| Hi there, it’s Helen Chandler-Wilde, a Bloomberg UK journalist and editor on the Readout. Hope you enjoy today’s newsletter. Pleasing the richest people in society is a tricky sell in politics. That’s especially true for a Labour government who came to power promising to crack down on non-doms, and who last month released a tax-hiking budget. Well, it appears that their message has been heard, at least — it has been by Dubai, Singapore and Abu Dhabi. They and other wealth hubs are hosting invitation-only events in luxury hotels and cultivating relationships with City law firms to lure Britain’s super-rich with a siren call of tax breaks and sunshine, according to a story by Benjamin Stupples today. Some will undoubtedly see this as a good thing: the unfair scheme that allowed the wealthy to avoid paying UK tax on overseas earnings has been closed, and the playing field leveled. But others will point to the £8.9 billion in taxes that non-doms contributed to the exchequer each year, alongside other indirect benefits like added jobs. Whether or not this policy is right, the government must work out what the global pitch for Britain is, especially since we don’t have the sunshine on our side. Once upon a time, it was our steady institutions – but with long delays in everything from courts to hospitals, is that still true? There was also the fact that we could give your children the world’s best education: but now our universities are at risk of bankruptcy and private schools have been hit with VAT. If Britain continues to look unappealing to the richest, that could spell big problems for everyone – especially for Rachel Reeves, given the top 10% of income taxpayers contribute over 60% of all income tax – and the top 1% pay over 29%, according to the House of Commons library. Britain also needs to be appealing to the world’s fastest-growing companies – as shown by Bloomberg Opinion’s John Authers today. He writes that the UK’s stagnant stock market is a political threat to the government, and a “more profound problem for Reeves” than inflation. He says that in dollar terms, the FTSE 100 has hardly grown in five years, an indirect indicator of weak growth across the whole economy in that period. This might not be such an issue if everywhere else were stuck, too, but they’re not: John points out that tech companies including Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia have grown so much in that time that each of them is now worth more than the entire FTSE 100 (see below). This problem can compound. As returns stay low in British stocks, investors are tempted to put their money elsewhere – leaving companies in the UK starved of capital and struggling to grow. That could seem like a distant or abstract issue, but it’s not: if Reeves can’t dramatically boost growth, voters will kick out Labour in five years when they realize their salary is static and they still can’t buy a home. The reality of our low growth is stark when you visit other places. I recently went to the US to visit friends: a British couple in New York who doubled their incomes after moving there, another Brit in San Francisco who has work falling into his lap, and an American who owns a beautiful house and could retire in her 40s with a chunky pension. There are a few pieces of potential light in today’s news. The UK’s relatively low exports and manufacturing base — usually considered a problem — puts it at less risk of Donald Trump’s tariff wars, and makes our stock market a tempting place to put money in the near future. Plus, the Competitions and Markets Authority is reviewing processes to see if mergers can be cleared faster without harming consumers. So, perhaps our pitch is this: Trump doesn’t mind us too much, and we won’t delay your deals. Does it beat the promise of sunshine and tax breaks? We’ll have to see. Want this in your inbox each weekday? You can sign up here. | 
