How do you do?

How can I describe myself? A typical self-employed businessman who, because I loved what I did for a living, became pretty successful, employing up to 30 staff and trading for 20 years, paying six figures each year to the Inland Revenue and VAT departments. It seems greed overtook the authorities and, deciding that if I was paying so much maybe I could be paying even more, investigations were started by both the Inland Revenue and the VAT department. They poked and prodded, cranked me up until my stress levels were off the chart and took up so much of my time that my business hardly got a look-in.

Insinuating that I was somehow deliberately withholding something from them, the VAT started making veiled threats about being charged with culpable fraud and jailed for 7 years if they considered it appropriate, pushing me into such a state that I ended up in a mental hospital for three months. My marriage had collapsed, my home and all my possessions had been seized. I was made to sign a form relinquishing my art collection, my steeplechase horses, my vehicles, in fact everything except the items contained in a printed list that was handed to me. Ironically, my wedding ring; 2 suits, 4 pairs of socks and so on.

I was suddenly broke and, in spite of being found innocent of any fraudulent activity, it was made clear that I had signed everything away and nothing whatsoever would be returned. For ranting in fury at this legitimised robbery in the VAT office, I was taken back to the 'funny farm' in a straightjacket!

Upon my release I had a meeting with my employees, some of whom had worked with me since day one, and the staff offered to continue, unpaid, until the business was up and running again but I couldn't see the point of risking building up another life in the UK just to have it removed again, so I made the decision to leave Britain.

My team never saw a dole queue, they were the best and were snapped up by my competition as I knew they would be. Within three months, while I was still planning my emigration, I was approached by an old friend to help him duplicate what I had built up to be a successful business. It was a pleasure to see him rocket in his business and, of course, to share in the extraordinary remunerations. All this happened twenty years ago.

The reasons I left the UK are, I hope, obvious. Bureaucrats meddling in businesses of which they have no understanding. The targeting of productive employers and the middle classes. The inherent dislike of success. The politics of envy and the salivating pursuit of cash cows. Today, you can add voter apathy, political correctness and fiscally inept politicians, most of whom have not the slightest idea of how to earn a living in the real world. I would not trust any of them to run a newsstand in Old Bond Street!

250,000 people emigrate from the UK every year. I find it hard to believe that these people are drug-and-alcohol-addled knife wielders or third generation welfare benefit recipients, nor extreme clerics teaching hatred and the beheading of anyone that disagrees with their faith. Most certainly not politicians, bureaucrats, civil servants or any other of the new political class that are paid to be slaves to political correctness.

No, the people who are leaving are the entrepreneurs who are willing to put their own money, not someone else's, into backing their belief in themselves. They are skilled, whether surgeons, doctors, mechanics, plumbers or teachers; the very people that build stability into the infrastructure of a society. They are certainly not afraid of work. These people have paid their taxes in England and seen them squandered on the biggest and most highly paid bureaucracy in Europe. They have watched a financially incontinent government hurl billions of pounds at the health, transport and educational systems, to no avail.