Zack Polanski, the former boob-enlarging hypnotist and Liberal Democrat who now leads the Green Party, says that yesterday’s Gorton & Denton by-election result proves the Labour Party is a busted flush, and that voting Green is now the only way to keep Nigel Farage out of Downing Street. And it’s hard to disagree: as Andy Beckett has argued in the Guardian, the ‘Labour minimalism’ of Kinnock, Blair, Mandelson, Brown and now Starmer is simply “unsuited to modern times” in which “populists of both left and right say supposedly taboo things to voters – and soar in the polls.”

And not just ‘taboo’ things. In Beckett’s words, “we have entered a new age of political rhetoric”, with populists such as the ubiquitous Polanski able to say incredibly stupid things to voters, yet soar in the polls. Incredibly stupid things, such as ‘we will spend £700 billion per year on a universal basic income’ and ‘we will raise £15 billion per year from a wealth tax on millionaires and billionaires’.

As well as replacing the DWP’s annual spend on welfare benefits and pensions of some £340 billion with a universal basic income of £1,600 per month for each of Britain’s 55 million adult citizens costing up to a staggering £1,056 billion per year (the details of the policy remain stuck somewhere in Polanski’s head, it seems), the Green Party is committed to introducing “a 1% tax on wealth over £10 million and 2% over £1 billion, raising £14.8 billion per year”. And when, this morning, the Today programme’s Nick Robinson put it to a jubilant Polanski that such a wealth tax would just lead to wealthy people leaving the country, the self-declared lefty populist retorted that Switzerland has a wealth tax and is “literally famous for having wealthy people in it”.

To which Robinson could have responded by pointing out that Italy has a wealth tax and is literally famous for being an economic basket case.

In fact, Switzerland is one of only three European countries – the others being Norway and Spain – with a comprehensive net wealth tax of the kind proposed by Polanski and the Green Party, while three other European countries – Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands – levy a limited wealth tax on selected assets only. In Belgium, for example, there is a wealth tax of 0.15% on securities account holdings, and in Italy there is a wealth tax of 0.2% on financial assets and 0.76% on property held abroad. 

Furthermore, Switzerland does not have a federal (i.e. national government) wealth tax of the kind proposed by Polanski and the Green Party. Rather, under law in force since 1840, each of the 26 cantons (the autonomous member states of the Swiss Federation) taxes the net worldwide wealth of residents, and the tax rates and allowances vary substantially between cantons. So, the wealthiest residents of Geneva canton face a wealth tax of as much as 1.1%, while the wealthiest gnomes in Zurich canton get away with a wealth tax of just 0.3%. And you don’t have to be a millionaire, let alone a billionaire, to pay wealth tax in Switzerland: in Zurich canton, for example, the wealth tax kicks in when your net wealth exceeds just 81,000 swiss francs (£77,800).

So, I’m not sure that Switzerland tells us very much about how well a national wealth tax would work under a Green Party government led by Zack Polanski. Or maybe I’m missing the same thing that seems to have been missed by Germany, France, Japan, the United States, Austria, Sweden, Portugal, Australia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Denmark, Greece, Estonia, New Zealand, Poland, Iceland, Czechia, Mexico, Latvia, Israel, Luxembourg and Turkey. Indeed, since 1995, seven of those countries – Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland and Sweden – have all abandoned a net wealth tax, due to the challenges and costs associated with collection and enforcement.

But hey, the voters of Gorton & Denton have “embraced hope”. So everything will be fine.