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The City trader turned wealth tax campaigner Gary Stevenson has announced he is quitting the YouTube channel that made his name, citing health concerns.
His announcement, in a 48-minute address to camera, came after a mixed reaction to a televised documentary that brought him to a wider audience but drew some scepticism from left-leaning tax experts as well as more rightwing critics.
Stevenson, whose weekly YouTube channel Gary’s Economics took off during the Covid pandemic and grew to 1.64 million subscribers, posted an abridged 18-minute signoff on social media on Sunday morning entitled “It’s time to say goodbye”.
He said it would be the last weekly video, saying they had become “harder and harder as he had got more tired”.
The former City trader, born in 1986 in east London, came to wider prominence through the channel and his published memoir, Trading Game, in which he described how he made millions as a Citibank employee in the years after the financial crisis.
Retiring with burnout and disillusioned by the City, the self-styled anti-inequality campaigner argued for a 2% tax on individual wealth over £10m, which he said would raise £24bn a year for the Treasury.
Stevenson has been an influential online voice in raising awareness of inequality and linking it to falling living standards, predicting the rises in the cost of living and warning about the danger to society of constant accumulation by the growing billionaire class.
However, a Channel 4 documentary released last month, How to Get Filthy Rich with Gary Stevenson, in which he took his arguments to those who would incur the tax, was poorly received.
The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan wrote that the presenter was “outdone and undone by almost all of his interviewees … left floundering, without convincing comebacks”, concluding that it was “a faintly embarrassing waste of time”.
The expert tax lawyer and investigator Dan Neidle told Stevenson “to separate your emotional reaction to inequality from a rational assessment of the best tools for it” and described his plans as “populist claptrap”.
A slightly more sympathetic review in the Telegraph said Stevenson had “all the traits of the self-aggrandising online influencer class … so used to addressing his followers straight down the camera that engaging in debate with people of differing views leaves him floundering”.
Despite the reception to the documentary, Stevenson’s proposal for a wealth tax is gaining traction. The new prime minister, Andy Burnham, is fielding growing calls to increase taxes on the ultra-rich.
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A proposal to tax the 1,000 UK households with wealth of more than £100m could raise £10bn, according to one recent study. Last week ex-footballer Gary Lineker was among 120 other millionaires who wrote an open letter in favour of a wealth tax, urging Burnham to tax them more, saying “we can afford it”.
Stevenson gave some notice of his intentions in a Newsnight interview when the documentary aired earlier this month. He told the BBC he was quitting public conversation, saying: “It’s tiring. I do this because I don’t want this country to go down the toilet. Living standards are going to get worse … You cannot have a situation across [Britain and] the western world where the working class, the middle class and the government all very rapidly lose all of their wealth to 1% of people.”
However, the valedictory video on Gary’s Economics suggested that, after a break in Japan, he might make a return to public life in some form. Stevenson said he was now looking at a podcast format and did not rule out doing more videos on a monthly basis.
He said: “The very richest people in the world are going to fight this … We need a big chunk of the population to understand that living standards are falling because of rising inequality.”
Stevenson ended by saying: “I cannot be the only educator on this. We need to accept this will not be a short-term battle ... And I need to rest.”
