According to the Sunday Times Rich List 2025, just published, Britain has lost more billionaires over the past 12 months than at any point in its history.
It’s a shame we haven’t lost them all.
It’s a disgraceful indictment of the way society is currently organised that we have any at all.
The Rich List examines the finances of Britain’s wealthiest people. It shows a concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the population.
The combined wealth of the 350 entries (individuals or families) on the list stands at £772.8 billion.
If that isn’t enough to make you reach for your pitchforks, I don’t know what will.
Just think of the care homes, hospitals and nurseries that could be built or upgraded, or the improvements to make homes warm and energy efficient, or to improve disabled access, with that amount of money.
Top of the list is Gopin Hinduja and his family, with an obscene £35 billion. The Hinduja Group, with interests in oil and gas, banking and healthcare in 38 countries, employs about 200,000 people.
In June 2024 a Swiss court found four members of the Hinduja clan guilty of exploiting their domestic staff. Household staff were paid a salary of between 220 and 400 Swiss francs (£195-£350) a month, far below what they could otherwise expect to earn in Switzerland.
The Poor List
According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation over 14 million people in the UK were in poverty in 2022-23. That is 21% of the population, or more than one person in every five.
4.3 million of those were children and 1.9 million were pensioners. In other words, three out of every ten children and two out of every ten adults in the UK live in poverty.
There has been no significant fall in the level of poverty in the UK for twenty years.
Of the 14 million, 6 million (4 out of every 10 people) were in deep poverty, with an income far below the standard poverty line.
Around 3.8 million people experienced what is called ‘destitution’ in 2022, that is when people cannot afford to meet their most basic needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed.
That included one million children. That was almost two-and-a-half times the number of people in 2017 and nearly triple the number of children.
So while the super-rich wallow in their wealth, children go without their most basic needs.
The cause of this inequality is the capitalist profit system. It makes the owners of industry extraordinarily rich, while the producers of wealth and the providers of services struggle to survive.
Taxing the rich more heavily is not enough. We want a society in which there are no billionaires, and no-one can become a billionaire. We want a society in which there are no rich to tax.
Billionaires become billionaires by exploiting workers who make profit for them.
The answer is to change the system. We need to abolish capitalism. We need a system where there is no rich and no poor. We need communism, a classless society, in which the needs of all are met.
We must aim to expropriate the wealth of the billionaires and the whole capitalist class, taking their enterprises into democratic common ownership and running them for the benefit of all.