This seems to show that since the fall of the Soviet Union, the welfare state in Britain is being systematically demolished, and with that, inequality has grown exponentially. It is down to the anger and organisation of the working class. Right now class struggle is as miniscule as a gnat's cock and so the elite crush everyone for the working class sloth...
In his Beveridge Memorial Lecture to The Royal Statistical Society, Sheffield University's Danny Dorling says that an expert in inequality, says the richest one per cent of people in the UK take home fifteen per cent of all income, compared to 6% in 1979.
Professor Dorling, an expert in inequality, said: "If we look back about 100 years, we can see that inequality in the UK did drop significantly in the 70 years from 1910-1979. More than half of that drop in inequality took place prior to 1939. Since 1979 these inequalities have risen dramatically and continue to rise.
"The last time the best-off took as big a share of all income as they do today was in 1940, two years before the publication of the Beveridge Report, which became the basis of the UK's welfare state after the Second World War."
Professor Dorling says that to get into the top one per cent now requires an income of about £120,000 and this super elite have been awarding themselves huge pay rises in part to offset sterling's depreciation against other currencies.
"The super-rich ompare themselves to a global elite and sterling's depreciation has meant that compared to their peers in Europle or the US they are losing ground. Hence we see bankers and top CEOs getting big pay rises. It does not have to be that way beacuse in Switzerland and the Netherlands the top one percent take 6% of national income not 15%. It's our elites that are greedy."
Importantly the top 1% are pulling away from the rest of the rich. To get into the top 10% of incomes requires about £60,000 a year.
Professor Dorling said: "Even looking at the next-most well-off people, the gap between them and the richest is growing. In the early 1940s, the 'nine per cent' - the rest of the best-off ten per cent less the richest one per cent - were paid an average salary of 2.4 times average incomes, the same as in 1959, 1969 and 1973. But as inequalities rose, by 1990 this 'nine per cent' were paid three times average incomes and that continued until 2007.
"However, for the last five years their share has been dropping towards that 2.4 historic average. As each year passes, and the richest one per cent get richer still, the rest of the best-off ten per cent increasingly have a little more in common with the remaining nine-tenths of society, and less and less in common with those at the very top."
His lecture also addresses how fair Britain is compared to his past
Up until 1989 this is the best-off tenth of households (or more strictly 'tax-units'), after then it is adults. After 1975 it relates to all income declared for tax purposes (so tax dodging is excluded) and after 1920 what became the Republic of Ireland is excluded. More important than all these caveats is the fact that missing data has been interpolated so that when one line in the graph appears to exactly follow another, that is because it is estimated from that other (which figures are interpolated and which are not is shown in Appendix Table 1)
Inequalities by the measures shown here peaked in 1923, the year after the (1922) Great Gatsby summer (Fitzgerald, 1925). Then the best-off tenth of households in the UK took almost half the national annual income. Almost a quarter was taken by the best-off one-in-one-hundred, leaving 'just' a quarter of all income for the remaining nine tenths of the best-off tenth to share between them. The richest 1 in 1000 households in that year took home almost 6% of all income, but that share had been sliding since it had hit its maxima of almost 7% just a year after the Titanic sank (1912) which also happened to be the year in which the play 'The Inspector Calls' was set. The richest 1 in 10,000 households still took a staggering 3.34% in 1923, more than twice their share even today.
A key turning point, in hindsight, was 1936. It was then that the income of the best-off 1 in 1,000 peaked again at a lower point of 4.68% before falling fairly continuously to a minima of just under 1.00% of all income between 1977 and 1979 inclusive. The share of the richest thousandth's then rose to reach a new peak of 4.61% in 2007, before appearing to fall again in the two most recent years of data. I say 'appearing' as this is income declared for tax purposes and many of the richest people in Britain say they are no longer domiciled in Britain and do not pay tax here ( "tax is for the little people")
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