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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah

It’s not a rich list – it’s gone far beyond that. We need to talk about ‘extreme wealth’

Illustration

Once again, it’s the Hinduja family. Gopi Hinduja and his family, who run the Hinduja Group, are cited as Britain’s richest family in the latest Sunday Times rich list. The big story so far seems to be that their wealth has dropped to £35.3bn from £37.2bn the year before. But that story, and much of the discussion there will be this weekend, risks missing the real story. “Rich list” is barely the right description for the extreme wealth we should be talking about.

In 1989, when the Sunday Times first published its annual rich list, to be included someone would need to have 6,000 times the wealth of the average person in the UK. That’s already a pretty big gap – but this has now tripled to more than 18,000 times the average, according to a study by the University of Greenwich.

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