“The data says otherwise—and Channel 4 never thought to check”
Four years ago, a colleague asked me whether I could chair a debate with some guy called ‘Gary Stevenson’, who was, apparently, an anti-inequality campaigner and a YouTube commentator of some description. I had never heard of Stevenson, but accepted. The debate went all right, even though it was mostly a case of talking past each other (which, given that I was the moderator, was probably my fault). It was otherwise not especially memorable. Britain does not exactly have a shortage of left-wing media figures and activists. In the first half of the 2010s, there was the campaign for a ‘Robin Hood Tax’, the anti-tax-avoidance campaign ‘UK Uncut’, the ‘People’s Assembly’ with its endless anti-austerity marches, the Occupy movement, and, later, the political cult around Russell Brand. From 2015, all of these movements coalesced around Corbynism, and while Jeremy Corbyn himself stepped down as Labour leader in 2020, the movement lingered.
Stevenson was slightly different because of his unusual backstory as a former City trader, and because of his singular focus on wealth inequality as opposed to, for example, income inequality, nationalisation, or price controls. Nonetheless, I saw him as just another minor character in Britain’s vast left-wing ecosystem.
Today, four years on, Gary Stevenson is everywhere. He is a best-selling author, his YouTube channel ‘Gary’s Economics’ has more than 1.6 million subscribers, he is all over the media, and Channel 4 have just released an entire documentary about him. Four years ago, the wealth tax, Stevenson’s flagship policy, was a niche idea that only a bunch of tax nerds were interested in. Today, it is the policy idea of the hour, with three-quarters of the public expressing support for it. Stevenson even sells T-shirts with pro-wealth-tax slogans.
