Tag: wealth

The Idea We Can All be Rich is a Vicious Deception

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (7.7.26), intentionally poking a sideways jab at Nigel Farage, his £5million bung from a billionaire, alongside many other dubious “donations” much in the news right now. I was encouraged by a Vox pop 10 second interview with a working class woman on BBC radio, saying “if someone gave me £5 million I’d take it…”, as f anyone was ever going to! Farage says “nothing to see here”, and indeed, his is the tip of iceberg of corruption for which he’s neither the first nor the worst. But he’s a far-right racist bigot, and his corruption should be made an example of, even if he and his followers think there’s “nothing to see here!”. Unbridled vicious Capitalism, very visible indeed.

The unexpurgated version here or read the printed version by expanding the pic below:

One million pounds is a lot of money. £5million is a lot more. Based on current UK tax and National Insurance rules, a worker employed full-time from age 18 to 67 (a 49-year career) will finish with lifetime earnings of just over £1m if they earn the National Minimum Wage, or £1.5m if they earn the average UK median full-time salary. £1million is a working class lifetime. 

The median UK household disposable income (after taxes and benefits) is approximately £37,000. Roughly 30% of UK households share an income below the minimum acceptable standard, well below the national median. Those households never see £1m in their entire lifetime.

And for those of us who earn a million or two in our lives, the fact is it mostly goes out again – we have to spend it all to survive. The lucky minority, investing in property, may accumulate a package by retirement age, much of which will be spent on our own health and social care in our final years, and what’s left may help the next generation. Working class wealth largely depends upon inheritance – it’s far harder to become wealthy and shift up a class by your own efforts.   

If you’re born into wealth, it’s a doozy! An investment of £1m in the UK will earn a return interest of between £30,000 and 75,000 per year, cash, about the same or more than the average income from working. One million pounds is a lot of money. Imagine the investment income of a billionaire (a billion is a thousand millions) or a trillionaire (a million million)!

The above is an explanation of why socialists call the working class “wage slaves”. The employer-class pay us to make money for them, only for us to have to pay them back to be fed (badly), watered (hmm, water companies) and housed (poorly, overall), with little or no personal agency except for a week’s holiday if we scrimp and save. And for this we have to do as we’re told, watch what we say, and serve “The Man”.     

Yet, as President Trump eulogised last week at his, albeit spartan celebration of the founding of the Great USA, the American, nee Capitalist, Dream is a back. The myth that we can all be millionaires is being sold to us again. We should aspire to millionaires, value and adore millionaires.

It’s here in the UK, too. we are expected to believe that millionaires are best placed to lead us and make decisions for us.  Most strangely, the far-Right MPs who receive millions of pounds in “donations” are targeting the poorest in the country for votes and extra-parliamentary support. There is a tradition here dating back to the first working class suffrage of 1867 – the wealthy bought the votes of ordinary men with bribes or jobs or gin. 

In return, MPs were bought by big businessmen seeking legal privileges and a competitive edge. Today, the proportion of multi-millionaire MPs in the House of Commons is over 50%, hidden but assessable, much higher than the population where fewer than 5% are millionaires.

When we read of a single politician, self-publicised as being “anti-Establishment”, receiving £5m from a billionaire and “millions” more from a billionaire convicted felon, his claims of being “a man of the people” must fall far short. Those who support what Trump stands for may argue that we need rich businessmen to run society because they know best how to manage “The System”

This is probably true. But why should we support this “System” that enslaves us? Britain is seen abroad as having one of the most corrupt Establishments in the world. The City of London is joked about as the western world’s laundry, cleaning wealth gained illegally – drugs, people trafficking, prostitution and illegal arms sales. As a direct consequence, the spending power of the working class in England has fallen by 20% since 2008 – when the wholesale corruption of the millionaire bankers and financiers cost us all very dearly. 

MPs routinely receiving bungs weds them to corruption as the condition of the status quo. We should expose and depose every single one of them. 

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A Harsher 2025

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year, and hoping for some mass revolt in 2025, here’s my last weekly comment column of 2024, in the daily Plymouth Herald (31.12.24). This has been a ghastly year, both in terms of personal health and global suffering, Gaza needing to remain at the forefront of our minds. And the local issues, the degradation of our services and of any accountable democratic framework, have to be challenged. I remain focussed on the greatest twin perils of climate catastrophe and nuclear warfare, but the cause of all remains the Capitalsit System, which has to be overthrown.

The unedited version here:

On the eve of a new year, hope lies with those campaigning for Peace with Social Justice. That is not the manifesto of any of our main political parties, hellbent on war and racial hatred.

Starmer’s Labour is organising for a 5% reduction in spending in all government departments, cheered-on by the Tories and only Trumped by Reform UK demanding more cuts, their propaganda financed by billionaires. The lesser parties can say what they wish, but they have no clout.

Only the people, assembled, en masse on the streets and in collective action across workplaces have the power to improve our collective future.

We are facing a harsher year ahead, Austerity Mark Two now declared. It’s not what the People voted for, but democracy and civil infrastructure are now in deficit if not bankrupted. The National Health Service in hoc to private US-based corporations, our education system scavenged by hedge-fund consortia, our housing ravaged by short-term profiteers investing in squalid tenements and over-inflated market rates.

One-in-three of our children are living in poverty, going to bed each night without having access to at least one of the essential components of healthy development. At least one-in-three of our older people live impoverished lives of isolation and loneliness. One-in-four women are suffering domestic violence, the pressures of this alienated existence creating the conditions for us to turn against each other in the quest for some power and control over the inner sense of powerlessness.

The working class is the majority. Those of us who, should we suddenly spend a year or more without employment income, suddenly dependent upon £80 a week welfare benefits, the mortgage or expensive rent no longer paid, would face homelessness or insecure dank accommodation, subsistence diets and a depressed monotone reality. We are at least three-quarters of the UK population, living with serious vulnerability.

There is more that unites us than divides. We may enjoy different recreational pursuits, cultural preferences and dietary habits, but we go to work to earn the crust and pursue our dreams. We experience the treadmill of the workplace, the middle-managers forced from above to demand ever more, the workforce driven into a self-defensive regime to protect ourselves from bullying. overwork and hopelessness.

The UK is the 7th largest economy out of 196 countries. Our gross domestic product is 4 times the size of the 1970s. We should all be on 3 day weeks with an income twice it’s current size, or more. Where’s all the money gone?

The world has 7 times the wealth compared with 1970. The average person is only 8% wealthier, the richest 0.01% are 4000% richer: Elon Musk was worth $2billion in 2012 (much of it inherited), in 2024 that had increased to $447bn; Jeff Bezos $18bn 2012 to $249bn in 2024; Zuckerberg $44bn in 2012, $224bn in 2024. The world’s wealth has poured upwards, not trickled down at all.

Our taxes have been sucked into corporations through the process of privatisation, producing big holes in our health, welfare and education funding. And more taxes have gone to the now-endless wars being pursued by the military-industrial complex of private arms companies making obscene profits alongside the transnational oil and gas corporations.

Starmer wants UK tax expenditure on the military to go up to 5% of GDP, hence the 5% cuts to everything else. Our welfare is being sucked dry by war and private greed. And now, no-one is predicting that life will get any better – the changes to climate are observably accelerating at such a rate that it is undeniable, only the causes and solutions argued about. We face local and global food shortages in the near future.

We need a radical transformation to survive. From any social analysis it is clear that the rich are too rich and the distribution of wealth in society too extreme. No-one needs or deserves a billion pounds or dollars. In fact, anything more than £5million must be an inexcusable amount of surplus personal wealth, spent only on a life of wasteful privileges and extreme extravagance at the expense of tens of thousands if not millions of others. We have to put human need before private profit, a cap on wealth and a profound level of redistribution to meet human needs in this new harsher world.

It will take a revolution.

May be an illustration of map, ticket stub, blueprint and text