The super rich are getting richer under Blair

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1648493,00.html

Nothing new in all this, you might say. The rich, like the poor, are always with us. But that would be wrong. Robert Peston, City editor of the Sunday Telegraph, estimates that this year no more than 200 to 300 hedge-fund managers will carve up $4.2bn of pure profit between them. These sorts of payouts are on a scale unimaginable in the past, at least outside the handful of individuals who either invented a new product or owned a tangible resource: Bransons or Rockefellers. That they should come, as regular as a salary, to those who, by their own admission, create nothing is a new development. (And buying up once-public companies in their entirety is essentially a new field.)

It is the sharpest edge of a striking trend, one that shows the truth behind that lefty slogan about the rich getting richer. When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, just under 6% of national income went to the top 1%. That figure stood at 9% a decade later, but under Tony Blair it has risen to at least 13%: a tiny group taking nearly an eighth of our collective wealth.

...

If one man can spend £15,000 plying his pals with a syrupy cocktail, while another lays out blankets for his child to sleep in the kitchen then we know the system is broken. This is not some narrow criticism of the Labour government, but rather a challenge to our assumption that we are a civilised society at all.

For we imagine such gross inequalities to come tinged in sepia. They belong to the Dickensian dark ages, a cruelty so distant we render it now only as nostalgic entertainment: Oliver Twist at the cinema, Scrooge on the West End stage.

But the truth is that the injustice of extraordinary wealth alongside desperate poverty is no museum piece. It is alive and present in 21st century Britain.

The United States got there first, of course.

Elsewhere
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=369400&in_page_id=1770

Financier murder suspect 'obsessed with rich'
11:36am 22nd November 2005

One of the men accused of murdering financier John Monckton collected a series of articles about Britain's wealthiest people because he was obsessed with the rich, a court heard today.

Copies of the Sunday Times Rich List and the Mail on Sunday's Rich Report were found together with cuttings about wealthy city traders when police searched the room of Damien Hanson, the Old Bailey was told.
 
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