Billionaires

Carol Vorderman wonders: “Should we get rid of the super rich?” | LBC (youtube.com)

Following the recent publication of the annual Sunday Times ‘Rich List’, Carol Vorderman has been applying her mathematical genius to the numbers and has made some truly shocking extrapolations. In the last year, for example, the wealth of our prime minister (I’m not doing capital case for these people or the royals any more – they don’t deserve it) and his wife has risen by £122m, taking the total to £651m. Which does not of course make them billionaires.

From the beginning of the period designated as one of ‘austerity’ by the government, which began in 2010, the number of billionaires in the UK has quadrupled. In the Covid years alone, the wealth of billionaires in the UK increased by £150 billion (what has happened to the enquiry into the PPE scandals again, just asking?*) and in the last 30 years it has grown by over 1000%. I would italicise these numbers, but I would have to do it for all of them, so extraordinary and appalling are they.

*We are fortunate that Carol Vorderman will not let this lie and has exposed example after example of the corruption of the Tory awarded contracts.

Carol Vorderman goes on, quite rightly, to deplore both lobbying scandals such as the Greensill which earned David Cameron millions (he was cleared of wrongdoing but a Treasury committee report said “that reflects on the insufficient strength of the rules”) and the use of blind trusts by politicians who can thereby claim innocence, ignorance and immunity from the consequences of the investments of the trustees. She also reminds us that 40% of dirty money, globally, is laundered through the City of London, Crown Dependencies [and British Overseas Territories]. This nugget came not from some conspiracy theorist but directly from the current foreign minister.

Meanwhile some two trillion pounds has been added to our national debt making it almost 100% of our GDP. I have long suspected that when the news of Covid broke there were meetings behind the scenes: “Hang on a minute chaps, people may be dying but we and our friends and families can make money out of this. Lots of it.”