This much we know. If Ed Miliband wins, he will reintroduce the 50p top rate of tax, impose a mansion tax on homes worth over £2 million and abolish rules enabling registered non-doms to cheerily reside in the UK and avoid tax on their overseas earnings. In other words, he’ll whack the rich. Whether the rich deserve to be whacked we have debated elsewhere. What hasn’t been discussed is whether our eagerness to whack the rich might not have an adverse impact on charitable giving, in particular donations to the arts?
One non-dom to consider is Sir Christopher Ondaatje. He personally put forward £3 million toward the wing that now bears his name in the National Portrait Gallery and in 2002 helped acquire Van Dyck’s ‘Portrait of Sir William Killigrew’ for the Tate by donating £100,000. He continues to endow the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ Ondaatje Prize for Portraiture (both annual awards distributing £10,000 a year each) as well as doing far more charitably besides.
In 1999, another non-dom, Sir Ronald Cohen, set up his R and S Cohen Foundation which, between 2005 and 2013, spent £50,000 on the National Theatre, £9,000 on the Philharmonia Trust, £5,000 on the Roundhouse, £13,250 on the Royal Academy of Music, £72,197 on the Royal Opera House and £40,000 on the UK Jewish Film Festival – the list goes on and on.
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