Was it that Mayfair launch of bottles of Bollinger at £350 a pop? Was it flicking through glossy newspaper supplements with their pages of hideous watches costing hundreds of thousands? No, surely last week’s top shocker was watching both Shell and BP CEOs’ pay double to about £10m each, profiting from the slaughter in Ukraine.
These budget-week reflections, amid a wave of overdue strikes, echo a recent report by the FT’s astute data-cruncher John Burn-Murdoch, that “Britain and the US are poor societies with some very rich people.” The tyranny of averages hides the way we live now, though any reader of this paper, or indeed the FT, will have a weary sense of deja vu about our grotesque and economically dysfunctional inequality: earnings for the top 1% have accelerated since the start of the pandemic. UK plutocrats rank proudly fifth in the world for mega-wealth, but our poor have 20% less than the poor of Slovenia.
