Murdoch’s Sunday Times has just published its Rich List for 2015 which shows that the richest 1,000 persons based in Britain now have wealth valued at £547.1bn. That works out at an average level of wealth of nearly £550 millions per person, though there are wide variations between the threshold level of £100 millions at the base to £13.2 billions at the top (someone called Len Blavatnik).
These are not only staggering figures, but perhaps even more staggeringly, they have more than doubled since the financial crash in 2009. In that year the richest thousand had £258 millions, but they now have 112% more. They include 117 billionaires with a total wealth of £325 billions, nearly £3 billions each on average. Indeed Britain apparently now has more billionaires per 100,000 of the population than any other country in the G20 group of the world’s biggest economies, more even than the US. The number of billionaires in Britain has almost trebled in the past decade: there were only 40 in 2005. Continue reading