In his recent documentary for Channel 4, economist and inequality campaigner Gary Stevenson focuses on the ever expanding wealth gap in Britain.
By Jack Moody
He looks at the growing poverty and destitution of the working class, even as the 56 richest residents of Britain own as much wealth as everyone else combined. He also points out how billionaires grow their wealth to the detriment of everyone else. There is just one problem with his conclusion: they don’t want to hear it!
Indeed, the first ten minutes of the documentary are spent interviewing a billionaire tycoon who claims to have the ‘same background’ as Stevenson, a rags to riches fairytale. But he fails to mention how he got his initial capital. This becomes a theme.
Stevenson interviews several ultra-wealthy individuals who all seem to claim ‘social mobility’ means inequality isn’t important, or is simply solved with individual ‘bootstraps’ mentalities.
There is an argument that interviewing people like this will encourage them to ‘tell on themselves’. But the most useful and hard hitting segments of the documentary have Stevenson hearing from a working mum of two talking about the increase of her weekly food shop, or about how even people with managerial positions at work are having to move back in with parents in their 40s. This is the predatory nature of the private rental market.
Gary Stevenson interviews his dad about his own family’s economic trajectory. His father has a “good Royal Mail pension” and was able to buy a house as a young man despite never earning a high wage. These kinds of options are no longer available for most working-class people.
Indeed, people with normal jobs today are struggling to achieve life milestones many took for granted in the past. Getting a secure home or starting a family are out of reach for millions. One of the main reasons for this, as the documentary illustrates, is that wealth has been dramatically redistributed upwards – from the working and middle classes to the very rich.
Wealth tax
The crux of the documentary is the host’s support for a wealth tax. This is an extremely popular idea. Even the modest demand for a 2% tax on those worth £10 million would raise an extra £26 billion a year. This is enough to build over 180,000 council homes, or to cut the basic rate of income tax by 3.5%.
But the wealthy have never accepted parting with their wealth via taxation. So they like to invest it in places that those troublesome tax collectors can’t get to. In a revealing segment, a large landowner tells Stevenson “we fight to win”. Gary rightly points out that perhaps this is a spirit working-class people need to mirror.
Stevenson’s documentary is a positive way to get people asking the right questions. But it will take more than individually well intentioned millionaires to fix these problems.
One of Stevenson’s interviews is with someone who has made a boutique career out of helping the super rich avoid taxation. The amount of tax the rich are prepared to put up with paying is not fixed. At times when the workers’ movement has been well organised, and when the ruling class has felt threatened by the prospect of revolutionary socialist change, the capitalists have been forced to pay more.
Fighting to make the rich pay is worthwhile. But to address the fundamental causes of inequality, we also need to pose the question of capitalist ownership more directly. Socialists fight to nationalise the biggest monopolies under workers’ control and management, so that we can democratically plan the economy to meet the needs of all.
