Comment Targeting the super-rich won’t solve Britain’s ills
LABOUR has declared war on the “super-rich elite” named in the Sunday Times Rich List and vowed to end the “obscene” concentration of prosperity with a tiny elite in London.
Jon Trickett, Labour’s Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office, set out the party’s plans to wrest power and wealth back from economic and political elites, and redistribute it to England’s towns and regions. And it was pretty hard-hitting stuff. He was speaking following the publication of the annual list which names the UK’s wealthiest people.
The Rich List also provoked a strong reaction from Birmingham Labour MP Liam Byrne.
Mr Byrne (Lab Hodge Hill) said on Twitter: “We’re at a tipping point. If we don’t take action now, the world’s top 1% are on course to control TWO THIRDS of world wealth – in just 12 years time!”
At the top of the list this year was businessman Jim Ratcliffe, who founded chemical firm Ineos. He’s worth £21.05 billion.
In second place were the Hinduja brothers, Sri and Gopi, who are worth £20.64 billion. The Hinduja Group is an Indian company headquartered in London, involved in a range of activities including foundries, motor vehicles, banking, call centres and healthcare.
But Mr Trickett said the Sunday Times Rich List exposed a “warped system” in which a small elite “run rings around the rest of us”.
And he said ordinary people are victims of a “deliberately rigged economic and political system”, and face falling income levels along with a lack of housing and opportunities.
He said: “With over half the UK’s richest hedge fund managers donating to the Conservative party, as long as they are in Government nothing will change.
“The Tories’ billionaire friends give them money, and are gifted tax cuts worth tens of billions of pounds, paid for off the back of the rest of us.
“People have had enough of years of the elite pinching wealth from the pockets of ordinary working people. Labour will overturn the rigged economy that the Tories are obsessed with protecting.”
The winners are just a few thousand people making up a “super elite”, mainly based in London, he said.
“Through the rapid financialisaton of everything – from the water we drink to the education of our children – we have seen power snatched away from communities and handed over to the establishment of a few thousand super elite who have profited from the last 40 years of neo-liberal economics.
“You know the people: the great and the good, the rich and the powerful. They are becoming increasingly intertwined.
“The political class, who leave politics and go onto the boards of corporations that they supposedly regulated a few months before, or end up editing the newspapers that are supposed to hold power to account.
“This cosy club has never batted an eyelid about the challenges facing communities. The economic, social and cultural gulf between them and the rest of the England has grown so wide they no longer make decisions in the interests of the whole country.
“There is huge disillusionment and people have had enough.”
So what is Labour actually going to do about the problem?
It says it will introduce in government to break the stranglehold of the super-elite include setting up a “constitutional convention” to find ways of creating a more federalised country, with power shared across regions rather than concentrated in London.
Labour also says it will create regional development banks, to provide investment for places outside the capital.
It will devolve more power and devolution for local councils, including powers to build council housing, to regulate land lords, and tenants right to veto controversial redevelopments.
The extremely rich will face tax rises – but Labour says it will protect 95 per cent of people from any rises in Income Tax, National Insurance or VAT.
These may all be good ideas but it’s debatable whether the action that is planned really matches the rhetoric.
While we don’t know full details of
It’s unclear whether bashing the super-rich will really help the rest of us anyway
the tax rises Labour has planned, it seems likely that Mr Ratcliffe, worth £21bn, will still be much richer than the rest of us after he’s paid them.
It’s also unclear whether bashing the super-rich will really help the rest of us anyway.
What we need as a country is more good jobs.
That means jobs that pay well, where pay at least keeps pace with inflation (because anything less is a cut in real terms), and which offer opportunities for training and advancement.
Providing that in a world where technology increasingly allows work to be automated is a challenge.
Some Labour front-benchers, such as Deputy Leader Tom Watson and, indeed, Mr Byrne, Labour’s shadow minister for digital, have been thinking hard about how to achieve this.
The solutions may require cutting into the profits enjoyed by some capitalists.
But, sadly, they won’t be found by simply attacking the rich list.