by Mark Creaser – Entrepreneur
Andy Burnham became Britain’s ninth prime minister of the century a few days ago and he inherits half-baked plans on a wealth tax and an exit tax, a charge on the unrealised gains of anyone who leaves.
But for the digital-asset firms the City says it wants to keep, the number that matters is not a tax rate. It is a date. 25 October 2027, the day the UK’s new crypto regime finally switches on. In the UAE, where I live, it has been running for years.
Set the two side by side. In February, Parliament pulled crypto dealing, custody, stablecoins and staking inside the regulatory perimeter for the first time. The FCA published its final rulebook on 30 June. Firms can begin applying for authorisation on 30 September. The window shuts in February 2027. Nobody actually operates under the finished regime until October 2027.
You read that right. A founder choosing London today is being asked to commit staff, capital and a banking relationship to a regime that does not exist yet, on the understanding that it will, roughly fifteen months from now. That is not a regulatory framework. It is a save-the-date magnet to stick on the fridge.
And crypto is not the special case; it is the pattern. Successive prime ministers have promised an AI hub with the same fluency.
One government announced Britain’s first exascale supercomputer. The next cancelled it, £31m into the building meant to house it, declared Britain an AI superpower anyway, and re-announced the machine, smaller, a year later.
To be fair, there is now real movement: growth zones with real money attached, an electricity discount for data centres arriving in April 2027, a flagship campus opening in 2029. Even the good news is a save-the-date.
Dubai did the unglamorous work earlier. Its Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority is a dedicated crypto supervisor, not a subplot inside a larger one. It spent last year finishing its rulebooks and this year enforcing them. A licence there is not a certificate to frame. It is permission to trade in a market that already functions. The rules are hard, but they are finished. You can build on finished.
This is the part London underrates. For an early-stage firm, regulatory timing is not administrative detail. It is capital. You cannot raise against it, hire against it or get a bank to open an account on the strength of “we will be regulated, under a framework that goes live late next year.” I watched a founder put roughly that sentence to their lawyer. It closed the London option in about a minute. Certainty is a product. Dubai is selling it. Britain is still drafting it.
And Britain is now unsettling what certainty it had left. Since late last year the Treasury has been weighing an exit tax, a 20% charge on the unrealised gains of anyone who emigrates, projected to raise a couple of billion. In his first days in office, Burnham declined to rule it out, just as he declined to rule out restoring the 50p top rate.
Leave aside whether it would raise the money. A tax on leaving is, in practice, a tax on arriving. No serious founder builds a company somewhere they will be charged for one day moving it, and the fact that the idea is live at all tells them what they need to know about the ground beneath them. You do not stop an exodus by bolting the exit. You deter the people still outside, deciding whether to come in.
None of which makes Dubai the soft option, and the honest version of this argument concedes the reverse. The FCA’s caution will, in time, produce a regime with more case law and more institutional weight than a young authority can claim. If you are a global custodian with a thirty-year horizon, that patience may be worth the wait. But most firms making this choice are three years old and mid-raise, and they pick a jurisdiction the way you pick a runway: by how much of it they can see. London’s disappears into consultation papers.
There is a deeper version of the same problem, and Burnham’s arrival illustrates it. A company is a multi-year bet. The hire, the licence, the roadmap all assume the rules, and the people writing them, will still be there when the bet matures. Britain has now run through no fewer than seven prime ministers since 2016. Most promised stability. The latest did so on Monday.
This is, after all, the country that cancelled and reinstated a legislated corporation tax rise inside three weeks in the autumn of 2022, while getting through three prime ministers in two months. A tabloid livestreamed the middle one alongside a supermarket lettuce, to settle which would last longer. The lettuce won. Dubai has kept the same ruler throughout, watching the revolving door at 10 Downing Street while pursuing a single plan that outlasts them all.
You can feel the result here. The founders are everywhere: in the coffee queue, in the lift, filling the residents’ WhatsApp group, beavering away on laptops in the coffee shop when they would once have been at a desk in Shoreditch. There was no dramatic exodus. They left one quiet relocation at a time, while Westminster was still deciding what its rules should say.
The uncomfortable point for the City is that none of this is really about the quality of Britain’s rules. The FCA’s finished framework is a sensible one. The problem is time: the world moves fast, and it won’t wait while the UK sequences its reforms across three consultations and a two-year runway.
A rule a founder can build on today beats a better rule that lands in October 2027, and until the City treats speed and certainty as competitive advantages rather than afterthoughts, it will keep losing the firms it least expects to, and telling itself they left over tax.
They didn’t. They left for solid ground.
