SAM LOWRY
I am in my 50s, and I have spent three decades in engineering and technology leadership, including safety-critical hardware work in aviation and senior software leadership in regulated industries such as financial services and transport. I have a mortgage on my home, like most people who work for a living rather than inherit. I pay a great deal of tax and have never once asked the state for anything back.
The decision has been building over several years, through a Conservative government that talked endlessly about controlling immigration while presiding over record net migration, and now a Labour government discovering, apparently to its own surprise, that you cannot spend what you do not have without eventually coming for the people who have it.
What tipped us over was not a rumour but a fact: on July 20th, Andy Burnham was confirmed as Prime Minister, and the land value tax he has championed for years – an annual charge, potentially 0.48% and nearly double that on second properties, levied on the land beneath your home – has moved from a leadership pitch to a live possibility. No formal proposal has been published, but there’s no mistaking which way the wind is blowing. It’s sold as a “fairer” replacement for council tax, with council tax, stamp duty and inheritance tax dangled as sweeteners; history suggests those sweetener taxes tend to survive once a future chancellor decides they’re rather useful after all.
I don’t even own my land outright; I have a mortgage on it, which means a land tax would charge me annually on equity the bank and I are still splitting. It would sit alongside income tax already claiming over 60% of earnings above £100,000, National Insurance as a second income tax in all but name, inheritance tax at 40% and energy bills among the highest in Europe.
And it’s not the only ratchet in motion: a flat 10% levy on every estate on death – no threshold, no exemptions, the same “care levy” Burnham floated in 2010, when the Conservatives put it on an election poster and called it a death tax – is being looked at again, with Reform UK warning it would drag an extra 650,000 families a year into inheritance tax who currently pay nothing. A widow in an ordinary £250,000 bungalow, already taxed on every penny that bought it, would owe £25,000 the moment she died. There’s also a mansion tax surcharge already being rolled out, with the Valuation Office Agency using satellite and aerial imagery to value homes for it – first tested in Wales, not denied for England.
Burnham’s top team does nothing to reassure me: his new Chancellor, John Healey, is described by sources close to the Government as sharing his outlook rather than tempering it, and Ed Miliband, the Net Zero enthusiast who as Energy Secretary helped drive our bills to among the highest in Europe, has been promoted to Foreign Secretary rather than moved on.
Within days the pattern was visible. Burnham’s first announcements as Prime Minister – a VAT cut on household electricity and a return of the £2 bus fare cap – were both revealed almost immediately to be uncosted: the electricity cut’s funding source turned out not to exist and the bus cap was funded by converting climate-finance grants into loans. The Spectator called it a “shambles” by day three. The gap between headline and funding gets closed later, quietly, through exactly the kind of tax rise this article opened with.
Underneath the policy detail sits a harder problem: it is no longer clear the ballot box can even fix this.
Reform UK, the party currently leading national polls, has had its leader placed under a Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards investigation over an undeclared £5 million gift, while the Metropolitan Police are now also investigating Deputy Leader Richard Tice himself: two £250,000 donations paid to Reform via a company he controls, funded by a backer whose son is a convicted fraudster, with Reform’s bank account reportedly frozen over suspected suspicious activity. Tice calls it a “politically motivated smear campaign” and says the Met briefed the BBC before ever contacting him – a framing harder to dismiss given the National Crime Agency has separately had to refer itself to the police watchdog after Reform’s confidential financial data was leaked to the press.
Compare that with Louise Haigh, who resigned as Transport Secretary in 2024 after it emerged she had pleaded guilty to fraud by misrepresentation a decade earlier. Fourteen months later, Burnham brought her back – not to a backbench role, but as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and First Secretary of State, his effective second-in-command.
A challenger party’s own deputy leader gets a live police investigation over disputed donations; a governing party hands its second-highest office to a minister with an actual fraud conviction.
Whatever the truth of any individual case, the two established parties who have governed this country for a century closed ranks around their own the moment a serious challenger emerged, while treating that challenger’s finances as the scandal to be policed rather than the policy failures that produced it – which is not a system that leaves the ballot box open in practice, whatever it says on paper.
Twenty years of uncontrolled legal and illegal immigration, on both parties’ watch, has changed the country beyond anything either campaigned on – and saying so plainly now risks a knock on the door for a “non-crime hate incident”, which is why I write under a pen name in a country I still love rather than under my own in one where doing so has consequences.
Speech isn’t the only thing treated differently depending on who you are. The grooming gang scandals in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and elsewhere sat unprosecuted for years, officially for fear of appearing “racist”, while people posting intemperate opinions online have found police on their doorstep within days. Even the row over the Sentencing Council’s proposed guidance on pre-sentence reports – which would have told judges a report was “usually necessary” before jailing an offender from an ethnic, cultural or faith minority – makes the same point: it only got blocked by emergency legislation after an almighty political row, and the Council’s own chairman noted that ministers from both main parties had been briefed on it at 15 meetings over three years and raised no objection until it became a public fight.
A system that only acts once something threatens to become a scandal, rather than catching it in the design, hasn’t fixed two-tier treatment. It has simply learned to manage the appearance of it.
A Ministry of Defence inquiry found the RAF’s diversity targets led to unlawful discrimination against white male recruits held back from pilot training regardless of merit; those affected were paid £5,000 each. West Yorkshire Police ran a recruitment system sorting candidates into “gold,” “silver” and “bronze” tiers by ethnicity, with white British applicants ranked lowest. NHS England guidance has encouraged trusts to mandate ethnic-minority shortlisting and at least one hospital admitted outright “positive discrimination”. The BBC still runs internships explicitly closed to white applicants. A government department has already conceded, under its own inquiry, that it broke the law.
The basic promise of British life – pay in, and the state looks after the roads, the water, the health service and, eventually, you – has quietly collapsed. Council tax keeps rising while roads crater with potholes. One in four adults in England can’t get an NHS dentist. Eight water companies imposed hosepipe bans this summer, from Kent and Hampshire to Cambridgeshire and, as of this week, the whole of London and the Thames Valley – more than 20 million people in total – while those same companies lose billions of litres a day to leaks left unfixed for decades. Britain pays among the highest household energy prices in Europe, and last winter roughly 2,500 cold-related deaths, mostly pensioners, were recorded in a country meant to be one of the richest in the world.
Behind all of it sits the plainest number: the country is broke. Public sector net debt stands at close to £2.9 trillion, roughly 95% of annual output – a level last seen in the early 1960s, still paying off the cost a world war. The Government borrowed £132 billion last year alone and debt interest now runs to around £110 billion a year – the fourth-largest item in government spending, ahead of the entire education budget. The OBR’s own forecast has the debt ratio not falling at all until the end of the decade, and then only fractionally. A land tax, a death tax, a wobble on inheritance relief, whatever comes next – it isn’t one bad idea from one bad government. It’s what a state does when the bill arrives and there’s no one left to send it to but the people still working and still holding assets.
None of this happens in a state that leaves you alone, either. The DWP’s new “Fraud, Error and Debt” bill lets the department demand bank account data on suspicion of error as well as fraud – prompting Big Brother Watch to warn it risks “unprecedented” mass financial surveillance reaching everybody’s accounts. A state that cannot fix a pothole can apparently watch your garden extension from space and your bank balance from Whitehall.
We are also not remotely alone in leaving. The ONS admitted last year its old methods had badly underestimated how many Britons were going: revised figures show 992,000 British nationals emigrated between 2021 and 2024, 190% more than previously recorded, and for the first time in years the outflow now exceeds the inflow. Set that against 2022 having brought the fastest population growth since 1828, and a foreign-born population share up from 16% to almost 20% in four years, and the picture is unmistakable.
Put all of that together and the question is unavoidable: as a white British family, on what basis are we meant to build our future here? Every institution named above – the armed forces, the police, the health service, the national broadcaster – has now either been found to discriminate against people who look like us, or is actively designed to.
We are not owed anything for being white and British. But we are entitled to ask why a country would build itself this way, and to leave when the honest answer keeps coming back “because it can”. Add a dying tax base, a state pension and NHS that will not be there in the shape promised, and a balance sheet with no way back inside our working lives, and the country starts to look less like a home going through a rough patch and more like a dead duck.
Family comes first, and there is no shame in saying so plainly.
So we are going.
None of this is written out of hatred for the place. Britain is my home. But over my lifetime I have watched almost everything I once recognised as my country be dismantled, one piece at a time – sold off, apologised for, legislated away or mocked out of public life until it quietly stopped being said aloud. You can mourn a home even as you pack the boxes. I do.
But if we don’t leave now, we never will. We have a mortgage we can still sell and a career I can still take elsewhere.
That window doesn’t stay open forever.
Sam Lowry is a senior manager in the software development industry with an interest in political and social issues. His name is a pseudonym.
(UKR)