Britain for the last decade has experienced a bleak paradox: rising child poverty alongside a dramatic increase in billionaire wealth. This inequality has been tolerated partly because greed has been rehabilitated as virtue. The Billionaire Britain report, published this week by the Equality Trust, reveals what many instinctively feel but few in parliament will admit: the UK economy has become a machine for the upward redistribution of wealth.
Using Sunday Times Rich List data, the report found that the 50 wealthiest UK families now own more than the poorest half of the population combined. Their opulence is no accident. It’s largely built on the labour and consumption of those 34 million other Britons. The gains of society are being hoarded by those least in need. There’s a lexicon that sells it all as “entrepreneurial spirit” and business dynamism. But the very markets that reward the wealthiest so handsomely are constructed and policed by the state. Governments entrench intellectual property rights, strengthen legal monopolies and write policies that benefit banks and asset markets.
