Should the UK tax wealth not work for assets over 10 million in value and reduce tax on income?

The chamber's instinct was less about soaking the rich for its own sake than about rebalancing the tax system itself, with three in five voters endorsing a levy on assets over £10 million paired with lower tax on earnings — a verdict that reads as a judgment on what gets taxed, not just how much.

The age pattern is the tell. Voters in their late fifties and early sixties, the group most likely to have built up housing equity or a pension pot without ever crossing the £10 million threshold, split against the idea, while both the youngest cohort and the over-65s backed it strongly — suggesting the coalition for a wealth tax runs from those who feel priced out by asset-rich elders to older voters confident the threshold would never touch them, with only the pre-retirement middle uneasy about where a "wealth tax" might one day land.

The result lands squarely on the fault line Andy Burnham reopened by refusing to rule a wealth tax out: a Treasury raising taxes against 0.1% growth, an economy that taxes salaries harder than inherited or passive fortunes, and a public increasingly asked whether that trade-off still makes sense.

That argument was made most sharply by the floor's top Yes voice, Mark, who called it "insane" that "we pay more tax if we go out to work than if we send our money out to work for us." The most-respected No case, from osiris, warned the policy would drive capital and business away, asking "why run your business from uk only to be robbed of 2pc a year, 1/5 of your business stolen in a decade."

Britain's tax base is only 0.4% wealthy enough to feel this directly, but the vote suggests plenty of the other 99.6% have already decided whose turn it is to pay more.