THE total wealth of the richest 1,000 individuals and families in Britain has more than doubled in the last 10 years to £547bn, the 2015 Sunday Times rich list survey has found.
So much for ‘we are all in it together’!
Britain’s richest people are wealthier than ever before with a combined fortune of £518.975 billion, according to this year’s Sunday Times 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 benefit 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.
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 despite the financial crisis.
In fact, the rich have become much richer because the working class has been forced to pay for the crisis of the capitalist system, bailing out the banks and then paying for the quantitative easing programmes, where trillions have been handed to the banks resulting in a boom in share prices, making the rich even richer, doubling their fortunes.
The working class and the middle class have not had the same experience
They have paid for the bosses’ boom with a 10% fall in wages, the slashing of housing and child benefits, the introduction of the ‘bedroom tax’, the over one million who now depend on food banks, with their children going to school in poor clothing and suffering from hunger, plus experiencing the mass evictions that are now taking place in London as the poor are decanted to make way for the rich to buy and develop properties!
The future for the working class and the middle class has already been spelt out by the Tories. This is that while the rich continue to double their money, the poor will have to bear over £50bn in cuts to try and pay off the huge government debt!!
We are definitely not all in it together.
In fact, the growing inequality is approaching pre-first world war levels with the richest 10% in Britain owning 44% of total national wealth, five times more than the poorest 50% of the population who collectively own 9%.
The figures for the share of national income are even more startling. The share going to those on the lower half of earnings has fallen by 25% since the 1970s (OECD) whilst the slice going to the top 1% has increased by 50%.
It was Marx who proved a century and a half ago that as capitalism expanded it would create a situation where the rich got ever richer while the poor got poorer with wages driven down to subsistence levels.
There is only one way to deal with this monstrous capitalist system that is driving society backwards towards its dissolution, through slumps, wars and civil wars.
This is to ‘expropriate the expropriator’ by organising a socialist revolution to replace backward capitalism with a socialist system where the bosses and bankers are expropriated and planned production to satisfy people’s needs replaces dog-eat-dog capitalism.
The WRP is standing seven candidates in this general election to drive home this message.
Vote WRP, and join it and the Young Socialists to build up the revolutionary leadership to lead the British socialist revolution as part of the world socialist revolution!
