UK mourns as number of people with more money than they could ever spend falls to just 442,000

Britain is facing a crisis so severe that even the think tank named after an eighteenth-century economist has been moved to publish a tracker for it.

The number of millionaires resident in the UK has fallen to 442,000 — the lowest figure since the 2008 financial crisis — and the Adam Smith Institute would like you to know that this is very bad news for you personally.

The figure, down seven per cent on the previous year, represents a dramatic collapse from the peak of 1.07 million millionaires recorded in 2021, when apparently over a million people simultaneously became millionaires and then, just as swiftly, stopped being residents.

The institute attributes the decline to high taxation, the abolition of non-dom status, and what it describes as a “hostile culture for wealthiest” — a phrase meaning people occasionally say unkind things about them at dinner parties before driving home in their second car.

The shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith urged the public to reflect on what fewer millionaires means for the tax base, a concern that would carry more weight if the Conservative Party had not spent fourteen years in government during which the number of people using food banks quadrupled.

Separately, 120 UK-based millionaires including Gary Lineker wrote to the Prime Minister this week asking to be taxed more. The Adam Smith Institute did not comment on this development, as it falls outside the scope of the tracker.

Andy Burnham is meanwhile considering a ten per cent death tax to fund social care for the elderly, a policy the Adam Smith Institute opposes on the grounds that it would affect millionaires.