Thursday 6th March

There was a world-wide crash in late 2008, which deepened into a crisis in early 2009.  We have been living through that ever since.  Governments around the world have meted out varying levels of Austerity, hundreds of thousands of jobs in the public sector have gone – to be replaced by lower paid private ones.  For millions the minimum wage is also the maximum they will ever earn.  Benefit rules have been tightened and the hated bedroom tax introduced, where long-standing tenants are faced with a big cut in their benefit or having to move to a smaller property.  All of this suffering has been felt mostly at the lower ends of society – the famous squeezed middle may have to shop at Lidl now rather than Waitrose but this is nothing compared to the really poor.  Food banks and Payday loans are now the two fastest growing phenomenon in modern society.  Here in London we have been shielded from much of this, employment is pretty good and even if rents are rising fast for most the value of their homes is far higher than they could ever have got a mortgage for when they started out.

But surprise, surprise; the real winners are the super rich.  Just in the last year alone their wealth has gone up by 1 trillion dollars.  That is almost a 20% increase on an already ridiculously high figure.  When I was young it was thought that to be rich you would have to have a million pounds; now they don’t even bother to count the millionaires, especially when house values are rising so spectacularly.  To be rich these days you need several millions, and the number of the super rich is expanding year on year.  That sadly doesn’t mean we will all be rich one day of course.  But with all of this wealth our Government still thinks it would be dangerous to tax them an extra 5p in the pound and have reacted with howls of horror when Labour has said that they would.  Actually even this will not go anywhere near to altering the situation.  We are locked into a system that is designed specifically to reward the super-rich, and unless it is torn down and we start again it will just get worse.