Rafe Fletcher: Should I stay or should I go?

Rafe Fletcher is the founder of CWG and writes The Otium Den Substack

Rousing music is juxtaposed with a stark message from Peter Hitchens in a recent Daily Mail video. “Get out while you can,” the columnist advises younger Britons, before the UK “becomes impossible to live in”.   

Plus ça change, you may say. Hitchens has never been one for sunny optimism. The bleak picture he paints of a country where “nothing works” is a consistent theme. But it’s striking nonetheless because Hitchens is fundamentally a one-nation conservative. He is no fan of laissez-faire Thatcherism, believing in duty and patriotism, rather than the relentless pursuit of economic self-interest.

Emigration is in the spotlight after the ONS revised down 2024 net migration (the difference between arrivals and departures from the UK) by 20 percent to 345,000. A result of more people leaving rather than fewer coming in. It seems Brits are a significant part of that exodus. As a fellow fleer, I see this is about much more than tax dodgers heading to Dubai. It’s ordinary professional families quietly leaving because the UK makes aspiration feel futile.     

Minimising my tax bill was not a priority when I moved to Hong Kong in 2019. As a reasonably well-paid single professional in my twenties, I was dimly aware that HMRC made a hefty claim on every payslip. But I had enough disposable income to feel comfortable after rent, food, and other basics. I wasn’t saving much beyond a workplace pension but that wasn’t an imminent concern.  

Adventure and career progression ranked far higher in the decision to venture east. Gross salaries without PAYE deductions were a welcome surprise, as were subsequent tax bills from the Inland Revenue Department that asked for very little. But it didn’t trump all other considerations. I only stayed put when Covid hit in 2020 because I’d met a girl and feared the consequences for our blossoming relationship if I returned to the UK. A prudent decision, as I capitalised upon a friend’s advice that time plus lack of competition is the formula for romantic success. Locked down together, things moved quickly, and we married in 2021. We moved to Singapore a year later with a first daughter on the way.  

We are now a family of four and often think about moving back to the UK. Singapore regularly ranks as one of the world’s most expensive cities. Our fixed monthly outgoings – rent, kindergarten, childcare and a car – are precariously high. We could certainly cut that in the UK. But not by nearly enough to offset what we would lose in post-tax income. Furthermore, what you save in Singapore, you keep. There is no capital gains or dividends tax, so you quickly see the compounding benefits of what you put away.  

I don’t expect anything from the British state in retirement. Demographics and debt mean it’s hard to imagine anything resembling today’s pensions will be available to my generation. Nor do I believe I should be entitled to it. One of the few sensible measures in Rachel Reeves’ budget was correcting the remarkable offer of a state pension to expats who continued making annual £182 National Insurance contributions. The threshold has now been raised to £910.  

So, we stay in Singapore because it gives us agency to build our own future. Things are transparent. We pay relatively low tax (24 per cent is the top marginal rate in Singapore’s progressive bands) and then it’s on us. I’m 33 and this is both the highest earning and most expensive time of my life. But Singapore lets you build momentum around that income, while the UK just exacerbates the expenses. If we returned, we’d pay a gruelling marginal rate of tax while footing the bill entirely for nursery and childcare costs. Treading water rather than making progress.   

I sympathise with Matthew Syed, writing in The Times, when he asks whether Brits have “a duty to this nation” to stay and save it. I hate it when other expats exhibit a lifeboat mentality – “thank God we got out” – and revel in the malaise back home. I share Syed’s patriotic sentiment, but country loses out to family in any hierarchy of obligations. It’s this that motivates many of the other Brits I meet abroad.  

Because we’re not just losing people to tax havens. I was in Brisbane last week to see England’s latest comprehensive Ashes defeat. Many of the other England fans lived in Australia. One, a builder in his mid-40s, had built a successful business and given his three children a very different upbringing to his own in Basildon. Another Brit in his mid-30s had spent several years in Singapore before moving to Sydney. He didn’t resent paying higher taxes in the Australian capital because it still encourages agency, offering tax rebates on education, healthcare and savings.   

Other friends from university are happily settled in New York, where living costs make London look cheap. But the taxman doesn’t jump on your back so early in the game. You can get wealthy before the government starts asking for its substantial cut. Unlike the UK, it is far less generous to citizens who work elsewhere, taxing them on worldwide income. The incentives are clear. Stay, work hard and you can prosper. By contrast, Rachel Reeves “asks” people to pay a little more, while the government rewards those who refuse to engage with the system at all. Benefit claimants can earn a salary equivalent to £120,000. Illegal arrivals get housing, healthcare and an allowance.  

The UK indulges the idle and punishes aspiration. Departees don’t, by and large, resent handing anything over to HMRC. They’re just choosing other countries where that tax bill still forms part of a social contract. So, Hitchens’ dire warning is not a call to simply abscond when things get difficult. Rather, it recognises that you can’t save a country if it doesn’t want to save itself. Most expats aren’t ostentatiously boasting about newfound riches in Dubai. They’re reluctantly slipping away. And few in Westminster seem to care.