COLETTE DOUGLAS HOME
We know our society grows more unequal and unfair every year
WHAT have we done? That’s what Hawick housewife Carol Martin said when she realised her lottery ticket had scooped £33 million. Her husband David knew exactly what she meant. He said: “If we’d won £50,000 we’d have been dancing round the living room.”
Thirty-three million is a different ball game; no wonder they sat in stunned silence for five minutes. That degree of wealth will change everything. For people like them who love the community they live in, it could be as much of a burden as a blessing.
I hope not, but that’s the trouble with money. Most people don’t have enough. But too much can be divisive. The Martins belong to a pretty exclusive financial club, and yet they are nowhere near the top.
They would, for example, have to triple their winnings to even make it on to The Sunday Times Rich List, which has an entry point of £100 million. The Queen, whose wealth is £340m, has dropped out of the top 300.
According to Oxfam’s disturbing new report An Economy for the One Per Cent, just 62 people have a combined wealth equal to half the population of the world. (Yes, I know, I had to read that twice, too.)
How have we arrived at such an extraordinary situation where a bus-load of individuals can have as much money as 3.7 billion people? Their average wealth is an astonishing £20 billion. Compared to them, Carol and David Martin appear moderately well-off. How have we allowed the global super-rich to hoard quite so much? Is this capitalism’s moral low? If so, what can we do to correct it?
There are people who go to bed hungry even in this country. There are families that work a full week but still need benefits. There are countries so poor that what we call disadvantage looks like riches; where people subsist throughout their short lives.
Here’s another astonishing fact from the Oxfam report: the total wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population fell by almost £700bn since 2010 even though the number in this group rose by 400 million.
How can it be anything other than monstrous that so many have so little when so few have so much? This degree of disparity must surely be the stuff of revolution. And yet, how do we stop individuals from accruing great wealth? And should we?
It’s not as if the 62 are sitting idly atop a pile of gold coin in a marble palace. Their wealth is in the corporations they have created. Bill Gates is the richest with £79.2bn. He co-founded Microsoft, thereby revolutionising the way we live our lives. The business offers employment to those who work for it and its offshoots.
Far from being a villain, Gates and his wife Melinda established a charitable foundation 16 years ago with the stated aim of eventually giving away 95 per cent of their wealth. Because of the scale at which they can invest, it can transform communities and lives. One of their ambitions is to rid the world of malaria and to have discovered an HIV vaccine within a decade. At 31, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has amassed $41.6bn (£29bn). He says he is determined to give 99 per cent of it to good causes. Another of the 62, Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York has already donated $3bn (£2.1bn) to charitable causes. In 2014 alone he disbursed $462m (£325m).
And so the list goes on. Warren Buffet is another as famed for his generosity as his wealth. However much they give, they will remain wealthy men. But their instinct to help the needy demonstrates that even those with their great good fortune understand the injustice of keeping such excessive riches while there is need in the world. Perhaps, on second glance, attacking the global super-rich for their enormous fortunes is too knee-jerk a reaction.
Shouldn’t we rather celebrate their actions if they’re determined to spend the money on improving the lives of others less fortunate than themselves? After all, we don’t decry the self-made millionaire philanthropists of history. We don’t denigrate Carnegie for his money-making but praise him for the good he did, and his cash still does.
If only it were so simple. But the other fact about the world’s super-rich is that too many don’t like paying tax. Oxfam estimates that, globally, the super-rich have £5.3 trillion stashed in offshore accounts. It deprives governments of £132bn each year in tax revenues.
Corporate investment in tax havens has quadrupled since the millennium and, according to Oxfam, nine out of 10 World Economic Forum partners (one thousand of the world’s top companies) have a presence in at least one tax haven. Tax-dodging by multinational corporations and their wealthy owners costs developing countries £69bn a year.
That’s the sort of money that could make a difference to people’s lives. It is money owed to communities and would offset the need for charitable handouts. So why aren’t politicians taking action to right this wrong? Year after year we see the rich few pull ever further away from the working and middle classes. We see those who already have assets make them grow with little or sometimes no effort. For example, look at those in London who owned a property before the present bubble started to swell. It is said that one in 10 of the capital’s property owners is a millionaire as a result.
But the rest, the hard-working young on whom the future rests, can’t put a toe on the ladder. They are left to struggle on flat-lining salaries. The professional qualifications that bought a home and security to their parents’ generation can only afford them permanent rentals. It has a knock-on effect in delaying marriages and the starting a family.
What political system allows its up-and-coming citizens to be so ill served? And why are we, the electorate, letting this happen with hardly much more than a squeak of protest?
We hear airy promises from George Osborne that multinationals will be forced to pay their fair share of taxes. Meanwhile, across the UK, services are cut back and huge numbers of workers do a full week yet still need a state handout to make ends meet.
The revelation that 62 people are as wealthy as half the planet is shocking but not surprising. We know our society grows more unequal and unfair every year. So, in Britain, why aren’t we angrier?
Honestly, I’m not sure I know. Perhaps it’s because we’ve bought into the aspiration of being rich too, of being Lottery winners like the Martins or of making a small fortune if our houses or buy-to-lets go up in price. Have we become seduced by the possibility of becoming wealthy too? Is that why we tolerate a system that creates such huge and corrosive inequalities for billions of our fellow citizens?
If so, we have been sold a pup.
‘‘ The other fact about the super-rich is that too many don’t like paying tax ... they have £5.3 trillion stashed in offshore accounts