Andrew Lloyd Webber Joins the Tea Party

Andrew Lloyd Webber weighs in on soaking the rich:

Last Thursday I met with a thirtysomething guy. I absolutely depend on him in a highly technical area of theatrical production. For legal reasons he has to employ himself through his own company. Under the new tax regime, he will have to pay 13.3 per cent to employ himself before he pays himself anything. And then he will have to pay 51.5 per cent on what's left.

This is a guy at the cutting edge of his profession who works all over the world. He is in demand in every major territory where entertainment is produced. He has a young wife and two children. Last Thursday he told me that he and his wife had decided that the UK was no longer where they wanted to live.

His wife thinks the State education system is inadequate. And she fears that a bankrupt Britain will increasingly be a worse place in which to live as the horror of our present financial mess hits us all in the solar plexus.

He says that he is young enough to set up shop somewhere else. The new tax rates were the final straw. These talented young people know they will make it impossible for them to educate their kids privately in the UK.

So Britain plc loses not just the 40 per cent he would have paid in personal taxes under the old regime - plus NI and everything else - but... Come on, I don't need to explain the knock-on effect. It's obviously huge and immensely damaging - that's why I am writing this article quickly and probably with too much passion.

The extraordinary thing is that, back in 1974, even Denis 'squeeze the rich until the pips squeak' Healey realised that you can't crush these talented people - who work much of the year abroad and away from their families - like specimen butterflies.

He introduced a reduction in tax of 25 per cent for any work performed by a UK resident overseas. This, amazingly, rose to 100 per cent if the work took the individual out of the UK for a year. These reductions were scrapped by the Tories when they introduced the 40 per cent top rate.

In the Healey days, there was no open-ended national insurance tax. Then national insurance was supposed to be just that, not the gigantic Ponzi scheme financed through direct taxation that it has become...