In April the Sunday Times published its guide to Britain’s super-rich persons. The list comprised the top 400 wealth-owners with assets between them of some £55 billion, roughly equivalent to the amount of revenue that the government will receive from income tax this financial year. It was stressed that the list was based on estimates of minimum wealth and the actual assets of the flush four hundred are probably worth much more.
At the top of the list, not surprisingly, is the Queen, who as head of state is said to be worth some £5 billion, of which at least £450 million is her own personal wealth (this makes a mockery of the paltry sums raised for charity by her and her family in an attempt to justify their parasitic-status).
The survey then goes on to rattle off a roll-call of revenue-reapers (of whom 25 percent possess an aristocratic title), along with the business or industry with which they are mainly associated, until we arrive at the relative paupers at the bottom who have only managed to amass a trifling £20 million each.
The list includes not only the famous and infamous; far from it. As you might expect there are the Richard Bransons, the Dukes, the smattering of pop stars; but the majority of names would be completely unknown to those of us who don't regularly make killings on the stock market or mount the occasional take-over bid for a multi-national corporation. No, most of these super rich supremos wouldn’t even stand out in a crowd, and yet they control huge businesses and properties and yield influence over millions of lives.
Significantly, the top three wealth-owners after the Queen have amassed their fortunes through food production and distribution, proving that selling people something they must have in order to survive is highly lucrative and certainly not sacrosanct in capitalism’s thirst for the divine dollar. Of course, not all fortunes are made through business. Many are acquired through inheritance, kept in the family so to speak, much as workers inherit a life of exploitation and drudgery from their parents. Some 45 percent of those surveyed were born to their riches, and can look forward to obtaining further revenue via rent, interest and profits.
In case you've been moved to rush to the sideboard to retrieve your investment portfolio in order to discover just how far you’re lagging behind in the assets race, it should be mentioned that some of our affluent tycoons have fallen on hard times and find themselves not quite so flush of late. For instance, spare a though for the embattled Duke of Westminster, who has seen the value of his assets fall from £3.5 billion to £1.5 billion since the bottom fell out of the property market. The Duke, who owns budget deficit-sized chunks of ultra-cache Mayfair in the heart of London, has also been clobbered by a recently introduced amendment to the leasehold law which means that tenants have the right to buy their freehold after 21 years. Despite this unforeseen "hardship”, the Duke hasn’t been dissuaded from splashing out on a £650,000 executive jet for commuting to London, but one does after all have to keep up appearances. Likewise, further down the table, poor old Cameron Mackintosh, a 46-year impressario, has seen the value of his theatre production company fall from £200 million to £60 million. Mackintosh has apparently not been prone to self-pity however, having paid himself a salary of £8.3 million in 1991.
However, the tale is not all of doom and gloom and some of our entrepreneurs have experienced substantial windfalls during the past year. Take the Sainsbury family (they of local supermarket fame); its members have seen the value of their empire increased by some £1 billion, without them having to lift a finger. Last November, half-year profits were up 19.4 percent to a staggering £391 million. So next
time you pop out to Sainsbury s to pick up a few essentials and find yourself dismayed by the size of the deficit in your pocket afterwards, take comfort in the knowledge that a good deal of the hard-earned cash you have to hand over every week just to cat is further enriching, amongst others, the Sainsbury folk.
Plutocracy
If you think that Britain's richest have rather more than their fair share of a very sumptuous cake, consider the fact that even the Queen ranks only fifth in the worldwide league table. In fact her fortune is dwarfed by that of the world’s wealthiest man. the Sultan of Brunei, whose oil-rich state has provided him with a tidy nest egg of $37 billion (£19 billion).
This tribute to Britain's under-worked and overprivileged plutocracy did not of course lake the form of a denouncement but was more of a celebration of the vast inequalities created by a property society. Despite several pages being devoted to honouring a mere 400 capitalists, who take no direct part in producing goods or services, not a single column inch was given over to the plight of the millions of workers (who actually produce everything) and their struggle to make ends meet week after week. But then producing an article listing the poorest members of society with total assets up to £55 billion would require several volumes and an inordinate degree of monetary exaggeration.
You’d think that by actually publishing this information the Sunday Times would be guilty of incitement to riot, or at least precipitating several angry letters to the editor. Not a bit of it; it’s a remarkable testament to capitalism's power to persuade and influence the majority of the working class that one of the mouth-pieces of the ruling class can openly boast about the inflated fortunes of its leading members without provoking mass outrage and calls for a fairer system of wealth distribution.The fact is of course that most workers actually believe that the current system, while perhaps, not entirely fair, is nevertheless immutable and that there is no viable alternative.
Socialists have no personal grudge against the people described above; when all the affectations and the airs and graces are stripped away they are just ordinary people like everyone else. It is however very important to recognise that it is the economic system known as capitalism which causes such disparity between the haves and the have-nots. It is the job of socialists to campaign for an alternative economic system under which each and everyone can partake of the wealth that this planet can yield and to persuade workers that things can be run differently, that is, not only in the interests of the few. Dare we even imagine a day when a future socialist equivalent of the Sunday Times may produce a special supplement entitled "Revealed: The World’s Wealthy”. More difficult to imagine is how you could fit into such a supplement the name of every person in the world .
Nick Brunskill
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