Nadhim Zahawi and Rishi Sunak. Credit: Kim Mogg
There is a good reason why the rich always want more. Money provides status and connections. Big money makes you feel big, bigger than you are. The rich open doors for each other.
Rich people don’t know and don’t want to know about the lives of poor people, their bills, their empty fridges and pockets, their petty troubles and endless needs. They can’t work out why poor people don’t get up in the morning with determination and go out and get rich.
We do not know how a horse feels when it’s in a field chewing grass. That’s how the rich regard the poor. They see the poor as another species – like horses, docile, but don’t get too close in case they bite.
Rich people like spending time with rich people. They have the same tastes. Tell the same jokes. They know the problems of finding good staff. Rich people trust rich people. Rishi Sunak is the perfect example.
Who Cares About the Law?
Mohamed Mansour
With a £730 million fortune, according to the Sunday Times rich list, when Sunak was chosen by his own MPs to be our Prime Minister, he made Nadhim Zahawi (worth £100 million), Conservative Party Chairman and appointed Mohamed Mansour (worth £2.3 billion), the Conservative Party’s Senior Treasurer tasked with raising funds for the next general election.
Mr Mansour has pledged a personal gift of £2 million and kicked off the Tory fighting fund with a donation of £600,000 from Mantrac Vostok – a subsidiary of his UK-based Unatrac – a company that, according to the Daily Mirror, continues to supply Caterpillar machinery to Russia’s oil and gas industry in spite of sanctions imposed when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Narayan Murthy
Sunak’s father-in-law Narayan Murthy (worth $3.2billion) is the co-founder of the internet company Infosys. Like Mr Mansour, he has not closed his offices in Moscow.
That’s another thing about rich people, they don’t think the laws apply to them. Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata is a good example. She did not surrender her American Green Card when she moved to the UK and maintained non-dom status to avoid tax until it became too embarrassing to continue.
Mobarak Exemplifies Why the Rich Always Want More
Mohamed Mansour is an Egyptian with dual British citizenship. He served as transport minister in the Egyptian Government under Hosni Mubarak and resigned in 2009 after a train crash killed fifty people.
Hosni Mubarak
Hosni Mubarak had risen through the ranks of the air force to become its commander and Egypt’s Vice President. He took over the presidency in 1981 when Anwar Sadat was gunned down by Islamic extremists. For three decades, Mubarak ruled with an iron fist and was finally ousted in 2011 during the uprisings of the Arab Spring.
This is where the question why the rich always want more comes into focus. In the first year of his presidency, Hosni Mubarak squirrelled away $1 billion dollars in Switzerland. He bought a mansion flat in Kensington, a chateau in France, a private plane and ruled, according to Amnesty, with the ‘signature policies of mass torture and arbitrary detention.’
When he died aged 91 in 2020, Mubarak had accumulated a personal fortune, according to Forbes, of $70 billion.
Why the Rich Must Not Rule
With his property holdings and $1 billion, Hosni Mubarak in 1981 was financially secure. There was nothing he could do with $2 billion that he could not do with $1 billion. He had the power and authority to use Egypt’s wealth to create better lives, better housing, better conditions and universal education for the nation’s 100 million people. He had the chance to become a hero, a giant, a Nelson Mandela, a figure remembered with esteem in history.
But no. He wanted the money.
What Mubarak’s wealth had done was separate him from real life and ordinary people. The more distant the rich become, the less they see people as people with hopes and dreams, the more they transmogrify in the rich man’s mind into a faceless mass, just numbers with no more humanity than an algorithm.
How can Rishi Sunak with his £730 million put himself in the shoes of a nurse or fireman or a teacher with a couple of kids who get to the end of the week and don’t have enough money to buy groceries? He cannot imagine the shame, the indignity, the cruelty of poverty, hunger, food banks. He will never look into the eyes of his children and see the lost look of despair and disappointment.
Trickle Down
Sunak and his predecessors – Cameron, May, Johnson and Truss – have since the Conservative Party took power in 2010 used austerity and wage restraint to break the will and well being of working people. They have neglected the NHS and social care system, and allowed the mainly foreign owned private rail, water and energy suppliers to reap massive profits at the expense of wages and investment.
Sunak and his cohorts – like Thatcher and Reagan – believe in deregulated capital markets, the elimination of price controls and the eradication of state influence in the economy through privatisation: the debunked trickle-down doctrine that assumes if the rich get richer, it would trickle down to the poor. It doesn’t. Money attracts money like a magnet. It doesn’t trickle down. It is sucked up. Since 2010, wages and the buying power of working people has decreased while the number of millionaires has doubled.
The Conservative Party in government through five prime ministers has placed high net worth donors in the House of Lords and key positions as advisers and heads of influential institutions, most recently financier Richard Evans shoehorned furtively into the BBC by Boris Johnson.
In collusion with the right-wing press, the 1% rich, elite and privileged in the United Kingdom have freed themselves from the financial oversight and human rights obligations of the European Union. By underfunding, undermining and unpicking the very fabric and foundations of society – health and social care, schools, transport, the probation service, prisons, the border force and the civil service, they have created a social and financial crisis far worse than in any other developed economy in the world.
Rishi Sunak, Mohamed Mansour and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, relatively poor with a mere £14.5 million, refuse to talk to trade union leaders about wage claims and will continue to fight the poor for every penny they can get.
Mr Hunt in a recent interview said the government will be asking ‘everyone for sacrifices.’ What he didn’t say was that by ‘everyone,’ he meant the poor, the increasing number of people on the edge of poverty, the children from unheated homes and broken schools, broken by thirteen years of neglect, mendacity and cruel policies that hurt ordinary people.
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Spot on with what you have said. The time for change is now but unfortunately the Tories still have 2 more years to destroy what social services and other services we have left.
Jesus weeps!
Far better expressed than I could have done!
“The more distant the rich become, the less they see people as people with hopes and dreams, the more they transmogrify in the rich man’s mind into a faceless mass, just numbers with no more humanity than an algorithm.”
The post-BREXIT Toxic Tories of misinformation maladministratiom and misgovernance have two chances of winning the next election – dam little and none – and face the prospect of an eternity on opposition benches without even being the main opposition.
Conservatism under the past five Prime Ministers has caused division, economic catastrophe and social unrest.
We are seeing strikes by those that oppose Government policies of enriching the already wealthy while pushing the poor into destitution.
The very people that underpin our society are seen as the enimy to be defeated in its ideological agenda, while public opinion remain with those on the picket lines.
GREED is truly the most terrible challenge of our times, and capitalism is its tool, its means to power and more greed.
Greed is a (contagious) mental illness, an unfillable hole, a hunger that denies justice, a brutal expression of broken egos.
Greed is having a million times as much as the poor and still feeling you don’t have enough.
Greed consumes the earth without respite, and is a cancer on humanity.
Greed destroys us and our children and their future.
Greed is death.
Another good article. Being somewhat older, I remember the election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power. Before the election a work colleague told me he was going to vote Conservative as they promised tax cuts. I asked him what services did he want to see cut as in my view that would be the end result of tax cuts.
The Thatcher political priorities included putting the Market in control wherever possible and to open up the world to trade with as few tariff barriers as possible. Reagan in the USA did the same. The result was that businesses could move production out of Europe and the USA where wages were higher to places with cheaper employees and fewer restrictive laws. I remember Thatcher explaining to trade unions that their people were now in competition with workers in the Far East.
The result ironically was that when well paid reliable jobs in heavy industries went to the east, the people who lost their jobs were gaslit by right leaning papers to blame the EEC/EU and Immigrants for their financial predicament. The end result was the election of Trump in the USA and Brexit in the UK.
All the while, the wealthy were getting wealthier because of their share ownership and investments in things like hedge funds and asset stripping buy-outs.
We need capitalism to create work and wealth and we need share ownership to fund enterprises and to enable pensions to work. What has to go with it, in my view, is strong control and direction by politicians to ensure things work in the interests of all of society and not just a select few.
This is connected to feelings of inadequacy and inferiority for the need of materialistic powers and greed. The rich are always higher in status and wealth than intelligence, integrity and what they genuinely deserve, so they try to inflate this side to be in line with their status and wealth, and in doing so want more.
They are used to being put on a pedestal and getting more than they deserve but they have to behave with inflated egos to compensate for their inferior capabilities which don’t match their status and wealth, so use materialistic oneupmanship as a means of being more deserving.
Snobbery is the wealthy equivalent of having an inferiority complex and this combined with feelings of a right of entitlement over others is narcissism.
Inferiority is the root of all evil. It destroys society and there is more hidden inferiority in the wealthy than those struggling to make ends meet, and consequently these inferiorities are used in evil ways through abuse of power to inflict suffering upon others (normal people but vulnerable people in particular who cannot fight for their rights).
This abuse of power must be stopped.
Another point here is that it is not just the advantages those with a silver spoon in their gob during their developmental years get but something more which is unacceptable.
If the disadvantage were let move on as well (at a disadvantage to the privileged but let progress) then this would be better than what I am about to reveal.
There are some who come from disadvantaged backgrounds and are highly gifted but don’t get any support to make the most of their potential and are still left to rot. In spite of all this they have natural abilities which can still develop and by the time they become young adults they have done “reasonably well”, sometimes better than the more privileged.
But this is where abuse worse than being disadvantaged comes into play. It is oppression where in addition to not getting support during development, they have their achievements undermined and pushed into the ground again.
I was brought up in poverty, taken out of mainstream school because of uncontrolled epilepsy, I had my education messed up, conned out of disability benefits by DWP fraudsters, but still got go university and obtained a degree in mathematics. Instead of being appreciated for my skills and getting a reasonable opportunity, the bureaucrats and narcissists in positions of control used the epilepsy and poverty to limit my choice and forced me into cheap employment where I was paid less than school leavers in spite of my degree.
All these responsible for the oppression I experienced were privileged middle class perverts with silver spoons in their gobs, pokers up their backsides, and always had to be seen by their status and not their intelligence as they were not that talented or bright, just used to having everything handed to them on a plate as a right of entitlement.
All these actions are consequences of the evils of inferiority associated with perverts in privileged positions.
Bernard Naish
Studies by the Harvard Business School some time ago did not find that. Once all the basic are provided for, people strive to earn more as a way of comparing their success with other peoples. Thats why heavy and progressive taxation is perfectly acceptable in social democratic economies.
I’ve been bitterly aware of the rich elites ever since I happened to attend a middle school populated with entitled, elitist snobs (who at 11 to 13 years old) made life a living hell for the very few of us who lived on the wrong side of the tracks (literally) and through a minor wrinkle in the school district’s map attended this school. I’ve also witnessed the phenomena of the Cult of Trump, composed mostly of lower-income blue-collar workers and masses of people from rural areas who continue to worship at the altar of an insurrectionist moron who wouldn’t cross the street to piss on any one of his sycophants if they were on fire. What I will take away from this article is the phrase, “Money attracts money like a magnet. It doesn’t trickle down. It is sucked up.” This is an unfortunate but profound truth.
The poverty and troubles that are assailing the UK are the same as in France where the strikes on a weekly basis are crippling the economy for those who want to work/have to work to feed their families and pay the rent and heating. France is a country where criticism is rife, nobody is happy…and want more and more. I wonder to what country we may look for a better and more democratic system? totally and completely depressing even if I have a heated home, full fridge and a loving family. Individually reducing the heat, eating vegetarian or almost and helping one’s friends and family etc is about all one can do. And smile, it HAS to get better! You are not alone.
Although we may have the same problems in France and the UK, I think the roots are different. Thirteen years of Conservative Government has left 20% of the population living in poverty. Nurses and firemen are using food banks because their wages are insufficient. Teachers’ wages have a buying power 40% less than 10 years ago. So here there is a great deal of sympathy for the strikers and a growing intolerance with the government. Somehow, the world itself has gone out of balance. So, we, too have changed our diet, enjoy our friends and try to smile.
A perfect assessment of the self-serving attitude of the tory government that has progressively brought Britain to its knees.
You’ve hit the nail onthe head, as usual Cliff. The video of Sunak asking a man in a homeless shelter “do you work in business?” says it all. He doesn’t have a clue about real life and the rest of them don’t either. Perhaps we should copy the French and start setting fire to things to get justice for the major part of the people of this country. We sure ain’t gonna get it by being passive and listening to the whole bunch of them. Democracy? We seem to have voted against it and I can’t see a way back – if we ever had it. Can anyone else?
Forget about Tory or Labour, get the Tories out and it will be alright. that is the same as the Vote Leave sunlit upland rubbish.
Forget about 13 years of Tory rule, the voter has since 1979 voted for 33 years and rising of Tory rule and 13 Labour
Forget about Labour in any shape wasyor form under the current leader being your economic saviour. The 33 versus 13 year statistic shows Labour have continuously moved and followed the Tories to the right, to get elected
Remember Maggie T. who said her finest achievement was changing the Labour Party , maybe Johnson in years to come will claim he did that to Starmer’s Labour?
There is no use complaining about the loss of the NHS, strikers pay, food bank usage surging, when in 2016 but for a long time before it, Voters have vote for poverty, just as long as it did not affect them … and Labour in 1997 did not reverse it sufficiently, or establish a new basis, an alternative way, did they?
The governing elite sold the voter in 2016, to demand the right of a Delegate Parliamentary system not a Representative Democracy.
But The Elites play tokenism to this new Democracy, selling the voter what he wants, or he thinks he wants, or can be persuaded to want, and then presenting it as the will of the People
E,g. The governing elite sold the voter Brexit, and they lapped it up
The governing Elite then went off and created the kind of Hard Brexit they wanted, for their benefit, not necessarily the UK
It certainly can not be said to be mandated in a 52-48 referendum … but this was after all just tokenism wasn’t it?
It is not only the Tories that are self serving, that is too one sided, Labour are self serving too
They all play the numbers game. Your vote is not important, they know you will vote for your party irrespective, 2019 proved that for Conservatives and the next election will prove that for Labour’s precious red wall, they know you do not care that much
Apathy, a 2 Party system, 1980s greed, and Brexit which brought out envy, 2010’s the decade the rich got richer and a lack of appetite from the Voter to change shows that the Elite’s will always rule on Behalf of the Country, whether Red of Blue, but not necessarily for the countries benefit, and the electorate are not overly bothered, certainly not enough, by it are they?
Nothing there to disagree with.
Trains not running, subsidised by us.
Empty buses running frequent underused service, subsidised by us.
HS2 a waste of our money.
BT broadband expansion, subsidised by us whilst I’m paying £45.00 a month for 2 mb per second.
Diesel and petrol prices astronomical because of the war in Ukraine.
Food prices astronomical because of the war in Ukraine.
Water rates rising despite rain and floods dominating our weather as if there’s a water shortage.
Energy prices remaining shockingly high and energy companies reporting astronomical profits, odd that their costs haven’t depleted their profits.
Council tax increases despite services being squeezed and lessened.
Wages stagnant and dropping, we are working harder and longer for less money and the pittance we earn buys us less and when we get ill we cannot get the medical care we need.
Our police services have been squeezed beyond normal operational requirements, endangering our brave officers and us.
Nurses and doctors and support staff absolutely ruined with work load and lack of supplies, equipment and numbers and underpaid too.
Public sector staff under paid, over worked, under appreciated and abused.
Private sector workers under paid, over worked, over taxed, tired and skint.
Disabled, unwell, aged, young, homeless, evictees, carers and every other good person being abused as the rest of us are and …….
some think the Tories are doing a good job at running our country!
Surely the people who think this are the Tory wealthy, the bigoted brexiteers and the media corrupted?
Things for the majority of us all are getting even worse and we tut about it.
For humanitarian reasons we have to say Enough is Enough and have a general strike to force a general election and get this government out and then answer for their corruption and deceit and the absolute ruination of our nation.
I arrived in the UK in 1972, after 7 pretty crap years in apartheid era South Africa. I was amazed by how poor the country was, and people were so ground down. In SA, race was the dividing line, here it was – and still is – class.
Voted for Maggie in ’79, thought she’d start getting things better for us. Lived in a GLC hard to let flat at the time, as hubby and I saved up for our first home. We moved in in 1981, and it cost 1.5 times our combined income. (Happy to hand back the flat to another deserving couple/family: we’d done it up and it looked really nice!)
Never voted for Maggie/the Tories again. Lucky enough to have family living in Consett, so I saw the damage they caused there – fortunately none worked for the steel mill. Saw the terrible ways the police treated striking miners. Pitting poor against poor, something the rich excel at.
For a while, I worked in corporate affairs (for McDonald’s UK). Saw how easy it was to manipulate MPs, giving them good lunches or dinners. However, McD’s provided many jobs for ordinary people like you and me and quite a few went onto really senior positions in the company. But the business took too long to change.
Labour would have been a lot better if Gordon Brown had been PM from 2005 onwards. Tony was a chancer, same silver spoon as the Tories. Charming, good looking, but zero interest in ordinary people. Look at the Iraq war: it unleashed real chaos and hardship for Iraqis and Opened the floodgates when he allowed the new EU members to come over here with NO cap. (I love the EU, btw). It’s only right some people in poorer areas objected: many weren’t doing well, partly because far too few social housing was built to replace those sold off.
I had periods of unemployment, claimed Job Seekers and talked to many claiming benefit. It was very sad – many had lost hope and their skills weren’t up to date. Poor health too, owing to lack of funds to buy decent food. Late 1990s.
Middle income earners still believed Labour/Tories had their back. Not so. Everything was sold off, the NHS by stealth. I have friends who’s postman sons and nursing daughters in law are on strike regularly. Rightly so.
I retired 8 years ago. Don’t have a huge pension (most people I know don’t) but we were able to buy our house outright, which gives us more security. I’ve helped raise funds for homeless projects, donate to Food Banks, talk to the homeless and help many to quit drinking, which I see as a service to them, their family, community, employers and domestic and public safety (road accidents.)
All of this is happening worldwide. I’ve made a choice to always help where I can, to shine a little light in the darkness. The darkness is unfettered and unchecked greed. The very wealthy I occasionally bump into are scared stiff and hate being challenged. As an older woman, I challenge. They cringe, or shout at me. No problem!
Most religions also support unfettered greed as the senior clerics get power and status too: look at the Bishops in the House of Lords!!!! I recall how the Dutch Reformed Church supported the brutal National Party’s apartheid policies as well……
My dad (served in the RAF in WW2, and later worked for De Havilland on the Comet) and Norwegian mum – survived Nazi occupation in WW2 – would be utterly horrified by what the uber wealthy have done to this world. I was brought up a socialist and will remain one until my dying breath.
And frankly, there is nothing elite, nor entitled about them. If we treat them in the same way as others, not giving in, or walking away, they get the message…..