Gary Stevenson

Gary Stevenson is a phenomenon in the UK. This unique individual grew up with an advanced ability and a drive typical of poor youth: he was brilliant in mathematics and he wanted desperately to get out of poverty, to become a millionaire. Gary studied mathematics and economics in the London School of Economics, an institution created by rich Fabians in 1895 basing the social sciences curriculum (especially E for Economics) on the French Sciences Po model. The Fabian society were British socialists including the Irish socialist writer George Bernard Shaw.

Stevenson worked for a few years in the high stress job of interest rates trader in London and Tokyo. As a financier who has made millions from being CitiBank’s best trader. His tag line is “Tax Wealth not Work”. He is nothing you would expect from an English multimillionaire, especially a financial trader. Garry grew up in working class inner London in the borough of Ilford. His parents were working class, his dad worked nearly 40 years for the Royal Mail. They were poor but dignified members of the working class. From their wages they bought and owned their small house when his dad was 26, and his mum was 23. The limit that the banks would loan for purchasing a house was 2.5 times their salary, but even a postal worker could buy a house in London for that.

To those, like Gary, who understand the economic motors of housing asset inflation in London (when compared with working class income growth) they will know how difficult it is to do that now. Most people haven’t a clue why this has happened. It is literally almost impossible for someone from the working class to own property. This is Gary’s point and he explains why ownership is key to retaining democracy and destroying the extreme wealth gap that is undermining democracy not just in the UK but worldwide.

The wealth gap is not about income but about assets, about ownership. This is something that is not new but something that has returned to feudal levels in three generations in the UK, basically his life time, that of his parents and his grandparents (since the end of WWII).

The wealth gap between the rich and the poor which has returned to previous feudal extremes gives a very small number of people so much money that they can literally set the agenda for the whole country. “The richest 56 people in the UK now own as much 27 million of the rest of us.” says Gary in his documentary. Gary cites investors in UK property, bonds and shares. These investors that literally own the country and its private sector also own the public sector too, literally. They own the bonds that keep the public sector working.

Gary explains the in terms of a Great privatisation. After decades of privatising state assets (Tunnels, Electricity, Gas, Water, Streets, Libraries etc…), assets that were previously used to provide services to people. The concentration of ownership of the UK State (holders of its debt which is approximately £1 Trillion UKP) has meant that the rich are concentrating their ownership of the state by being able to sell their bonds if they don’t like state policy. The state owes the bondholders and often also needs to help poorer people pay services for pensioners or the poor for the use of UK natural monopoly assets such as electricity from the grid or train systems. The bonds were created too to recuse the banks and to keep taxes down and the conservative and labour governments were convinced by these same very rich people not to tax them not heir incomes or their wealth. Thus the state has gone into debt because it no longer owns the assets it needs to provide the public services to the people who elect them.

This has mean that, roughly speaking in two generations the UK government who are supposedly the representatives of the British people who elected it to serve their interests (also including, and increasingly predominatly, the poor) has gone from owning nearly 100% of the assets it needs to provide services (canals, streets, electricity, water and gas pipelines and electricity grids etc…) to owning almost nothing and owing instead to the private sector (predominantly the rich) about one year’s worth of the UK GDP (One Trillion pounds) to UK bond holders (who are the local and international rich and the banks they own). This has implied what one might call a double privatisation of all government assets.

The bonds themselves were loaned to the governments to keep taxes on the rich low while helping build those assets (paying for motorway building and gas pipelines for example) until they were built and became profitable. It was then that neoliberalism was invented so that the rich could buy these assets back from the State in privatisations— often so that the State could pay that very same money back to the people who bought the discounted privatisations to cancel the debt that the government owed them in bonds. This is a process we now call neoliberalism. Neoliberalism lasted 50 years from Margaret Thatcher to Liz Truss but then it too went bust because there was nothing more left to give.

The UK government is now in a bond bind. Bond activists (traders like Gary Stevenson himself) pressurised the UK government treasury offering them three choices because it has run out of money and they won’t give them any more deb
1. Significantly increase tax on the super rich (tax wealth)
2. Significantly increase taxation on the upper middle class (tax share profits) the problem is the UK 0.1% will eventually get all this money because they own the bonds.
3. Reduce the capabilities of the welfare state and return to feudalism; the rich survive their illnesses because they can pay for care and the poor die young.

 In his British Channel 4 Documentary “How to get filthy rich” Stevenson explains how the economy works. He sums this challenge up as only a trader can because of their global technical dynamic mathematic trend analysis both national and local:

“If we do not do anything about this system then very very quickly the billionaires will own everything and you will own nothing! […] This is not this is not an abstract thing. These are the real resources of our country. The buildings, the land, the hospitals, the schools. This is real wealth. And every single year more and more and more of that is owned by this tiny group of people.”

Gary’s argument is that democracy will collapse as will the British government (probably into fascism) if this concentration of wealth is not reversed through wealth taxes. I am inclined to agree with him.