SO it is goodbye Blighty from me, as I join the legions of Brits leaving these shores.
I’m not going because of over-regulation, crippling taxes and a hostile environment to entrepreneurship, but tens of thousands are.
Yet there is no denying that during my year writing this Monday column, things have become a lot bleaker for our country — once a shining beacon on the hill for investors and wealth creators.
These were successful Brits who paid billions into our coffers but will now prop up public services and state spending elsewhere.
They are fleeing a government that has already punished employers and workers alike with the heaviest tax burden in peacetime history, and is now cooking up more years of on income as well as the doomed leftist fantasy of a wealth tax.
Is anyone surprised that top earners are scarpering for the Gulf, or ?
While I will be keeping a beady eye on what’s going on here from across the Pond in Trump-land (and keeping you updated in The Sun’s pages, too) others who are leaving won’t be looking back.
Brain drain
According to consultants Henley & Partners, who admittedly have a stake in helping well-off business folk relocate, the UK is projected to lose 16,500 millionaires in 2025, which, it says, is double what had been expected.
That’s one world-beating title we still have, with the UK firmly at the bottom of the global millionaire loser league.
We are miles behind even communist , who are second bottom with a projected 7,800 millionaires taking flight.
But it’s not just the faceless, nationless super-rich fleeing — many of them have already fled — but aspirational British citizens who are turning their backs on the place they once called home.
And it’s not just millionaires, either.
As many as 40,000 Brits moved to last year, with around a quarter of a million expats earning their keep there rather than in our cities.
Call it a Taxodus, or a brain drain, or whatever, but there is no logical argument to importing a thousand a week to prop up the black market while watching our best and brightest leave.
Or you could just sneer like many Labour MPs seem to, muttering good riddance.
But they won’t be so cocky when Chancellor has to fill the black hole this autumn.
The top ten per cent of income tax payers contribute more than 60 per cent of all income tax receipts.
The top one per cent pay 29.6 per cent of all income taxes, despite earning just 12.9 per cent of the income.
Those with the broadest shoulders are already carrying the biggest load.
And yet the drumbeat to hit them even harder to fund unsustainable and healthcare spending is already deafening.
But where do you think that money is going to come from if you do not try to lure them to stay and pay instead?
Yep, the pain will have to fall on those that DO NOT have the broadest shoulders and on yet more borrowing — cruelly hampering the yet-to-be-born future generations.
And on that note it’s not just the physical abandonment of Britain that should bring on a fresh bout of tears for the Chancellor.
Our £2TRILLION debt mountain is only growing, and getting more expensive to service.
Long-term borrowing costs are now consistently higher than during the disaster, but you don’t hear the BBC screaming day in day out this time round.
The UK was once seen as a safe haven for long-term investment, safe as houses and trustworthy.
“Buying in Britain was like buying in gold,”; one banker said to me recently.
“It was a safe option when everything else goes a little crazy.”;
But now the rug has been pulled, with a government unable to get even the slightest decrease in the rate of public spending through Parliament, let alone a significant cut.
And a political class totally lacking in the will, know-how or cojones to be honest with voters about what needs to be done.
We have a PM who stood on the steps of last year and promised he would be honest and his Government would “tread more lightly”; on its citizens.
Yet now, 12 months later, he is too weak to stand up to his own Deputy Prime Minister, who along with Labour’s union paymasters, is creating more bureaucracy and red tape for anyone actually trying to employ someone in Britain.
Lower wages
And who is it going to hurt? Yep, regular workers.
A shocking report this week from the Institute of Economic Affairs says business faces a £5billion bill for Employment Bill, which will be passed on through lower wages, which have already stagnated for nearly two decades.
I was going to try to write something a bit more positive about Britain as my last Monday offering, but now — running out of words — I realise what a struggle that would have been.
Of course we are still a great country.
We are not yet going cap in hand to the IMF like Labour in the 1970s, and there is still time to turn things around.
We’ve been in tighter spots, we have been more broke — though only when winning two world wars.
But recoveries have only happened when there has been leadership and honesty.
When vested interests and the unions were stared down rather than given more power.
When taxes were cut, and spending brought to heel — despite the screaming, shouting and protests.
A time when backbenchers were not caving in at the first whiff of cordite.
Business rates can be cut, Brexit exploited, madcap red tape attacks can be ditched, virtue-signalling targets can be put in the reality check bin.
But only when our politicians wake up.
NOT allowing the chance to address when he visits in September is simple political cowardice.
Especially after the red carpet was rolled out for to lecture and hector Britain on last week during his own state visit.
This is the twice democratically elected leader of the free world and President of our closest ally.
Caving over fears that hard-Left Labour and anti- Independent MPs could protest or shun the speech is the height of pathetic.
And says so much about who is pulling the Government’s strings these days.
