'Rich just get richer while poor have to accept being poorer'

28 April 2023 , 14:47

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Bank of England chief economist Huw Pill says people should accept they are getting poorer (Image: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Life must be feeling like one big, slap-up grouse supper right now for the rich.

Recent budget changes mean you can pump millions into your retirement nest egg without paying extra tax, property prices are rising – and with interest rates high there are serious returns to be made in bonds.

The pay of FTSE 100 bosses surged last year by 23% with banks like Lloyds making £7billion before tax and NatWest £5billion, their biggest profits for 15 years.

Covid was a nice little earner, too, and not just for those who had a mate in the Cabinet and knew how to get hold of dodgy masks.

The number of billionaires in Britain shot up during the pandemic by a quarter and the top 10% of earners saw their wealth grow by £51,000, while the poorest households flatlined, or sank.

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That’s been the story of non-rich people’s luck ever since bankers crashed the global economy back in 2008, driving millions into poverty.

Taking account of inflation, a middle-income UK worker’s wage packet has shrunk by £10,000 a year since then.

And it just keeps on shrinking.

The Resolution Foundation think tank, which is focused on improving living standards for the non-rich, claims the average family is now £600-a-year worse off since Boris Johnson won the 2019 Get Brexit Done election, with incomes not likely to recover until 2028.

Which brings us to Bank of England chief economist Huw Pill, who said this week that Britons need to accept they are getting poorer and not ask for pay rises.

The former Goldman Sachs banker, who earns £190,000, six times more than an average worker, reckons “we’re all worse off, and we all have to take our share”.

Which feels like being told by a mugger as he lifts your wallet that life’s a bitch so suck it up, loser. Because, as the figures I’ve listed show, when the economy tanks the people who run it ensure they don’t suffer.

The only thing booming at the bottom of the wealth pyramid is foodbank use (Julian Hamilton/Sunday Mirror)

The rich may get less rich for a short while but they then bounce back even richer, claiming it’s all down to their genius. When it’s actually down to rigged political and economic systems which ensure they keep hoarding capital at the expense of the poor.

Unlike at the top of the wealth pyramid, the only thing booming at the bottom is foodbank use, as three million families asked the Trussell Trust for emergency parcels last year.

Since the bankers’ crash, British workers have had to put up with -crippling austerity, fire-and-rehire, zero-hour contracts, trade unions being sidelined, increased taxation for public services that don’t deliver and now killer inflation.

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Currently, average pay is rising at 5.9%, which is 4.2% below inflation. So, in truth, Mr Pill, we all HAVE accepted that we are getting poorer.

But it is not people asking for sub-inflation wage rises that is the problem in the UK.

It is the ever-widening chasm in material gains between the rich and the rest.

And the lack of competence, or will, from those in power to change it.

And that is why, until British voters have the guts to radically change our rigged system, the vast majority will indeed keep getting poorer and poorer.

With the mantra from multi-millionaires in Downing Street and the City to the rest of Britain being: “Ask not what your country can do for you - ask how skint you can become for your country.”

Brian Reade