A quiet week in Davos should be a warning to the global elite

Nobody who’s anybody is in Davos this week and, as usual, neither am I. World leaders from Donald Trump to Narendra Modi declined to attend the annual super-elite World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps, while the UK was represented chiefly by Sir David Attenborough and a giant Union-Flag banner across the front of the Belvedere Hotel proclaiming — incongruously, you might think, given IMF warnings about what a no-deal Brexit might do to global growth — ‘Free trade is great’.

My own excuse was that I’m too busy at home rehearsing the role of a wickedly exploitative landlord in a spoof Victorian melodrama called Her Honour for Tenpence. And that’s apposite, because although no one bothers with the actual Davos agenda (a load of blah about ‘Globalisation 4.0’), the meeting has provided another peg for Oxfam, the aid charity turned hard-left provocateur, to steal headlines by publishing a chilling attack on the sins of the global rich.

This year’s bulletin offers the eye-catching factoid that while the poorest half of humanity got poorer last year, the world’s 2,208 billionaires got collectively richer by $2.5 billion a day. Closer to home, it claims (on the basis of ONS data) that the poorest 10 per cent in the UK ‘are now paying a higher proportion of their incomes in tax than the richest 10 per cent’ — after taking account of VAT and other indirect levies. Oxfam’s solution to these rising inequalities is a Piketty-style global wealth tax which if charged at 0.5 per cent on the planet’s richest percentile would fund education and healthcare on a vast scale.