Hi ,
Last week, we predicted that there would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth about the plight of the super-rich upon the publication of this year's Sunday Times Rich List and, sure enough, the Spectator followed up right away with Michael Gove's opinion that Britain is now "inhospitable" for the richest (thanks to M Solomon for sending that in).
It's an interesting choice of wording that positions the UK as little more than a habitat for the delicate species of very wealthy people which is, unfortunately, exactly how the UK has functioned for several decades now. But in making the UK the perfect nest for a lesser spotted oligarch, have we affected the UK's other species? How hospitable is the UK for the rest of us?
We're in the Guardian this week talking about exactly this. The Sunday Times Rich List showed that billionaires in the UK now hold vast amounts of money; the richest two on the 2025 list hold more than the entire 1990 list combined. Just 33 of them have enough wealth between them to meet the entire cost of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and they'd each have £112m left over, which is probably more than any of us could spend in our lives.
More than that though, our analysis of the Sunday Times Rich Lists show how damaging this process of wealth accumulation at the top is for the rest of us. More and more wealth is drawn from property, inheritance, and finance, meaning that billionaires are doing no work at all to amass money, but are benefiting from the high rents and bills we pay. More billionaires draw their wealth from sources like oil and gas now, funding climate breakdown. Media and creative billionaires have seen their wealth explode despite the collapse of public service journalism.
It seems clear that the UK's richest are profiting from society's struggles.
Together, we've won massive support for plans to tax wealth and income from wealth, like the ones Ben Tippet suggests could have raised a national wealth fund of £325bn over the years of the Sunday Times Rich List; equivalent to £11,000 per household. Nearly 8 in 10 people in the UK now support this idea.
Now we need to win a shared understanding of how harmful this excessive wealth and inequality is to everyone's wellbeing. We've got a growing consensus that inequalities are causing serious damage, but we need this to spread further to start the deep, systemic change we need to fix this problem at the root. |
