HOUSEHOLD debt has grown for the 26th consecutive month, reaching £1.47 trillion according to the Radical Centre for Social Justice (RCSJ).
Household debt has soared by more than £34 billion in less than three years, exceeding the UK national debt which was at £1.26 trillion in 2014 and according to the government will reach £1.36 trillion for the year 2015!
At the same time unsecured debt on credit cards, overdrafts and payday loans increased by £10 billion to more than £170 billion – the highest level in four years. The RCSJ found that more than 15 million people are borrowing in order to cover their bills and warned that 8.8 million people are now ‘over-indebted’ due to more than two years of increasing household debt.
Low-income households face the biggest challenges from Britain’s mounting personal debt, as they often have little choice but to take on high-cost short-term credit. Christian Guy, Director of the Radical Centre for Social Justice, said: ‘For more than a decade the CSJ has documented how problem debt is a cause of poverty, as well as a consequence. It damages families, affects mental health and makes it extremely difficult for people to get back on their feet.’
With the Tories still boasting that they are ‘One Nation’ enthusiasts it is useful to remember the ‘other world’ that the Sunday Times ‘rich list’ for 2015 recently shed some light on. It found that the total wealth of the richest 1,000 individuals and families in Britain has more than doubled in the last 10 years to £547bn.
Britain’s richest people are wealthier than ever before with a combined fortune of £518.975 billion, according to the ‘Rich List’. The 1,000 richest now own the equivalent of a third of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), with their combined wealth rising 15.4% on last year’s total of £449.654 billion.
Len Blavatnik, Warner Music owner, is Britain’s richest man with a £13.17bn fortune, while the Hinduja brothers, Gopi and Siri Hinduja, run him close on £13bn. The Queen, a multi-millionaire at the expense of the British working class and middle class, is now a relative pauper. She is now unable to find a place in the top 300 for the first time ever, despite the fact that her state welfare benefit has not been cut but has gone up by £10 million.
There are now 117 billionaires on the Sunday Times list, up from 104 in 2014, with 80 of them living in London. While the household debt of ordinary people is rising at an enormous rate, a personal fortune of £100m is now required to become one of the 1,000 richest people in the country, up £15m compared with last year’s entry point of £85m. In 1997, it took a fortune of ‘just’ £15m to join Britain’s richest 1,000 people.
According to the Office For National Statistics, the number of millionaires has risen by 50% in four years, making a mockery of the financial crisis. The truth is that there are two nations. One is the nation of the 1,000 families of the super rich, and the other ‘nation’ is the overwhelming majority of the population, the working class and the middle class who are getting into greater and greater domestic debt, and dread that the loss of their jobs, or savage welfare cuts, will see them into the gutter.
Then there are the working class and middle class youth who have nothing to look forward to, outside working as zero-hours contract slaves, or working for nothing as unpaid interns, who, if they get paid employment, will spend decades paying back their student loans.
On July 8, the Tory Chancellor Osborne is to have a second budget of the year. This post-election budget will unveil what the pre-election budget kept hidden, that is the detail of the massive cuts in all benefits, totalling many billions and the huge cuts in services, including the NHS, that are to be imposed on the working class and the middle class in order to keep the 1,000 super-rich families in the manner that they have become accustomed to.
There is only one solution to the crisis of this outmoded capitalist society which is reducing society to a ruling 1,000 families of the super rich, who have the state and its political parties at their disposal, and the millions of the poor, and the super-exploited who dread being driven down into the ranks of the poor.
This is a socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist order. This will expropriate the bankers and the bosses, abolish the public debt and bring in a planned socialist economy where production will be organised to satisfy the need of the working class and the middle class as a whole. This is the way forward.