Section:GDN 1J PaGe:1 Edition Date:190807 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/8/2019 19:06 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
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hink of a football stadium. Not one
of the vast caverns like Old Traff ord
or Wembley, but somewhere rather
smaller and more bijou. Somewhere
like Fulham’s Craven Cottage, which ,
once its new stand is completed, will
pack in only about 30,000 fans. Now
imagine this stadium of 30,000 souls
rising up into the air and hovering unnoticed over central
London. Thirty thousand men in late middle -age living
the high life with the capital at their feet – and there,
stuck way below on terra fi rma are their 66 million fellow
Britons, tearing lumps out of each other.
Congratulations: you’ve just pictured the central
problem stalking the UK today. Not Brexit. Not the
breakdown in civil debate. These are urgent and
vitally important, but there is one big factor that forms
a large part of the backdrop to them. It can be summed
up by that gulf between a mid-sized football stadium
of super-rich men in their 50s , and the rest of us spread
out across our suburbs, our towns, our unpretty
stretches of urban sprawl.
That football stadium represents the top 0.1% of
earners in the UK. To join their ranks, numbering just
31,000, you’d need a taxable income of at least £650,000a year – £12,500 per week. In less than a fortnight, you
would easily pull in more than the average Briton makes
as taxable income over a whole year. But then, those
drudges are the earthbound while you, as the old song
out of Mary Poppins puts it , live in an entirely diff erent
realm: “Up to the highest height! ... Up through the
atmosphere! / Up where the air is clear!”
The stratospherically rich are among the subjects of a
new report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. An analysis
of the tax returns of the highest earning Britons, it shows
in uncompromising detail just how our money has ended
up in fewer and fewer hands based in less and less of the
country. Almost half the super-rich live in London and
nearly 90% of them are men. What’s more, they often end
up paying a lower tax rate than the pay- as- you- earn mugs
like you and me. The generous breaks given by politicians
to encourage entrepreneurship , innovation and risk-
taking are instead exploited by partners in City law fi rms
and big accountancies and at hedge funds – people whose
incomes sit a few zeroes above their value to society.
Nurses can go on TV and beg politicians for a pay rise,
and teachers can crash out of their profession under
too much pressure. But up among the
ranks of the top earners there is no such
stress: research last month from EssexI never thought I’d see the royals as a beacon of hope Zoe Williams, page 3
How our dirty industries learned to pollute politics George Monbiot, page 5
Modi is using Kashmir to remake India Kapil Komireddi, page 5
The Guardian
The fi nancial
district, London
PHOTOGRAPH:
GARY YEOWELL/
GETTY IMAGESWednesday 7 August 2019
Aditya
Chakrabortty
The super-rich
have turned
Britain into a
nation of losers
Opinion
and ideasG2
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