‘If you tax me I will leave’: the threat of exit in hegemonic commonsense about taxation

In recent years the ‘myth of millionaire tax flight’ – the claim that if you tax the rich, they will leave – has been robustly challenged (Young, 2017). Scholars in economics and the social sciences have sought to address uncertainty about the migration responses of the very wealthy with the aim of improving policy interventions. By developing evidence that refutes or complicates the myth of tax flight, these researchers have provided campaigners and advocates for progressive taxation with a means of contesting this threat.

What this essential research does not tell us is how this myth operates: why it is persuasive and meaningful, how it is communicated, and why it resonates in popular culture and media discourse as a resource for making sense of taxation and fiscal policy. My paper will explore these questions through a focus on vocal and widely-reported threats to ‘leave the country’ made by celebrities and high-net-worth individuals in the context of public debate about taxation in the UK. Rhetorical interventions such as these amount to something more than the petty complaints of wealthy personalities. Elevated into a recognizable media trope and situated within a broader set of cultural anxieties about the production and mobility of wealth, they accumulate as a significant ideological force.

Drawing on research in which I analyse key imaginaries in hegemonic commonsense about taxation (Massey 2016), I will position wealthy individuals’ threats to leave within a dominant ‘imaginary of exit’ and examine the role of this imaginary in the production of social meaning about taxation, wealth and economic inequality. The paper will explore how these threats contribute to commonsense understandings of fiscal space, how they animate tensions between globalisation and the authority of nation states, and how they confirm and consolidate ideas and assumptions about elite and capital mobility.