Cash money: if you haven’t seen even this much in a while, it’s because – thanks to Tory policies – billionaires have vacuumed it all up.
Here’s a painful piece of information I found on the social media:
New figures show that flatlining wages over the past 15 years have left every UK worker £11,000 worse off per year.
In that time, UK billionaires' wealth hasn't flatlined – it's up THREE-FOLD
That's no coincidence – it's how our rigged system works.
It's time for a Wealth Tax.
— Richard Burgon MP (@RichardBurgon) March 20, 2023
I did a bit of digging (not very much!) and it turns out that Mr Burgon isn’t wrong:
Workers are £11,000 worse off per year due to 15 years of wage stagnation, according to the Resolution Foundation.
In new figures shared with BBC Panorama, the think tank calculated that, had wages continued to grow at the pace seen before the 2008 financial crash, the average worker would make £11,000 more per year than they do now, taking rising prices into account.
Torsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, told the BBC the wage stagnation of the past 15 years is “almost completely unprecedented”.
Unprecedented it may be, but you can bet it was entirely planned by the Tories who slithered into government in 2010.
“This is definitely not what normal looks like. This is what failure looks like.”
Not as far as those Tories were concerned. For them, it was success. They funnelled the cash away from the majority of UK citizens, away from the Treasury, and into the hands and offshore bank accounts of the tiniest minority of the super-rich.
As for the billionaires… here‘s Statista:
The UK’s top ten richest people are wealthier than the group has ever been, according to The Sunday Times, who recently released their annual Rich List. Their data finds that the cumulative wealth of the top ten billionaires in the UK has grown from £47.77 billion in 2009 to £182 billion in 2022 – an increase of 281 percent.
As this chart shows, following the 2008 crash, the UK’s billionaires have seen a steady, and fairly steep, incline in their wealth. The upward trend continued despite the pandemic, which saw the UK’s economy shrink by 20.4 percent in the second quarter of 2020, as most industries suffered, and 30.5 million people in Europe were expected to be pushed into poverty. This is a stark contrast to the UK’s 250 ultra wealthy, who saw their collective wealth surge to a record high of £653 billion in 2022.
And Jeremy Hunt’s Budget predicted slower growth than we expected after the disastrous Liz Truss was ousted from Downing Street last year.
And the Tories are starting to bounce back in the opinion polls.
Who are the people going back to them? Are they masochists?
Source: Workers £11,000 worse off a year due to stagnant wages – Resolution Foundation
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