Gary Lineker has joined more than 100 other UK-based millionaires in signing an open letter urging Prime Minister Andy Burnham to raise taxes on extreme wealth, prompting accusations of hypocrisy from Conservative and Reform politicians who note that nothing stops signatories paying more tax voluntarily right now.
The “Proud to Pay” letter, organised by campaign group Patriotic Millionaires UK, states: “We want you to tax us. We can afford it,” and calls for higher levies on wealth rather than income.
Other notable signatories include musician Brian Eno, director Richard Curtis, and Gary Stevenson, a former City trader turned campaigner.
Lineker, who has a reported net worth of around £30m, said:
“Our fantastic country deserves all of us to get behind it. I’m proud to stand with people across the UK who want to live in a more equal society.”
He added that “paying your fair share is a basic British value” and that the richest “can do more and most want to.”
However, Conservative ministers have warned that such policies “always end up harming the worst-off.” A Conservative spokesperson said:
“If you keep raising taxes on top of everything else, you’ll just see more millionaires leaving the country. These are often the entrepreneurs and business owners who create wealth in the first place, and they do far more for Britain being taxed fairly here and reinvesting here than they would sitting on a spreadsheet in Monaco.
Thousands of British millionaires have already left the country since Labour took office. Chase away more, and it’s the whole country that ends up worse off.”
Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick also dismissed Lineker’s letter as “virtue signalling,” saying:
“If Gary Lineker and co. want to pay more, they should write a cheque to the Treasury today – no one’s stopping them.”
HM Treasury confirms this route exists: members of the public can make voluntary donations, with no minimum or maximum specified.
Patriotic Millionaires’ counter-argument is that individual donations don’t solve a collective-action problem, one person overpaying raises negligible revenue and does nothing to change the system, whereas a change in law applies to everyone in that wealth bracket equally. The group says its own polling found 75 per cent of UK millionaires support higher taxes on themselves.
Separately, some commentators have pointed to Lineker’s past IR35 battle with HMRC as evidence of inconsistency. For years, from 2013 to 2018, the taxman pursued him for £4.9 million in income tax and National Insurance, arguing that the partnership he’d set up with his then-wife to channel his BBC and BT Sport earnings was little more than a way of avoiding tax an ordinary employee would have to pay. Lineker didn’t quietly settle. He fought it, all the way to a tax tribunal, and in 2023, he won outright, escaping the bill entirely.
Lineker left the BBC in May 2025 after a controversy over a social media post about Israel’s military response, and now earns his income primarily through Goalhanger, the podcast company behind “The Rest Is…” franchise, which he co-founded in 2018.
Main Image: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
