Last Sunday Matthew Syed wrote a rousing piece in the Sunday Times as to why all the working Brits should not flee the country in the wake of Labour’s tax and spend budget. In “We may have lost faith in politicians, but don’t lose faith in Britain. If we quit these shores rather than fight for a better future, we will be playing into our enemies’ hands” Syed admits, “the emerging view is that the UK is finished. Get out while you can.”

Syed goes on “I get it. I really do. It is not just (if I can ventriloquise for those who have either left or are on the verge of doing so) about Rachel Reeves, Sir Keir Starmer or even the budget. It is also about Brexit, 14 years of hopeless Tories, a decade and a half of record immigration (too high even for most “liberals”), the vivid sense of political betrayal. Why stay? Why not take our talents and ambition elsewhere? I was talking to a multimillionaire American last week and he put it starkly: the conversation in the UK is all about its own impending demise. Why would I invest there?

But perhaps I might offer a different perspective during a moment of acute, possibly existential, vulnerability. We live in a democracy. We have an opportunity to change things. We have the vote, the chance to join a party, to organise, to make our voices heard. If we who are socially assertive, high in social capital, well-to-do and upwardly mobile leave, taking our cash with us, won’t this condemn the nation further?”

He continues, “Moreover, don’t we have a duty to this nation and to those who are not so mobile (and could never afford a golden visa)? I am not just talking about the teachers and volunteers, but the hidden army of fellow citizens without whom we would have been nothing at all. Don’t we owe those who fought and died in world wars, the quiet sacrifices of men and women who faced a danger greater than Reeves and who didn’t desert — and would never have dreamt of doing so. Why? Because they believe this nation is not just a place to make money, but also to make sacrifices; a place worth saving, a place called home.”

I was inspired, truly I was. Not inspired enough to move back, but moved. Do you stay or do you go raises important ethical questions. What do you owe and to whom? First, I should say that Matthew Syed is British and I am not. But I did live there for 20 years and I’m married to a Brit and the children are Anglo – Irish.

I do not truly have the same love for the country a British person who was born and bred there has but I did find myself defending Britain on the telly quite a few times against actual British people on the left that seemed to spend their entire life hating their own country. I found that odd. Therefore when crunch time came and we decided to leave and return to Ireland perhaps the balance was different.

Should British people stay and stop the place turning into a third world sh*t hole because they owe it to those who fought and died in world wars? Perhaps, if the saving was really possible. Sadly, it is now highly debatable as to whether that is possible.

Then there is the tax burden. Syed “I will not leave for the sake of a lower tax bill. I absolutely will not.” I think that is easy to say if you still have two children at private school, which Syed does. This should not be held against him but it tells me there is still a little ‘give’ there in Syed household if he is paying at least £30,000 per year in school fees.

Tax bills matter because you give your life energy and your time to pay tax. Put simply, instead of doing something else, you have spent time working to earn money that is then transferred to the HM Treasury to do with as they see fit. It is one thing for this to be spent on a nationalised health service as it was back when first formed after the war, when money was spent mostly on the young and in a high trust society. Now it is a straight transfer to the old and includes people who never, ever paid into it.

Then there are the transfer payments to those who do not work. There has been a rise of 1.2 million in working-age people claiming disability or incapacity benefits since 2019, taking the total to 4.4 million. The number of 16 to 34-year-olds off work with long-term sickness has risen by 76% cent between 2019 and 2024. Recent data released under freedom of information laws reveal that £10.1bn of the £61.2bn spent on Universal Credit in 2024 went to foreigners. Many people on universal credit are in work. Many are not.

There are billions of bounds earned by one group of people and transferred to another group of people who do not work for it. There is a word for when you work and that money is confiscated and transferred to those who have not earned it – socialism. The word for working for free under coercion is slavery.

There is also a health impact on those who pay all the tax. They don’t whine about their own mental health problems but they exist as surely as those who claim disability benefits. The stress of the job and the responsibility, the heart conditions, the marriage problems if you are working long hours and never see your spouse who is also working long hours, the children are stuck in nursery from dusk to dawn. It all takes a toll until one day you just keel over with a heart attack or maybe you get a divorce or perhaps your children are acting out because they don’t see you enough.

So on balance no, I don’t think you owe it to ‘war heroes’ to do that to yourself and your family because some 18 year old somewhere has ADHD and can’t work or some other couple has decided to have 5 children and will receive universal credit while you stopped at one. There is a word for people who suffer for no good reason – martyrs. There is also a word for those who allow themselves to be manipulated and financially exploited by politicians to work for “the greater good” – fools.

But it’s not just the tax burden, is it. It is the fact your country has been stolen from you, how it is institutionally open borders to the extent that – yes I’ll say it again – the RAF flew in at least 25,000 Afghanis in a secret scheme. You do not have a duty to stay and resist when you have already tried to stop this mad open border experiment at the ballot box at least 5 times in the last 20 years. And you got called far – right fascist for your efforts.

But finally, Syed is wrong when he claims the ship can be turned around because Britain is a democracy. Exactly. It is a democracy, that’s your problem right there.

It is democracy that delivered the last Labour government and the tax and spend budget. If the takers outnumber you, then there is nothing you can do. If the asylum seekers who have been in the country for 3 seconds aided and abetted by the native lefties who seem to hate their own country outnumber you then you can’t stop it. Resistance is futile.

The democratic system in fact guarantees the slow, painful and inevitable decline. If one group of people who want other people’s money outnumber the group of people who earn it, then democracy says, show me your money. You can’t vote your way out of it.

Syed says, “we can make a difference. We can fight for a better future.” I wish him luck. I really do. But you can’t blame those who believe otherwise.

---