While the rest of us are paying 40% of our income in taxes, last year the 54 billionaires reported to work in Britain paid just £15m tax on combined fortunes of about £126bn.
Meanwhile, Sir Philip Green earned himself a knighthood, soon after paying himself (or rather his wife) a tax-free £1.2bn dividend. How did we ever get to this situation of galling inequality, and who helped us get here?
These are just some of the questions that BBC business editor Robert Peston seeks to address in his new book Who Runs Britain – How Britain’s New Elite Are Changing Our Lives. And with more than 20 years’ experience in financial journalism, Peston knows more than most about how we got to where we are today – a Britain of closed pension schemes, credit crunch and recession.
As well as being what Peter Preston in The Observer describes as one of “the clearest, most erudite” guides to the world of modern finance around, his book is also “a vivid portrait of a Blair government that displayed at times breathtaking naivety in its embrace of big business”, says Chris Blackhurst in the Evening Standard.
Indeed, “if Thatcherism smiled on the rich, Blair beamed on them until his face cracked”, says Simon Jenkins in The Sunday Times. After the devastatingly high tax rates of the 1970s, the new Labour government had “an almost neurotic determination never to be associated with the anti-business image of old Labour”, writes Peston. But although greed may well be good, some have become “so rich that we are more vulnerable than perhaps since the 19th century to… rule by an unelected oligarchy”.
Blair and now Brown, afraid of displeasing the rich to the point that they leave the UK, were more than happy to accede to the demands of the wealthy, as the recent uproar and subsequent climb-down on non-doms proved. Little surprise then that Blair found himself a job with JP Morgan pretty quickly after leaving office. “Now, as the world faces credit crunch and recession, we shall all pay the price for this, while Blair dances off into the sunset. That is the terrifying moral of this tale,” says Jenkins.
Who Runs Britain? by Robert Peston (Hodder & Stoughton).