What Stevenson gets right

And what he gets wrong (obviously)

Anna Ridgway is the National Coordinator for Students for Liberty UK

Recently, Channel 4 gave Gary Stevenson an hour and a half of prime time to argue that billionaires broke the economy and a 2 per cent wealth tax will fix it. His ‘documentary’ is the latest extension of a YouTube channel with 1.6 million subscribers, most of them young, and a memoir which was the most listened-to audiobook on Spotify UK in 2025. He has warned of desperate poverty for the vast majority if we do not act.

Christopher Snowdon, Julian Jessop, and Kristian Niemietz have already picked apart his data, his revenue estimates, and his valuation mechanics. But the debate has stayed technical. I am in Stevenson’s target audience. I am Generation Z. I rent. I have student debt. I see youth unemployment at its highest in a decade among my peers. I share the frustrations. But I think they point in the opposite direction.

Stevenson is right about one thing. My generation was promised that if we studied hard, went to university, and played by the rules, we would be fine. That promise is broken. Over a million young people are NEETs, not in education, employment, or training. Homeownership among 25-to-34-year-olds has fallen from 59 per cent to 45 per cent in two decades. For under-25s it collapsed from 24 per cent to 10 per cent.

I have friends with good degrees, working jobs they could have got at eighteen, paying rent that eats half their income, watching the cost of a deposit climb further out of reach every year. Stevenson is right that something is wrong. He is wrong about who did it. Blaming billionaires is a better story than blaming planning law, and a better story is all you need when you are selling outrage.

Consider his own story. Stevenson made his fortune at Citibank by betting that interest rates would stay on the floor, that the cheap-money era would keep inflating assets while wages went nowhere. One of his own former colleagues has conceded that Quantitative Easing (QE) created asset bubbles, particularly in property, before adding that he does not agree with Stevenson’s solution. Neither do I. Gary made his fortune from the very government intervention that made housing unaffordable for his audience. His solution is more government intervention.

The housing crisis is not a product of billionaire greed. ONS data shows that three quarters of all household wealth in Great Britain is in property and pensions. House prices are high because England added 208,600 homes last year against a target of 300,000, which it has never hit, strangled by a planning system largely unchanged since 1947. QE poured accelerant on a fire that planning restrictions had already lit. A wealth tax would not build a single house.

But the Government did not stop at making housing unaffordable. It then loaded the young people locked out of the market with the heaviest tax burden of any generation in recent memory. A graduate on the new Plan 5 student loan earning £35,000 hands over 37 per cent of every pound earned above the threshold: 20 per cent in income tax, 8 per cent in National Insurance, and 9 per cent in student loan repayments. With a postgraduate loan on top, that figure rises to 43 per cent. The repayment window is 40 years. Most of my peers at university are on Plan 5. This is our reality for the next forty years.

On top of that, the personal allowance has been frozen at £12,570 since 2021, now legislated to stay there until 2031. The OBR estimates the freeze will raise over £55 billion a year by the end of the decade. That is more than double what Stevenson’s wealth tax would raise. The Government is already extracting more from young workers through fiscal drag than Stevenson dreams of extracting from billionaires.

And where does the money go? The triple lock guarantees that state pension spending outruns earnings growth over time. The OBR projects pension spending climbing from 5 per cent to 9 per cent of GDP, with the triple lock driving roughly a third of that increase. A pensioner sitting on £2 million in retirement savings receives the same state pension as a retired care worker with nothing. The system restricts housing supply and loads young workers with stealth taxes, then transfers the proceeds upward to the wealthiest pensioner cohort in history. I am on the paying end of every stage of this pipeline. That is the rigged system. Billionaires are a sideshow.

Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

Stevenson’s wealth tax, at his own most optimistic estimate, raises around £24 billion a year, or 1.7 per cent of government spending. Even if it raised every penny, it would not reform planning, cut the marginal rate on graduates, unfreeze the personal allowance, or touch the triple lock. And we know what happens when countries try.

When France ran the same experiment for nearly three decades, 60,000 millionaires left, taking an estimated €200 billion in capital with them. The tax cost the French state roughly twice what it raised. In Britain, capital flight would mean fewer jobs for young workers, and a tax on property wealth gets passed to renters, who are disproportionately young.

What concerns me about Stevenson is less the policy than the worldview. He is not a serious economist. He is a populist who has identified that young people’s genuine struggles and fears can be channelled into a scapegoat narrative about billionaires. He tells 1.6 million young people that the system is comprehensively rigged, that their own effort and choices are beside the point, and that nothing will change unless the state takes money from the rich. I am one of those young people. I have heard the pitch. I am not buying it.

The irony is that Stevenson’s own life disproves his thesis. He grew up working-class in East London, studied hard, got into the LSE, landed a job at Citibank, and made a fortune because he made himself exceptionally good at something the market valued. Nobody redistributed him into success. He got there through effort, ability, and opportunity. If Stevenson wants young people to live financially comfortable lives, he should be telling them to do what he did, not waiting for the state to hand it to them.

If he wants the Government to help more people follow that path, the answer is for the Government to actually do less: liberalise planning so people can afford to live, cut the stealth taxes that punish graduates for working, and stop running a pension system that transfers their earnings to people who already have more than they do. His framework leaves a generation waiting for a political solution that has not worked anywhere it has been tried, while the barriers that actually constrain their lives go unquestioned.

Stevenson built his fortune by understanding that government intervention was distorting the economy. He was right. His solution is more of the same. Mine is less.

What we’re reading

1. Two-tier competition. Our friends at EPICENTER have a new blog arguing that the European Commission is taking a “one blueprint, two standards” approach to implementing the Digital Markets Act. The authors contend that the Commission has demanded openness in Android while allowing Apple to exercise far greater control over similar AI technologies. This, they argue, undermines legal certainty, weakens incentives to innovate, and distorts competition.

2. Growth, growth, growth. Chris Curtis – MP for Milton Keynes North and erstwhile chair of the Labour Growth Group – has made the case on his Substack that Britain’s 18-year period of stagnation is the country’s defining challenge. The problem, he contends, is not over-regulation but a slow and risk-averse state that makes it hard to build infrastructure and attract investment. If Andy Burnham doesn’t offer him a job, Curtis is more than welcome to write for Economic Affairs.

3. Philosophers vs Economists. Over at UnHerd, Andrew O’Brien has suggested Burnham’s premiership is likely to expose a fundamental split within Labour between two camps: ‘philosophers’, who see Britain’s problems as a by-product of Thatcherism and favour state intervention, and ‘economists’, who believe the overriding priority is raising growth through supply-side reforms. The success or failure of our latest PM may well depend on which side ultimately triumphs.

4. Fighting the wrong war. Mani Basharzad, a towering IEA presence, has lent his talents to our chums at CapX to argue that Burnham is misdiagnosing Britain’s crisis by treating Margaret Thatcher’s legacy and the 1980s as the country’s principal enemy. The real enemy, he argues, is long-term civilisational decline. Western societies are weakened less by free markets than by cultural pessimism, demographic decline, institutional decay and a loss of confidence in themselves.

5. Migration mission. Fred de Fossard – a great friend of Economic Affairs – has argued in The Critic that Britain faces a false choice when asked to pick between accepting mass migration and sacrificing economic growth. He argues that immigration has filled labour shortages but also allowed governments and businesses to postpone the deeper reforms needed to raise productivity. Instead, Britain should make better use of the workers already here through investment, planning reform and the adoption of new technologies.