Most people alive today are working harder but feeling poorer and trusting their societies less than they did a generation ago. At the same time, more wealth is being created than at any other point in human history. There is no denying that society is becoming less stable and more divided, and extreme wealth is at the root.
New figures from Oxfam show that billionaire wealth has increased by over 80 per cent since 2020. Meanwhile, one in four people don’t regularly have enough to eat and nearly half the world’s population is living in poverty. Just 0.001 per cent – that’s about 80,000 people – hold three times the wealth of the poorest half of humanity – about 4 billion people, according to the latest World Inequality Report. In almost every region, the top 1 per cent is wealthier than the bottom 90 per cent combined.
But this isn’t just a story about money: it’s about who gets to decide how the world works.
A tiny minority of people now control a huge share of society’s wealth – and they’re using it to fragment our democracies, our communities and our futures. Wealth is no longer about worth, it’s about control. That’s why billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than other people. Even wealthy people like me recognise the dangers of this increasing concentration of money and power.
President Trump is a case in point. A billionaire backed by billionaires is in the White House. Like everyone else, I’ve watched in astonishment as Donald Trump and his cronies increasingly exert a violent takeover of their own country and other lands for their personal gain. The chaos and instability these oligarchs create impacts all of us: the massive inequality, the resentment, the resignation and scapegoating are not failures of the system but features of it.
But this is not “their” world. It’s ours. We can, and we will fix this. To take our collective power back, to take our democracies back, we must tax the super-rich. It’s not just me saying this – millionaires around the world share the same view. Polling by Survation, commissioned by Patriotic Millionaires, has found that 77 per cent of millionaires from G20 countries think extremely wealthy people buy political influence, and nearly three quarters recognise that extreme wealth threatens our democracies.
Inequality is a concern for the rich, along with everyone else. So many crises we are facing right now – the cost of living squeeze, political capture, climate breakdown and so much more – boil down to the concentration of extreme wealth. The past 50 years have shown us what happens when those with too much money and too much power are left unchecked: inequality soars and the foundations of society are sold off to the highest bidder. We have to make the next 50 years better than the last and build a future where everyone has a chance. The past 50 years have made this unmistakably clear: left unchecked, extreme wealth doesn’t enrich societies; it hollows them out.
Nobody needs trillionaires – instead we need decent healthcare, good education, affordable homes and food, and a view of the future that includes all humans, not just the rich ones. We can make this happen by taxing the super-rich and feeding back some of that wealth to the rest of society. Wealth is magnetic – it attracts further wealth. It doesn’t trickle down: it’s sucked up. Without constraints it accumulates automatically and the rich keep getting richer.
Let’s be clear: increasing taxes on the very richest is not a panacea to the concerning impacts of concentrated, extreme wealth. But it is simple, efficient and a very good place to start. It’s time to return to common sense and to stop just hoping for a better future. It’s time to win.
[Further reading: Is being a councillor the worst job in England?]
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