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The Spectator on how people on a quarter of a million pounds of annual income are not really rich at all, and would in any case all leave the country if anyone tried to make them pay some tax, as, allegedly, would the non-doms.

These rules are in fact a subsidy, just like the ones that governments in the Sixties and Seventies used to pay to loss-making factories and the like, except that those were to protect the jobs of large numbers of tax-paying Britons rather than to protect the lavish lifestyles of a tiny number of tax-dodgers, many of them foreigners.

The defenders of such arrangements are like the private schools lobby whenever anyone dares to point out that almost all such institutions would close overnight if it were not for gigantic public subsidies through the tax system, utterly unused to being spoken to in such terms, and practically reduced to blubbering if anyone does so.

The non-doms and other super-rich manage to run businesses in numerous other countries without needing to live in them. But then, only the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic have this bizarre concept of domicile, making London the only one of the great cities of the world where such arrangements are in place.

And these people consciously wish to live in one of the great cities of the world, or else why do they all live in or very near to London, rather than anywhere else in Britain? So the idea that they would move if they were made to pay tax is absurd – where would they go?

The only comparable city is New York, in a country to which many of our non-doms would be (and sometimes have been) refused entry, and where neither they nor their mates would discover anything remotely resembling the indulgent tax regime that they enjoy here.

In any case, they wouldn’t take their investments with them: I say again, they already have investments all over the place.