The World's Millionaires Really Love London

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Oh, wicked! Turns out London—England's capital city, a city of dust and pigeons and bus drivers loudly shouting "Oi!" at cyclists, a city of pomp and ceremony and extreme poverty and infinite pop-up restaurants, restaurants with residencies shorter than most flashmobs, if you remember those—is the number one destination for the world's second citizenship-seeking millionaires.

Let's just chew through the meat of this before we suck on the bones of the inevitable despair it will inspire: This is all according to a survey published this month that was conducted by wealth analysts New World Wealth and resettlement advisors Lio Global. Quite a lot of horrible shit in that sentence to hurdle over, is their not? "Wealth analysts," for when you have so much wealth you need to analyze it. "Resettlement advisors," for when you're so rich you can't move without a man in a suit charging you £100,000 [$155,000] to tell you where to go. And then, without irony, the company name "New World Wealth," an Illuminati reference so blatant it would be chucked out of an especially rough Yates's for being too aggressively flirtatious.

Anyway, the study tracked various high net-worth individuals (HNWIs) between 2000 and 2014 and gathered info on where they moved to and from, and found London was their primary destination. Sixty-one thousand HNWIs migrated from India in that time, with the majority going to the UK (and, by extension, London—I mean no disrespect, but if you're an international millionaire you're not going to move across the world to settle in Bracknell, are you?) Eight thousand South African millionaires emigrated in the same time period, again mainly to London. All in all, 125,000 millionaires moved to the UK in the first 14 post-millennial years, proving that a) it's easy to move here if you're rich and b) it's easy to buy property here, again if you are rich. Millionaires also moved to the US, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, and the UAE, but mainly London, because of all the manners and tax breaks and those little bikes you can hire outside Tube stations.

"The main reason people apply for a second residence or citizenship is to ensure freedom of global mobility and access, as well as security and wealth protection for their families," someone from Lio Global fucking barfed out of their awful mouth. "The majority of investors are typically looking towards the EU." They also gargled up some other garbage in between legitimately eating caviar and thinking champagne tastes good. This stuff is hard to read without getting both mad and bored at the same time, a curious compound emotion where you're angry but also wracked with a kind of chronic exhaustion, a deep-in-your-bones tiredness that—one assumes—you also feel before death, as life's inviolable miseries slash into you with their thousand little knives.

And so a vision of the future:

It is 2020, now. London is just a bunch of Lamborghinis slowly ramming into each other up and down the length and breadth of Oxford Street, gigantic Trump Towers-esque skyscrapers blot out the sun. We—the peons, the scum, the tax-paying, the vermin—have all been forcibly decamped to Leeds, since rebranded "Second London." The Queen's been moved on to Peterborough after being deemed too poor. Boris Johnson is still there, of course, in a crown now, his head deflated more into his Humpty Dumpty-esque body than ever before, tapdancing on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square—since tiled entirely with diamonds—while millionaires clap.

Gary Barlow is still there too, more waistcoat than man now, solemnly hitting a piano pedal with his big foot and playing millionaire-friendly ballads. A jump jet lands on top of Buckingham Palace. It is will.i.am, who is still trying to happen, welcoming a fresh batch of millionaires to the golden city.

"We have rooftop bars," will.i.am is saying, through the app-and-iPhone combination he replaced his voicebox with in 2018. "Flats in Canary Wharf start at £2M."

Peter Stringfellow welcomes the South African millionaires to Angels, where they are all administered grave and perfunctory £100,000 [$155,000] handjobs before David Cameron presents them all with British passports and MBEs. And slowly, without knowing it, every spark of life has slowly been strangled out of the city. London is little more than an endless matinee of We Will Rock You. It's basically just Victoria station, since Victoria station has grown huge and boundless and takes over most of the south-west of the city. It's an endless labyrinthine of Prets, where someone has built another Shard on top of the Shard, and nobody uses the Tube any more because they all have helicopters. And in west London, there is a street paved with literal gold on which recent graduates, rendered desperate by their poverty, are ceremonially killed in exchange for their family receiving a one-off payment of £800 [$1,240].

Anyway, London is dying. Millionaires are killing it. Come. Friendly. Bombs.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.