Ed Hates Me…

I used to clean toilets, 10 years before I started a hedge fund. Yes our office is in Mayfair. From when I was a child in Armley, Leeds, at a State school overlooked by Armley Prison, I had seen ‘Mayfair’ on the Monopoly board and I aspired.
What’s wrong with aspiring Ed? And I achieved. But like most ‘successful’ people, I remember poverty and know I am lucky and I, like every hedge fund manager and private equity manager, does all we think fair to help those in need. But we can’t do that if we don’t aspire. We can’t do that if we can’t build our businesses.
You hate us because you think we’re rich. Well I’m not. I’m a small business owner. And there is nothing wrong with aspiring, with being a small business owner. And you know what we hedge fund and private equity fund managers do? We get our rich friends to donate money to charities, we get banks like Barclays to do it.
Yes, some want to create wealth. But we don’t sit at night looking at it, and then laughing at the rest of society. We help others. You don’t have a monopoly on being caring, in fact, I’m not sure you even have a claim at all Ed.
When you demonise hedge fund managers, you are just demonising small business owners, all people who aspire. What Ed and Labour don’t like is people who are not dependent on the State. They don’t want us hedge fund managers supporting the homeless, or widows, or orphans – they want to do it exclusively through tax and spend – so their votes are guaranteed.
If the Tories don’t have a landslide it’s because there are fewer people dependent on them. I don’t want to be dependent on you Ed.
And mine is a British company Ed. It earns money from foreigners by investing abroad and brings profits back to Britain. I live in Britain. You demonise me, you demonise Britons. I don’t dodge tax. I dodge how much I pay foreign governments by making sure as much as possible comes to Britain, back to where I and my company are resident –where I can use the money. But that’s too subtle to understand. Instead YOU make me want to become non-resident – remember the ‘will the last person to leave the country, turn off the lights’headline in 1997 – that’s how you divide society.
Yes there are some rich greedy tax dodging people. There are also some lazy refusing to work people too. Neither deserve our sympathy.
Remember it is us, the entrepreneurs who create the companies, that pay the corporation tax, that employ the people that pay the income tax, that pay the national insurance and contribute to pensions. Without us the job creators, the business owners, you run out of the other people’s money you are so keen to spend.