Former Labour minister Anneliese Dodds says she ‘hopes’ Rachel Reeves is considering wealth tax

Published

4 weeks ago

August 1, 2025

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A former Labour minister has said she wants Rachel Reeves to consider the “evidence” behind introducing a wealth tax in the UK.

Anneliese Dodds, who quit as international development minister in February over Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to slash the overseas aid budget, said she believed it was “important” that the government considers “who has the broadest shoulders”.

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Speaking to Beth Rigby on the Sky News Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Ms Dodds, the MP for Oxford East, said there had been a “lot of discussion” about a wealth tax – a direct levy on all, or most of, an individual’s, household’s or business’s total net wealth, rather than their income.

Ms Dodds, who also served as shadow chancellor when Labour was in opposition, said she had been “a bit sceptical about some of those claims for a long time because, of course, wealth is taxed in the UK”.

However, she said work carried out by the Wealth Tax Commission in 2020 had looked at various types of international wealth taxes and how it would be possible to deliver one in a UK context.

She added: “I would hope the Treasury is considering that kind of evidence, as well as other changes that have been put forward.”

The former cabinet minister also said that tax proposals outlined by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner to Rachel Reeves should be “considered”.

In a memo that was leaked to the Daily Telegraph in May, Ms Rayner suggested to the chancellor that she increase taxes, including reinstating the pensions lifetime allowance and a higher corporation tax level for banks.

“We’ve seen the deputy leader of the Labour Party, for example, put forward suggestions as I understand it,” Ms Dodds said.

“I think it’s important for all of those to be considered now.”

Ministers have signalled they will not bring in a wealth tax to balance the books, with Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds branding the suggestion “daft”.

Speaking to GB News last week, Mr Reynolds said: “This Labour government has increased taxes on wealth as opposed to income – the taxes on private jets, private schools, changes through inheritance tax, capital gains tax.

“But the idea there’s a magic wealth tax, some sort of levy…that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.

“Switzerland has a levy, but they don’t have capital gains or inheritance tax. There’s no kind of magic. We’re not going to do anything daft like that.

“And I say to people: ‘Be serious about this.’ The idea you can just levy everyone. What if your wealth was not in your bank account, what if it was in fine wine or art? How would we tax that? This is why this doesn’t exist.

“There’s a lot of populism out about this, and I’m frustrated. I see colleagues sometimes say this in parliament and I say: ‘Come on, get serious.'”

Ms Dodds said that while she had not spoken directly with Ms Reeves about a wealth tax, she believed the “trade-off we have to consider in a world of lots of difficult trade-offs is potentially making some big and significant changes early, or having to make many tactical changes through the parliament and potentially being forced into some of those difficult decisions anyway later on”.

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Nigel Farage’s deportation plan relies on these conditions – legal expert explains if it could work

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4 hours ago

August 26, 2025

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Nigel Farage's deportation plan relies on these conditions - legal expert explains if it could work

Explaining how they plan to tackle what they described as illegal migration, Nigel Farage and his Reform UK colleague Zia Yusuf were happy to disclose some of the finer details – how much money migrants would be offered to leave and what punishments they would receive if they returned.

But the bigger picture was less clear.

How would Reform win a Commons majority, at least another 320 seats, in four years’ time – or sooner if, as Mr Farage implied, Labour was forced to call an early election?

How would his party win an election at all if, as its leader suggested, other parties began to adopt his policies?

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Highly detailed legislation would be needed – what Mr Farage calls his Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill.

But Reform would not have a majority in the House of Lords and, given the responsibilities of the upper house to scrutinise legislation in detail, it could take a year or more from the date of an election for his bill to become law.

Reform’s four-page policy document says the legislation would have to disapply:

• The United Nations refugee convention of 1951, extended in 1967, which says people who have a well-founded fear of persecution must not be sent back to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom

• The United Nations convention against torture, whose signatories agree not expel, return or extradite anyone to a country where there are substantial grounds to believe the returned person would be in danger of being tortured

• The Council of Europe anti-trafficking convention, which requires states to provide assistance for victims

According to the policy document, derogation from these treaties is “justified under the Vienna Convention doctrine of state necessity”.

That’s odd, because there’s no mention of necessity in the Vienna Convention on the law of treaties – and because member states can already “denounce” (leave) the three treaties by giving notice.

It would take up to a year – but so would the legislation. Only six months’ notice would be needed to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, another of Reform’s objectives.

Mr Farage acknowledged that other European states were having to cope with an influx of migrants. Why weren’t those countries trying to give up their international obligations?

His answer was to blame UK judges for applying the law. Once his legislation had been passed, Mr Farage promised, there would be nothing the courts could do to stop people being deported to countries that would take them. His British Bill of Rights would make that clear.

Courts will certainly give effect to the will of parliament as expressed in legislation. But the meaning of that legislation is for the judiciary to decide. Did parliament really intend to send migrants back to countries where they are likely to face torture or death, the judges may be asking themselves in the years to come.

They will answer questions such as that by examining the common law that Mr Farage so much admires – the wisdom expressed in past decisions that have not been superseded by legislation. He cannot be confident that the courts will see the problem in quite the same way that he does.