OCTOBER 31 is Halloween. The day when our blood runs cold as we move on from golden summer weeks into the wintery days to come. 

It’s that time when our world is haunted by the ghouls, zombies and assorted monsters who emerge from their darkened hiding places.

How appropriate then that the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has chosen that day to emerge from his office deep in the darkened bowels of the Treasury to reward the bankers who themselves have done even more damage to the human spirit than Halloween’s most spooky apparitions. 

The Tories, who are clearly living on borrowed time, rather like a tribe of zombie-like creatures, have decided to lift the cap on bankers’ bonuses.

Putting aside the details of the massive economic damage which the bankers did to the economy back in 2008, the big picture which emerged from the analyses at the time concluded that it was sheer naked greed by bankers which led to the crash. 

A cap was announced on bankers’ bonuses. And now it is to be lifted presumably motivated by the desire to feed greed within the finance sector once again.

Of course, the decision invites us to consider the class structures in our country where nurses, doctors, railway workers and others earn insufficient to keep up with inflation. 

In the last year workers have experienced the biggest decline in their living standards on record. Whereas bankers have seen huge inflation-busting pay rises, which follows a decade in which bonuses in the City of London have already returned to pre-crash levels.

Even with the so-called cap in place, bankers’ bonuses had already doubled since the 2008 financial crash — an increase of 101 per cent. 

Official figures released even before the Covid pandemic revealed 3,519 bankers working in the UK making more than €1 million (£880,000) a year. 

That’s the highest in Europe and seven times higher than Germany. These are the select few extremely wealthy people who stand to benefit from the removal of the cap. How can this possibly be justified?

What clearer example could there be of why we need to tax wealth? Our economy is structured in a way that means working people get less and less while the already rich get more and more. It’s time we redistributed some of that wealth.

How would this work?

Several years ago I published a report titled The Nature of Wealth in Britain, which examined four different potential wealth tax models. I found that the median revenue of the four wealth tax options would come to £218.4 billion over the course of a five-year parliament.

In addition, bringing dividends and capital gains taxes into line with income tax would raise £37bn and £90bn respectively. Closing tax avoidance loopholes and tackling tax evasion would raise a total of £145.5bn. This means that approximately £490.9bn in additional revenue could be raised over a period of five years.

My focus was specifically on a British-based wealth tax, but there are other proposals to implement taxes on wealth internationally that deserve our attention.

The EU Tax Observatory has just released a report which argues that billionaires should have a minimum tax rate. 

It found that there are 2,500 billionaires in the world with a combined wealth of $13 trillion. A minimum 2 per cent tax rate on billionaires' global wealth would raise £205bn a year.

It argues that, as things stand, most billionaires pay a much lower tax rate than the average citizen — equal to 0 per cent or 0.5 per cent of their wealth. 

They do this through clever accounting methods such as setting up shell companies and moving their money offshore.

However, the Observatory found that in recent years the automatic sharing of the wealthy’s account information across more than 100 countries has already significantly reduced offshore tax evasion. We should be arguing for this to be extended to all countries across the world.

Like Count Dracula, tax evasion and avoidance operates in the shadows, but rather than sucking our blood, it sucks the wealth out of our society. It’s time we drove a metaphorical stake through its heart.

If governments around the world decided to get serious about taxing wealth then we could raise the standard of living across the globe. 

In Britain, the additional revenue that would be brought into the Exchequer by a wealth tax could certainly be used to drag our economy out of the doldrums.

We could invest in much needed infrastructure and the green transition, as well as the wages of public-sector workers who have seen their pay decline now for 15 years. 

The wealth is there in our country to raise the living standards of working people if politicians were to find the courage to confront our zombie economy that continues to haunt our society.

We need to make the argument and build a movement for social justice which changes the class structures in our society once and for all.

Jon Trickett is Labour MP for Hemsworth.