spiked95%
Gary Stevenson gets his arse handed to him - spiked 85%
By Tom Slater98%
7/10/2026, 1:26:13 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 5 faulty reasoning types, including Politically Right Leaning Bias, Straw Man, and Attempt to Sell a Product or Service, with Ad Hominem as the most egregious example at 26.4% saturation with 294 hits. Analysis detected 649 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,114 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 79.6% and a BS Rank of 85% (2,231 of 14,081 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 84.20% of the article peer group.
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Say what you will about Gary Stevenson, the City trader turned crusader against inequality, here is a man unafraid to post his Ls.
For whether Gary is aware of it or not, that is precisely what he has done by allowing his Channel 4 agitprop documentary, How to Get Filthy Rich , to be broadcast, despite it unintentionally obliterating the case he was sullenly trying to make.
Stevenson, with a best-selling book and a hit YouTube channel under his belt, is the Bristol student / Radio 6 Music dad’s favourite economist.
He has captured the zeitgeist of the metropolitan middle classes – for whom there is nothing wrong with Britain that soaking the billionaires won’t fix.
Like Zack Polanski , who cites Stevenson among his intellectual lodestars, he is a symptom of Long Corbyn – the simpleminded, moralising leftism that captured the Labour Party and the hearts of Belsize Park just over 10 years ago, and that our politics has been struggling to shake since.
Stevenson sees tackling inequality as existential, arguing we are inexorably sliding into neo-Dickensian squalor.
Never mind that, as Christopher Snowdon points out , income inequality has ‘fallen significantly’ since 2008 and the share of wealth held by the very richest has ‘barely changed since 1980 when it hit an all-time low’.
Anyway… Gary’s plan?
A wealth tax.
Specifically, a two per cent tax on wealth of over £10million, which he claims will raise £24 billion a year and allow ordinary people to claw back some of the assets currently being hoarded by the bastard rich.
How to Get Filthy Rich is essentially an extended monologue for his wealth tax, laced with a series of stagey interviews.
Stevenson goes for a walk with his dad, talks to his old headteacher about the threat inequality poses to democracy, and has some shirty exchanges with a landowning, ruddy-faced aristo and a penthouse-dwelling Reform donor.
It’s classic Gary.
The beanie-wearing 39-year-old is markedly adolescent both in his politics and flashes of emotional incontinence.
At one point, he even weeps on camera, while a doctor reels off the numbers about diminished NHS capacity.
Those who have followed Stevenson’s vertiginous rise, through a string of viral clashes on TV and podcasts, will be well aware of the shtick.
He waves around his status as a trained economist and former high-flying currency trader at Citibank and, when challenged on the details and arguments, he bashes his opponents over the head with tales of hardship from his native east London, where his friends ‘can’t feed their kids’.
No doubt, it’s tough out there for many.
But despite being given ample opportunity, he has failed to explain how his wealth tax would help them.
Or even if it would work at all.
Stevenson strangely fails to land a blow on any of his more critical interviewees.
But he really comes a cropper when sitting across from Dan Neidle, a tax lawyer and another unlikely social-media sensation.
Neidle slams wealth taxes as ‘claptrap’, insisting those who peddle this easy answer should be ‘ashamed of themselves’.
He corrects Stevenson’s misconceptions about a report on wealth taxes, all with the air of a despairing university tutor.
He notes that annually calculating individuals’ wealth – squirrelled away in all manner of places – would be a costly, bureaucratic nightmare for the state that would lead the rich to up sticks anyway, even more so than they are already doing.
Then comes the killer blow: ‘You are unable to separate your emotional reaction to inequality from a rational assessment of the best tools for it.’
I’m almost impressed that Gary allowed this to make it into the final edit.
It is devastating.
You need not be a free-market ideologue, hankering for a nightwatchman state, to see wealth taxes for what they are: the policy equivalent of a virtue-signal, emotionally satisfying but ultimately pointless.
Even if the Treasury somehow managed to rake in Stevenson’s £24 billion, which it wouldn’t, this would cover the interest payments on the national debt for a full two months .
Meanwhile, our sluggish growth, eye-watering indebtedness and sky-high energy prices would remain stubbornly intact.
That so much hope has been pinned on a wealth tax shows the low horizons of today’s leftists.
Confronted with a decaying economy, they are resigned only to sharing the shit around more evenly, rather than creating the conditions for the material abundance – ‘plenty for all’ , as Sylvia Pankhurst put it – that socialists once saw as the working class’s right.
Has Gary finally been found out?
It’s fair to say How to Get Filthy Rich has not gone down well.
Even the Guardian panned it .
Indeed, the more we see of him the more his outlandish claims unravel.
And not just about a wealth tax.
He says he was once Citibank’s best trader in the world, an accomplishment none of his former colleagues can recall .
More recently, he has dubbed himself ‘one of the best, if not the best, inequality economists in the world’, despite publishing no more than one popular memoir.
He has survived off of phoney credentialism, as an economist and former trader, and faux authenticity, given he was born into a blue-collar family – even though he routinely gets his arse handed to him by non-economists and, in his Green-leaning politics and overgrown-student attire, is unlike any other white working-class person you are ever likely to meet.
But boosting the lot of the working class or contributing to the economic debate is not really the point of Gary Stevenson.
He speaks to a mood, a vibe, among the cultural elites – a lame anti-capitalist posture that is purely emotional, moralistic, Manichean; that feels good when you repeat its nostrums, but utterly useless when it comes to improving people’s lives.
This is why it doesn’t really matter if Gary’s sums add up or not, and why even the tremendous self-own that is How to Get Filthy Rich probably won’t leave a dent in his fandom.
Tom Slater is editor of spiked .
Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_ .
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Voice attribution · Experimental
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2speakers13%attributed speech973writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
17%flagged-word coverageDan Neidle
104 attributed words74% of attributed speech43% writer coverage
Politically Right Leaning Bias-21.4 pts
Writer 21%Dan Neidle 0%
Attempt to Sell a Product or Service-2.9 pts
Writer 2.9%Dan Neidle 0%
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Analysis
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