By John Pickard
The Times newspaper has just published its annual Rich List, showing how the other half lives. “Other half” is just a figure of speech, of course, because the list names only the richest 350 individuals and families in the UK and they represent only 0.0005% of the population.
Whereas the majority of working class people struggle on, week after week, and have to cope with increasing insecurity and uncertainty in their lives, for a vanishingly small proportion of the population, life just gets sweeter every day.
The top ten of this list are alone worth over £200bn. In one year their personal wealth has accrued in total by a cool £25bn. According to Tax Justice UK, the number of billionaires in the UK has increased from ‘only’ 15 in 1990 to 156 in 2025. “The scale of their wealth”, they explain, “is comparable to nation states’ economic output: the 350 richest individuals and families on the Rich List hold combined wealth of £772.8 billion, more than the GDP of countries like Belgium, Argentina or Ireland”.
The fifty richest families in the UK, according to Tax Justice, hold more wealth than half of the UK population. Research by The Equality Trust found that over half of total billionaire wealth comes from property, inheritance and the finance sector – which, as they point out, are “all sources of wealth that significantly contribute to society’s struggles”.
We won’t bore you with the details of who is on the list, but we might mention that coming in at joint 345th place for the first time is one Euan Blair, with a cool £350m to his name. This has nothing to do with him being the son of Tony and Cherie Blair, of course, and in any case, he is not as wealthy as Rishi Sunak’s family, with over £640m to their name.
£162bn could have been raised in the past 32 years
Tax Justice UK point out that “a wealth tax of 2% on fortunes worth over £10 million could raise £24 billion a year”. That alone would make a significant impact of public services if it was invested for social benefit. “Our friends at Patriotic Millionaires UK” they point out, “calculate a 2% wealth tax on just the UK tax residents on the Sunday Times Rich List could have raised over £160 billion for the UK over the past 32 years”.
In fact, according to the Guardian, the rich are getting away with paying less tax than they ought to, even under today’s very mild tax system. “Wealthy individuals in Britain”, it says “could be avoiding more tax than had been thought”.
The Guardian refers to an official government department report – the National Audit Office (NAO), which suggests that the wealthy are not being pursued vigorously enough to pay their taxes. According to the NAO, “billions of pounds in additional revenue could be collected from wealthy individuals”. They are simply not being chased vigorously enough because the tax authorities are not given the resources to do it, so there has been a big fall in the number of penalties.
No socialist or left activist would argue against greater taxation of the wealthy. But the real issue is not so much the wealth itself – although the disparity is in itself an obscenity – but the confiscation of the sources of that wealth. Public ownership of the steel, manufacturing, chemicals, property and finance and other sectors of the economy that lie behind the wealth would allow for national resources to be removed from the ‘market’ and rationally planned for social benefit.
The UK is the sixth most wealthy country on the planet, yet that wealth is skewed towards a tiny proportion of the population. Most workers live from month to month, or at worst, from day to day. Food bank use is at a record level. This so-called ‘Labour’ government is cutting benefits for disabled people and pensioners and has refused to abolished the two-child benefit cap, which is the main source of child poverty.
Public services and the NHS are on their knees and unable to cope, their staff overworked and underpaid. The whole thrust of the Keir Starmer/Rachel Reeves economic ‘strategy’ is to maintain the market system – capitalism – even though it is inherently rigged against working class people. Looked at from the point of view of the totality of national resources, skills and wealth, there is no reason whatsoever why a decent standard of living could not be provided for the entire population – with decent pay, good services and affordable homes for all. What stands in the way is an economic system set up to enrich those already rich.
