Wealth tax's mainstream moment is here
From Budapest to Britain, proposals once confined to the radical left are moving to the centre ground.
What does it tell us that a centre-right politician is poised to introduce a wealth tax?
For years, such taxes have been treated as an obsession of the radical left — the sort of policy aired enthusiastically at fringe events before being dismissed by serious politicians. Yet in Hungary, Péter Magyar, successor to long-serving populist Viktor Orbán, is now proposing exactly that.
The detail of his policy is still unclear, but the outline is striking enough: a 1 per cent annual tax on those with assets above 1bn forints (£2.4m), covering shares, property and other holdings, including wealth held via spouses, children and assets abroad. His finance minister will set out further details in the coming days, but the real significance is not the tax itself, but what it suggests about where public opinion has now moved
Politicians consistently underestimate how widespread support is for wealth redistribution. It cuts across ideological lines, age groups and voting habits. A 2024 poll by the Fairness Foundation found that three-quarters of Brits are worried about wealth inequality, while another YouGov survey found a similar majority in favour of higher taxes on wealth. The question is no longer whether redistribution is popular in principle, but when governments feel compelled to act on it.
Hungary helps explain why. Orbán’s rule saw the emergence of an extraordinarily wealthy elite whose fortunes were closely linked to state patronage and public contracts. As reported by The Guardian, 38 of the 50 richest Hungarians acquired their wealth under Orbán’s rule through public tenders or benefited from them indirectly. Magyar presents his wealth tax as a way of returning some of this money to the public coffers.
This is where Britain feels different — but only up to a point. Corruption here is not systemic in the same way, but we have had our own moments where public money has flowed in ways that have left a lingering sense of unfairness. The Covid era, in particular, still looms large: VIP procurement lanes, political contacts shaping contracts, and £15 billion spent on unusable PPE. Britain may not be Hungary, but it is not immune to the feeling that there is one set of rules for ordinary taxpayers and another for those close to power.
So what of wealth taxes themselves? Certainly, they are no silver bullet. They run into difficulties without much scrutiny. Firstly, the more money you have, the better you are at hiding it, making the money difficult to access. And while warnings that the wealthy will immediately decamp to sunny Dubai are often overstated, experience from countries that have experimented with wealth taxes suggests that some relocation at the margins is a real, if limited, risk.
And while proposals such as the Green party’s proposal to implement a 1 per cent levy on assets over £10m could raise significant sums — around £10bn a year in the Green Party’s estimate — they would not, on their own, transform Britain’s finances.
But that rather misses the point. In politics, taxation is not only about revenue, but about what people believe the system is for. A wealth tax is a signal as much as a policy. As Magyar himself has put it, it is “not a punishment, but a sign of social justice and solidarity in a functioning and humane country.”
Here in Britain, the deeper question is not whether a wealth tax is right or wrong, but why it now feels thinkable at all. That shift reflects something broader than tax policy: a growing sense that the economy has become detached from fairness. We tax earnings heavily, but treat accumulated wealth more gently. Council tax is increasingly indefensible; national insurance is incoherent. The result is a system that too often feels as though it rewards what you have over what you do.
Readers of The Lead know a wealth tax is an important step, we previously looked at what it would take and what it would involved.
A one-off wealth tax may or may not form part of the answer. But the more important shift is that ideas once treated as peripheral are now being drawn into the mainstream. Here in the UK, the government has so far shied away from substantive tax reform, wary of anything that smacks of “the politics of envy” or a tax on ambition.
But this is all increasingly out of step with public sentiment. From left to right, there is a growing sense that the system is not working as it should — and a growing willingness to consider changes that once would have seemed radical.
The question is not whether a wealth tax on its own would transform Britain, but why proposals like this are no longer outside the bounds of serious politics.
So what does it tell us that a centre-right politician is poised to introduce a wealth tax?
It tells us that wealth redistribution is no longer a radical idea at the edge of politics — and the left’s ideas might just be more popular than we’re led to believe. ■
About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.
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