Super rich slammed by carpet tycoon for fleeing London to avoid paying UK taxes

A leading London businessman has torn into the super rich for leaving the capital to live abroad and avoid paying UK taxes.To those who had already left Britain, he urged them to return.Lord Harris founded the Carpetright chainPA MediaThe peer, who made a multi-million pound fortune building nationwide chains of carpet stores including Carpetright, argued that wealthy bosses should contribute to Britain’s economic revival. “They should pay our taxes.”He added: “You should think of the UK, and you should think ‘we've got to make the UK great again,’ and that's the only way we do it. “If they all leave, we cannot make it great again. “We need them, and I'd like to see a lot of them come back,” he explained, taking a swipe at Government tax rises.The peer founded Carpetright, starting from one store in East London and a warehouse in Barking, and at the age of 84 still works in his carpet shops.“I love serving people,” he said. “If you said to me, ‘what's your favourite job of everything?’ it's serving in a shop."Arsenal director Lord Harris of Peckham before the Premier League match between the north London club and Chelsea at the Emirates Stadium in March last yearGettyHe denied that Britain’s high streets are a “lost cause” due to the switch to online shopping and called for a return of free parking to revive them. The peer, who has dyslexia and left school at 15 with just one 'O' level, in maths, after his father died from cancer aged 39, recalls how he built a business empire, initially shop by shop. Read MoreIt now includes some 59 primary and secondary schools in London and Essex.He told how then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher approached him in the late 1980s to turn around a struggling comprehensive in south London, Sylvan School, in Crystal Palace.“The Prime Minister called me in and said, ‘Philip, I'd like you to run a school.’ And my exact words (were), ‘Margaret, I know nothing about schools’,” he recalled. “She said, ‘But you know about business.’" Margaret Thatcher asked Lord Harris to rescue a struggling schoolPA ArchiveThe GCSE pass rate at the school was 9% but within three or four years it hit 52%.It became “the most improved school in the country, and instead of nobody wanting to go to it, we were getting 3-4,000 people applying for 180 places,” he added.By 2002, 92% of students were achieving 5 or more A-C grades.The turnaround at the school, he explained, was down to: "Freedom, freedom, freedom to do what they want." He stressed that the Harris Westminster Sixth Form College, established through an agreement in 2013 with the private Westminster School, now sends more students to Oxford and Cambridge than some elite schools."Fantastic - can you imagine...we take children from working class families, 40% on free meals...is that success?" he said.