Data on the obscene concentration of wealth globally and within the UK continue to be published. Two new documents from the Equality Trust (3 December 2019) and the High Pay Centre (6 January 2020) have not received as much attention as they might – and should – have done.
The Equality Trust’s ‘Billionaire Britain’ shows how much wealth inequality has increased in the UK since 2010:
- The five richest families in the UK own more wealth than 13.2 million people.
- Over the last ten years the number of billionaires in the UK has almost doubled, and the wealth of the UK’s billionaires has more than doubled.
- The richest 1% of people in the UK owns the same wealth as 80% of the population, or 53 million people.
- 14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials.
The five richest families according to Forbes have a combined wealth of £39.4 billion: Hinduja brothers = £12.8; James Ratcliff = £9.2 billion; Michael Platt = £6.1 billion; David Reuben = £5.7 billion; and Simon Reuben = 5.7 billion. The Equality Trust gives some background information on each of these five families.
The four Hinduja brothers command the Hinduja Group, which has a global reach and interests ranging from oil and gas to banking and finance and property and media. The family has four ‘connected London homes’ in Carlton House Terrace (apparently worth $500 million).
James Ratcliffe, knighted in 2018, founded the chemical firm Ineos, which produces everything from ‘synthetic oils and plastics to solvents used to make insulin’. It’s also the UK’s biggest fracking firm. The Scottish Environmental Protection Agency reported that Ratcliffe’s companies are responsible for nearly a third of industrial greenhouse gas emissions in Scotland. The Times reported that he was planning to save up to £4 billion in tax after relocating to Monaco.
Michael Platt is co-founder and CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge fund firms, BlueCrest Capital. Forbes describes him as ‘the tax-averse trader and avid skier’ who ‘now operates on the island of Jersey. In 2010 he moved from Geneva to London, according to Bloomberg to avoid the top British tax rate and increased regulation.
The Reuben brothers, David and Simon, who are independently assessed, lead in the sectors of private equity, real estate investment and debt financing. The Times reported that they are British citizens ‘but are believed to have non-domicile status’.
These five richest families in the UK have significantly more wealth than 13.2 million people, or the bottom 20% of the population.
The number of billionaires in the UK has nearly doubled since 2010 (from 29 to 54 in 2019). Billionaire wealth has more than doubled during this period (from £58.1 billion to £123 billion).
The High Pay Centre reported on 6 January 2020 that pay for the typical FTSE 100 CEO in 2020 had already surpassed the amount the average worker earns in an entire year. They add:
- top bosses earn 117 times the annual pay of the average worker.
- In 2018 the average FTSE 100 CEO earned £3.46 million, equivalent to £901.30 per hour.
- In comparison, the average (as defined by median) full-time worker took home a salary of £29,559 per hour.
- ‘To match average worker pay in 2020, FTSE 100 CEOs starting work on Thursday 2 January only need to work until just before 5pm on Monday 6 January (that is, just three working days, or 33 hours).
As I have often remarked, these statistics are difficult to grasp, such are the levels of wealth and income inequality. We should pause and reflect.
Less difficult to grasp are the following: (a) members of the capitalist executive in general, and capital monopolists in particular, are able to take full – strategic and amoral – advantage of a system rigged in their favour; (b) their accumulation of capital in the forms of wealth and income takes place via a system which jettisons others either through job-related exploitation or welfare-related abandonment (or increasingly, both); and (c) a (largely) unintended consequence of the behaviours of these ‘greedy bastards’ (to coin a phrase) is the immiseration, suffering, and even premature deaths, of a growing segment of the population.
The key sociological question here has two aspects to it. First, what it is about the particular amalgamation of structure, culture and agency in Britain that has facilitated its accelerated ‘Americanisation’ during the present era of post-1970s financialised capitalism? How, in other words, has our society come to be ‘fractured’ in the way that it has?
A second dimension of sociological enquiry may be deemed more controversial by some, most notably and understandably by those ‘tamed’ by their terms of employment, and more and more by processes of professional socialisation. I am once again evoking two neglected ‘types of sociology’, namely, foresight sociology and action sociology. Foresight sociology denotes and commends the exploration of alternative social forms and institutions – different ways of doing things. Action sociology calls for sociologists to aspire to more than public sociology, that is, to become personally engaged with evidence-based policies for change. The current obscene concentrations of wealth and income are – and you can make a choice at this point – (i) morally wrong and indefensible, (ii) inimical to a settled and civilised social formation, and (iii) obstacles to the development of an alternative, and better, mode of social organisation.
And the conclusion here? Two urgent matters for sociologists. The first professional task is to understand and explain – via the study of structure, culture and agency – why we tolerate grotesque levels of material inequality in Britain. The second is to arm ourselves with the results of this study to commit to secure effective social change. I regard this second matter to be a crucial aspect of the – reconstructed Enlightenment, anti- or post-bourgeois – sociological project.
NB We already know enough for a working identification the structural, cultural and agential causes of the fracturing of our society; and w know enough also to take to the streets to protest and to campaign for, to coin another phrase, ‘a society for the many’.