Who Needs Billionaires? Not Us
Lloyd Russell Moyle, Labour MP for Brighton Kemptown, stirred up a storm when he declared, “I don’t think anyone in this country should be a billionaire.” But of course he’s quite right. And the super-rich are rich at the expense of the rest of us.
Labour’s devastating report, In the pockets of the few published this week, shows how well the mega-rich have been doing under the Tories. We have 151 billionaires in this country. 48 of them have made total donations of £50m to the Conservative Party. For them it was money well spent. This is what they got or will get by 2023-24 in return if the Tories stay in power - nearly £100bn in total:
· £86 billion handed out through successive cuts to corporation tax
· £5.5 billion from steep cuts to capital gains tax
· £5.6 billion in inheritance tax giveaways
· £1.2 billion from cuts to income tax for the very wealthiest
Labour’s report goes on:
“While these super-rich individuals are gifting tens of millions of pounds, the Conservative government is on course to hand out almost £100 billion in tax breaks and corporate giveaways by 2023/24.”
Is this corruption of the political process? if not, it comes remarkably close
John McDonnell explained the reality of the gap between us and these billionaires:
“If someone gave you £1 every 10 seconds, it would take you more than 300 years to become a billionaire.
“Someone on the national minimum wage would have to work 69,000 years to get paid £1 billion and a newly qualified nurse would have to wait 50,000 years.
“No one needs or deserves to have that much money, it is obscene.”
Who are these billionaires? One source of information on the mega-rich is the Sunday Times Rich List. The 2019 issue puts Jim Ratcliffe at number three, ‘worth’ £2.9bn. He owns 60% of the shares in the chemical giant Ineos, formerly part of BP. Ineos posted profits of £2.28bn in 2018. Ratcliffe’s stake in the company is valued at £18bn. He also owns two super-yachts, hotels and a football club - Lausanne-Sport. Earlier this year Ratcliffe was knighted, presumable for the virtue of being very rich. He showed his gratitude by fleeing to Monaco so he wouldn’t have to pay UK tax.
Since 1980, the share of income earned by the top 1% in the UK has generally been rising, peaking to 13% in 2015. When we talk about millionaires and billionaires we are trying to measure their wealth - how much the assets they own in total are worth, not just income - how much money comes in over a period of time such as a year.
Wealth in Great Britain is even more unequally divided than income. It is also the case that the rich go to great lengths to conceal their wealth from the tax authorities, so estimates of wealth inequality will tend to underestimate the gap.
In 2016, the Office for National Statistics calculated that the richest 10% of households hold 44% of all wealth. The poorest 50%, by contrast, own just 9%. More than that, for the UK as a whole, the World Inequality Database found that the top 0.1% had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9%. One in a thousand own nearly one tenth of the entire wealth of Britain!
The existence of this gulf of inequality among people in Britain is not just obscene, as John correctly calls it. As a matter of simple arithmetic it means that, if some are super-rich, others are very, very poor - much poorer than anyone should be in the sixth richest country in the world.
It is difficult to assess the impact of poverty on people’s livelihoods. It is impossible to show statistically how it stunts people’s lives and hopes. But we know it does just that. One attempt to measure the effect is by the Social Metrics Commission. There are technical problems in measuring poverty, but there is broad agreement with the SMC’s figures. They found for 2017-18:
An estimated 14.3 million people are in poverty in the UK
8.3 million are working-age adults, 4.6 million are children, and 1.3 million are of pensionable age
Around 22% of people are in poverty - 34% of children
Just under half (49%) of those in poverty are in “persistent poverty” (people who would also have fallen below the poverty line in at least two of the last three years)
Working-age people in poverty are increasingly likely to be in working families.
There you have it. Rich and poor in Tory Britain. Time for Labour to end it.
