Only weeks before publishing his attack on Gary Stevenson, Konstantin Kisin opened the invitation-only, billionaire-backed Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London with an appeal to responsible citizenship and the duty to remember that political opponents are human.
Now, as Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens in theatres, Kisin’s column plays like an old scene. Demodocus, the blind bard, sings of the sacrifices of Troy before the Phaeacians, the civilised islanders Homer places “far from those who toil.” They are moved. Odysseus, who bled for that story, hides his face and weeps. They enjoy the song. He carries its cost.
Kisin opens his column with the same lovely ode to civility: treat opponents “as human first and wrong second.”
Then Gary Stevenson enters the hall, and the music stops.
The irony is hard to miss. From the safety of his Triggernometry studio, the very place he warns others not to tear people down, Kisin does exactly that in his video takedown, The Rise and Fall of Gary's Economics, the on-screen version of his Substack column.
Stevenson is condemned in his absence. He is called a “character,” “the Greta Thunberg of tax,” a man whose “brain short-circuits.” He is lumped in with Candace Owens and Andrew Tate, three inconvenient voices waved away as performers in a single stroke. His convictions are reduced to envy, his credentials ignored, and Kisin signs off not by answering the argument but by savouring “the complete implosion of his credibility.”
This is not treating a man as human first and wrong second. It is making him contemptible first so that he need not be heard.
It is the false civility of Scheria, the sheltered island kingdom of the Phaeacians.
Scheria is no paradise, though it looks like one. It is Homer’s warning: the height of human sophistication, and the ease with which it slides into evasion.
These Phaeacians have splendid halls, abundant orchards and ships that cross the sea without oarsmen. Their manners are flawless. Their civility appears complete.
But their civility is a luxury good. It costs them little because they live apart from the suffering gripping every other shore in Homer’s world. They can admire courage without being required to show it. They can be moved by sacrifice while someone else bears the wound.
And when their civility finally asks something of them, it is punished. The one time the Phaeacians act at real cost, ferrying the shipwrecked Odysseus home, Poseidon—their divine parent and patron—turns their great ship to stone within sight of their own harbour. The lesson of the island is severe: sympathy is admired, songs of suffering are welcome, but action carries a price. So the safest civility is the kind that never leaves the hall.
Worse still, the Phaeacians were once refugees themselves, driven from their first home by the Cyclopes. Having escaped danger, they turned the memory of their own rescue into insulation rather than obligation. They pulled the ladder up behind them.
That is the true charge against a certain kind of elite. They convert hard-won security into a wall, then lecture those still struggling in the water about responsibility.
Noblesse oblige once meant something costly: that great wealth carried a debt to those without it, to be paid in opportunity, security and a fair share of what the country produces, not in fine words and noble phrases. That duty has been quietly discarded. What remains is the standing without the sacrifice that once justified it.
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship risks becoming just such a place. Much of what they say about liberty, virtue and renewal is true, and some of their voices have rightly named the young being locked out of home and asset ownership. But the arrow of responsibility has a suspicious habit of pointing downward, from those with wealth and influence towards those with neither.
True civility is not silence, politeness or deference to power. It is the courage to speak hard truths without denying another person’s humanity. The ancient civic tradition began with a deeper truth: citizens belong to one another, and public life must serve a common good.
When wealth and power are deliberately concentrated at the expense of fellow citizens, naming that wrong, and seeking to remedy it, is not incivility. Refusing to hear it is.
Stevenson is that test.
Be Precise About the Wreck
I hold no brief for every claim Gary Stevenson makes. His documentary may have flaws. Even the Guardian, no enemy of a wealth tax, found the film a lost opportunity. His proposed remedies are open to challenge, and a wealth tax is difficult to design well.
But Kisin takes criticism of the proposed cure and uses it to dismiss the diagnosis.
The messenger is imperfect, therefore there is no message.
Stevenson’s argument is sharper than Kisin allows. Wealth is not simply drifting upwards by accident. His charge, made plainly and repeatedly, is that it is being transferred there by design, through decisions about taxation, housing, finance, privatisation and whose interests governments choose to protect.
This is not envy talking. It’s the statistics. In Britain the wealthiest one percent now hold as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the country combined, according to the Office for National Statistics. The four richest Britons hold more than the poorest twenty million, according to Oxfam.
This is now the lived reality across Western democracies.
And it is not a modern complaint. It is the oldest warning in political thought.
Aristotle, who all but invented the study of politics, wrote that everywhere inequality is a cause of revolution, and that no state stands for long when a few grow enormously rich while the many are left with nothing. The health of a city, he argued, rests on a broad and secure middle, neither desperate nor dangerously powerful. The very rich, he warned, become neither willing nor able to submit to authority. Strip away the middle, let ownership pool at the top, and you do not get order. You get the conditions for upheaval.
Kisin speaks of renewing the West. This is the West’s own founding wisdom, and Stevenson is the one repeating it.
Ordinary people do not need a documentary or an economics degree to recognise it. They see it in homes they can no longer afford, rents that consume their incomes, wages that no longer build security, public assets sold into private hands, and inheritance becoming the price of entry into the property-owning class.
They work, but ownership moves further away.
This is not merely a widening gap between rich and poor. It is the concentration of ownership, and therefore power, in fewer hands.
That is what the island does not want to hear.
It is willing to discuss national decline, responsibility, productivity, civility and even compassion, provided no one asks who profits from the decline, who acquires the assets or who wrote the rules.
Stevenson asks that forbidden question. So Kisin attacks the man asking it.
A Working-Class Hero is Something to Be
John Lennon’s song of that name, “a working-class hero is something to be,” was a warning, not a tribute. The climb, he sang, asks a price: to reach the top you must “learn to smile as you kill,” to trade your conscience for a seat at the table. That is the bargain. Stevenson reached the top and refused it. He kept faith with the people he came from instead, which is the only thing that ever earned the title.
Kisin writes that Stevenson does not understand basic economics.
Consider who he is describing: the son of a postal worker from a low-income home in East London who earned his way into the London School of Economics, took a master’s in economics at Oxford, and spent years as an interest-rate trader at Citigroup.
To say Stevenson does not grasp economics is not an argument. It is a smear, and one aimed precisely because his command of the subject is among the highest formal training the field offers.
Kisin’s other charge is vanity: that Stevenson shows “the complete absence of modesty” and crowned himself “the best trader in the world.” But consider what that sneer ignores. When you say what the powerful would rather not hear, no institution promotes you. You have to make your own case, loudly, because the gatekeepers who once opened their doors will not speak for you now. What looks like ego is often just a countercultural voice doing the only thing left to it: refusing to wait for a permission that will never come.
And that is why many regard him as a working-class hero. Not because he is always right, but because he learned how the machine worked, profited from it, and then turned to warn the people locked outside it. Millions recognise the reality beneath his argument: they work harder, pay more and own less. Calling that recognition envy does not make it disappear.
The question remains: who owns the country that everyone is being asked to rebuild?
Robin Hood and the Sheriff
Kisin’s cleverest turn concerns Robin Hood.
Stevenson imagines himself taking from the rich to help the poor, Kisin says. But Robin Hood robbed the Sheriff of Nottingham, a tax collector, so the legend is really a warning against grasping government and high taxes.
It is clever. It is also the opposite of the story.
The Sheriff is not hated because he collects taxes. He is hated because he serves Prince John, who is seizing the wealth and power of the realm while the rightful king is away. The Sheriff is the muscle of a usurping elite. He bleeds the poor not to fund the common good but to enrich the men who have captured the country in the king’s absence.
That is the point Kisin steps over. Robin Hood does not fight taxation. He fights a ruling class that has turned public power into private plunder, and he does it in the name of a rightful order they have displaced.
This is also the older story, the story of The Odyssey itself. A house overrun by men who feast on the commons. The stewards who should protect it have gone over to the takers. The rightful owner, Odysseus, is treated as a stranger at his own door. The tale does not end until the house is reclaimed and the suitors are put out.
And Homer does not offer this as entertainment. For nearly 2,700 years the poem has asked the same thing of everyone who hears it. The journey home is not merely a voyage across water. It is the harder passage back to a rightful order: to come home, to face what has seized your city, and to restore the justice that was there before the takers came. That is the summons beneath the whole poem, and it is the one Stevenson is answering.
He is not asking to loot anyone. He is pointing at the hall full of men devouring a country’s wealth and asking the question the comfortable would rather not hear: whose house is this, and by what right do they sit in it?
That is not envy. It is the demand that a captured country be returned to its citizens.
Kisin invokes his Soviet childhood as proof of where envy and confiscation can lead. His warning deserves respect. Regimes have crushed freedom and ruined prosperity while claiming to serve the common good.
But it does not follow that every attempt to restrain concentrated wealth is tyranny, or that every demand for economic justice is envy.
You need not share Stevenson’s politics, or his proposed remedies, to see that dismissing him this way was unjust, and that the question beneath his work still stands.
So, Konstantin, human first and wrong second, as you asked and as I mean it: you are a gifted singer, and much of what you say about civility is true.
But Gary Stevenson has not been “found out.” He has been criticised, sometimes fairly and sometimes cheaply. His warning remains unanswered.
Engage him. Then answer the question at the heart of his argument:
How can ordinary citizens once again own a meaningful share of the country they are told to save?
That is not envy.
It is responsible citizenship.
Diane Kalen-Sukra is the author of the bestsellers Lead with Civility: A Handbook for Uncivil Times and Save Your City: How Toxic Culture Kills Community & What To Do About It, and the founder of Kalen Academy. In 2026, she was named a global Top Thinker in Local Government by the UK’s Local Government Information Unit (LGIU) for “catalysing a movement to renew civility and trust in public life.”