Nigel Farage and 5 million pounds

 For some time I have wanted to write about the different value money has to different people. My work with Norwich Credit Union made it very clear that people have no concept of how much others earn and why £5 can be a lot of money to some whist £5 million or almost trivial to some. Most people in Britain are somewhere in the middle. 

The fact that Nigel Farage was given five million pounds should seem like a huge amount of money to many people. If you earned £50 thousand  a ear it would take 100 years to earn 5 million. How many of Nigel Farage's constituents earn even £30 thousand a year. Why does Christopher Harborne want to give so much money to  Nigel Farage. Recall this was not a gift to Reform, the political party, but a personal gift to one man, a gift he does not have to pay tax on. So Farage has just been given the equivalent to a hundred years salary at a not unreasonable wage.

This leads to the question of why Mr Harborne would give away this apparently large some of money. According to Wikipedia he is worth over £18 billion. This means that Harborne has given away less that 0.00001% of his wealth. So presumably he wouldn't even notice.For some earning £50,000 that is less that £15, a couple of pints in a London pub. So what does Harborne get for his money?

Notice that he didn't give the money to the Reform party so it is not just about politics. So why would Harborne, who lives in Thailand but maintains a house in the UK so he can donate money to political parties, want for his money. Why make it a personal gift, is he keeping Farage as his own personal poodle. A well trained dog who rolls over and has his tummy tickled as a reward for performing some trick at his maters request. Or perhaps the treat is just another million somehow gifted to Farage. 

One conclusion from that story is that Farage cannot be trusted, he will jump whichever way his master commands.  The other is that most economics does not seem to understand that £5 million is an enormous sum to some and trivial to others. This should really have an enormous impact on the way politicians and economists see the way taxation and benefits affect different people.