countries. Why would you try and run it? You're very passionate about this.
53:28Do you feel that the Labour Party kind of shares your sentiment? Like what percentage of people are, obviously they should all read your book. They definitely should all read it. Yeah, definitely. But do you feel like a lot of people are on your side or it's an uphill battle? I do. It's a great question. And I do. And what is really interesting at the moment is this amazing new intake of Labour MPs that has come in. I mean, I've been around a long time. This is by far and away the smartest, most motivated, most disciplined group of new MPs I have. Torsten Bell, people like that. Torsten Bell, but I mean, you know, you could name hundreds of names.
54:06and is that because there's power on the table now maybe it's because there's power on the table i think also you've just had a lot of people who have said right i'm going to do something about this i'm going to roll my sleeves and get stuck in so um and these guys are going to change the world basically and the sooner we hand power over to them in a way it feels like that but i'm optimistic so i'm not sure if everyone feels the same as me but it does feel like we're kind of having a change a little bit in in in my business you have to be optimistic otherwise you quite quickly become depressed.
54:36Are you optimistic of the future of the UK? So I got asked this question the other day and actually I paused for thought because the truth is I'm really anxious. I'm determined but I am anxious because I'm now far more worried about what is at stake. I genuinely think if we do not fix this now, we are going to be in a terrible, terrible place over the next 10 years. So I do think this is a big moment in our country's history. And I think there's a big choice on the table.
55:15Please remember, this is not financial advice. Like we say a lot on the podcast, investments can fall and rise. In fact, it's pretty much a guarantee. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. So your money is at risk with investing and other fees may apply. As with everything financial, please do your own research. We really encourage that because no one cares more about your money than you. I'm Damo. I'm T. This was an episode of Making Money from our company Most. It was filmed and edited by the team at Flow Spire, Jack and Ben. It was produced by Ruth Edwards and brought together by Will Stollerman.
55:45What about Ruth and T. Phil's a dog? Yeah, shout out them two.
From the publisher
Liam Byrne is the Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill & Solihull North. He’s written a book called ‘The Inequality of Wealth’.
🤝 Get 1:1 help with your money from our financial adviser service
https://makingmoney.email/financial-advisors-audio
🎉Sponsors
MoneyWeek Magazine - Try it for free:
https://moneyweek.com/money
TaxZap - Do your tax return / self-assessment:
https://makingmoney.email/taxzap
Vanta - Get your company secure and compliant: https://vanta.com/makingmoney
Odoo - Apps to run your business: https://www.odoo.com/r/MM1
📈 Investment platforms we use:
Trading 212
Watch this video where Damo explains how to get the most from it: https://youtu.be/BVVZhrM0LVQ
Get a free share worth up to £100 when you sign up for a new Invest or ISA account and deposit at least £1.
Use the code ‘MM’ or this link: https://www.trading212.com/join/MM
InvestEngine
Get up to a £50 bonus when you invest at least £100.
https://investengine.pxf.io/daOD2Q
Vanguard
Minimum investment of £500 or £100/month.
https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/
--
If you purchase a product or service using one of the links above, we may receive a commission. There will be no additional charge for you. Remember investments can fall and rise - and past performance is no guarantee of future results. Other fees may apply. Your money is at risk.
This is not financial advice. The reason it’s not financial advice is because it’s not tailored to you. We explain the principles of building wealth but if you want personalised advice, it’s worth speaking to a financial advisor. As with everything financial, please do your own research. We really encourage that because no one cares more about your money than you and if you learn the basics then it will change your life.
