Evening Standard: "It’s never been so easy for the rich to get richer"

Link to Evening Standard

"For 30 years after the war, Britain had been slowly becoming a more equal society and a more open one. But now it is painfully obvious that social mobility has slowed again, and a new superclass is soaring out of sight, while the real wages of the people at the bottom have scarcely budged since the Seventies. 

"Just as the Occupy mob (never was there a less terrifying mob in London’s riotous history) were settling into their benders, Incomes Data Services reported that in the previous year — when millions were seeing their standard of living fall and many were taking actual wage cuts — the 'comp' awarded to CEOs of the FTSE-100 companies had risen by no less than 49 per cent.

"... Yet London is Metroland on speed, a world apart from the rest of the country and from large parts of itself. As Neil O’Brien, the director of Policy Exchange, said of 'Planet London' in his Spectator article last week:

"Places such as inner Rochdale, where 73 per cent are on benefits, were simply out of sight and out of mind for the Londonised political class, who live in the parts of the city where unemployment is zero."

Ferdinand Mount’s new book is 'The New Few, Or A Very British Oligarchy' (Simon & Schuster)

---

Reviews

Link to Daily Telegraph

Peter Oborne: Daily Telegraph

"There is an important book to be written about this, and I suspect the answer lies in the capture of the Labour Party by big money in the mid-Nineties. These big donors bought the Labour Party, and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in return collaborated in the destruction of the post-war structure of shareholder capitalism, and its replacement by a system of debt finance. I hoped Mount might tell us how the rich pulled off this sensational coup, but he does not even attempt to do so, probably because (like so many political writers) he lacks any real curiosity about the connection between money and power.

"Ferdinand Mount is one of the two or three finest minds the Conservative Party has produced over the last century, and the author of some superb books. This is not one of them."

The Guardian

Andrew Anthony: The Guardian

"What most disturbs Mount is the increasing gap between the super-rich and the mass of society – a separation that he sees reflected at the rioting end of the social ladder. Without excusing looters, he writes that:

"The unbridled greed of the oligarchs and their indifference to the normal obligations and restraints… engender a sense that society has lost its recognisable moral shape and, with it, its legitimacy."

"Mount, who is a gifted and subtle author of many books, both fiction and nonfiction, is perhaps best known for writing the Conservative party's 1983 election manifesto. Like many on the aristocratic wing of the Tory party, he was never a full-blooded Thatcherite, and long ago reverted to classic One Nation Conservatism. What's odd, and is itself worthy of reflection, is how left-field that kind of old-fashioned belief in social cohesion now appears.

"After all, Mount is no rabid anti-capitalist, but a 72-year-old conservative, arguing for a little more equal distribution of wealth. And among a cowed and timid political class, that currently qualifies as a radical position."

---

Link to HOME (see all posts).