British rich get richer

This video is called World Bank Making the Rich Richer – BBC Newsnight (2008).

By Simon Walker:

British Sunday Times Rich List: Austerity? Not for the elite

14 May 2011

If further proof was required to refute Prime Minister David Cameron’s assertion that all in the UK are suffering his government’s austerity measures equally, one need look no further than the latest Sunday Times Rich List.

Times journalist Philip Beresford describes how “Britain’s super rich are making light of the age of austerity, achieving an 18% rise in their collective wealth over the past year”. He continues, “Together, the 1,000 multimillionaires in the Rich List are £60.2 billion better off than they were in 2010”.

The UK’s 1,000 richest people are now worth the grand sum total of £396 billion.

According to Beresford, the aggregated wealth of the UK-based financial oligarchy is now “within striking distance of their all-time pre-recession high of £413 billion, set in 2008.”

The economic crash of 2008 initially reduced the incomes and wealth of the super rich, whose limited losses could be noted in the 2009 list. But working in connivance with first the Labour government, which handed over nearly £1 trillion in public funds to the banks, and now the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, it has prospered by shifting the burden of losses onto the backs of working people.

While British workers’ wages are set to slip for four consecutive years, the first time this has happened since the first “Great Depression” of the 1870’s, the wealth of the super rich is going stratospheric. The economic fortunes and share of total wealth held by the British masses and that held by a mere fraction of the top 1 percent are heading in opposite directions.

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