OK. This just gets more and more bizarre. Brown said in his press conference today that many of the non-doms are nurses and won't pay the £25,000 levy. He added:

Only several thousand people are capable of paying the money that is being talked about and to most people in the tax industry and accountancy industry this is very well known.

Now I'm trying to stay open-minded on this one, but this is news to me, and I suppose I just about count as someone in the tax industry. Moreover, a tax adviser (who presumably does count) told me earlier: 'if there are only a few thousand, I must act for all of them.'