In the summer of 2017, Gemma McGough was unemployed, but also a recently minted member of the UK’s top 1 percent: a multimillionaire from the sale of her company, Product Compliance Specialists. She was in a position where she never had to work again.
Then she read This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein’s book about the impact of capitalism on the climate. It struck a chord. “It was a massive shift in my thinking,” she says. “I sold my Porsche and bought a Tesla. What a cliché, the 911’s got to go.”
In 2019, she founded a new company, Eleos Compliance, modeled on the B Corp principles of transparency and social and environmental accountability. Although she took a salary, the majority of her money now came from investments, bonds, and rental properties—from wealth.
Suddenly swamped with scaremongering mailers from accountants offering legal loopholes to reduce her tax bill, McGough analyzed the tax she was paying on her salaried income versus the lower rates on income from the sale of assets. She reached two conclusions: first, that the country’s tax policy was unfair, and second, that she could be contributing more. Yes, she had worked long hours over 20 years to build her first business, but lots of people worked hard only to be left with “a mortgage and many more hours to work.”
Philanthropy wasn’t enough. McGough and her husband have given away approximately £400,000 ($509,946) in the past three years, mostly to reforestation, rainforest conservation, and strategic land purchases. “It’s a lovely thing to do, it’s a pleasure,” she says. “But ultimately it’s not the answer when you need a system-level change.” So in 2021, McGough became one of four British “wealth-holders” to join the UK branch of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of multimillionaires and billionaires who want governments to tax them more.
The organization was set up in the US in 2010 and now has 240 members there; McGough is a founding member of the UK arm, which has grown to 20 members. They attend monthly meetings, coordinate media activity via WhatsApp, and advocate for taxes on net wealth at parliamentary events. It’s a mix of founders and CEOs; uncomfortable heirs; and reformed financiers, such as Citibank trader turned inequality YouTuber Gary Stevenson.
They bring together connections, financial and tax expertise, status, access, and a few famous names—including the entertainment scion Abigail Disney. Actor Mark Ruffalo is a signatory on the recent “Cost of Extreme Wealth” open letter that was delivered to the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting this January. Phil White, a British former consultant and engineer, added a classic campaigning tactic to his Davos trip: holding up a cardboard sign saying “Tax the Rich.” There’s also increasing coordination with Taxmenow in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and the Copenhagen-based Millionaires for Humanity.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the Patriotic Millionaires are notable for being unusually public and unusually frank—US chair Morris Pearl, a former MD at investment firm BlackRock, has described how the Covid-19 pandemic made him personally wealthier, and how he doesn’t check his bank balance because he doesn’t need to.
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