“The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust… The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together.” Tom Paine (1737-1809)

Research by the Equality Trust points to the social gulf between the UK super-rich and the majority who are getting poorer.

Its report, Billionaire Britain 2025, published in May explains, “The costs for our unequal society continue to be borne by those who can’t afford them—and the costs are still growing. Throughout this time, however, the UK’s richest have thrived. Billionaires in particular have seen their wealth soar.”

The richest 50 families in the UK own more wealth than 34 million people, comprising the poorest half of the population. The ultra-rich are becoming richer, increasing their wealth by a multiple of a thousand since 1990. Today, the two richest UK billionaires hold “more wealth between them than all the billionaires in the 1990 list combined.”

Launched in 2009, the Equality Trust received funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust before becoming a charity itself in 2015. The Equality Trust notes, “UK income inequality is among the highest in the developed world.”

In 1990, there were 15 billionaires in the UK. This number soared to 165 by 2024. In real terms adjusted for inflation, the aggregate wealth of billionaires in the UK in 1990 was £65.8 billion, rising to a stratospheric £619.5 billion by 2025.

This is a global phenomenon. According to Forbes World’s Billionaire List 2024, aggregate wealth of the world’s 3,028 billionaires reached a record high of $16.1 trillion.

The 2008 global financial crash, ushering in savage austerity for the working class globally, had no impact on the rising number of billionaires and their wealth. In 2010, the number of billionaires in Britain rose from 74 to 117 five years later— their wealth almost doubling from £250.2 billion to £442.5 billion in the same period.

Following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the wealth of the growing number of UK billionaires reached new heights. In 2020, 147 billionaires possessed £614.1 billion. By 2023, 171 billionaires held £704.1 billion.

Warning that the growth in extreme inequality means “trust in the political system is collapsing,” the report states that “the UK’s economy has become incredibly specialised at finding ways to extract wealth from a process… adding little or no value, and charging a fee.

“This has made a small number of people very, very rich by contributing almost nothing and taking increasing rents from those that do contribute.”

The Equality Trust graphically illustrates the parasitism and financialization of the UK economy since 1990, whereby wealth accumulation is increasingly divorced from the production of real value. This is a defining feature of the world economy controlled by a billionaire oligarchy.

In 1990, two of the UK billionaires’ wealth was held in property, rising to 15 in 2005 and reaching 42 in 2025. Today, the wealth in part or full of more than one in four billionaires in Britain is based on property, inheritance, or the financial markets.

Wealth accruing from finance comprised 30 percent of total billionaire wealth in 2024 or £197.6 billion—a fourfold increase since 1990. The number of billionaires in this sector rose from one in 1990 to 39 today.

There was a surge in wealth appropriation in this sector both after the financial crash of 2008—the report suggests this is indicative of a resumption of risky ventures—and in 2021 after the COVID-19 outbreak.

“There was a particular increase during the beginning of the cost-of-living crisis and the global inflation surge in 2021-22,” it states.

The myth that all boats rise when the richest and the corporations profit is dashed by the billionaires prospering vampire-like in industries like media, oil and gas, which are shedding jobs. The report states that the “growth of the ultra-rich has little to do with success for the wider economy.”

According to the British Retail Consortium, there were over a quarter of a million job losses in retail in 2024. The Equality Trust data shows that, in the same year, the total wealth of the billionaires exploiting this sector reached £100 billion.

The burgeoning wealth of the few based on property sits atop a desperate housing crisis. Due to rising property prices and lack of social housing, families are prey to private landlords, who charge exorbitant rents. In 2024, one in 160 UK households were classed as homeless in England. Last Christmas at least 354,000 people were without a home in England.

While most of the population are crushed by the impact of rising inflation and the cost-living-crisis—due to surging energy costs since the pandemic and the NATO-led war in Ukraine—the rich increased their wealth, “from the increased bills, rents, and mortgage payments shouldered by the rest of us.”

The Equality Trust reveals the “rise in the value of inherited wealth” which now occupies “twice the share of the national economy it did in the 1980s, making up nearly 9% of UK GDP.” In contrast, inheritance tax, which provided 3 percent of national taxation in the 1950s, today provides a mere 0.3 percent.

Successive Conservative and Labour governments have allow the sated few to swell their incomes, slashing top rates of income tax since the 1950s—from 91 percent to 45 percent today—privatising essential services like transport and communications, while gutting funding for health, welfare and education.

Amazon UK was exempt from paying tax from 2020, while gaining tax credits of £8.9 million due to a scheme that rewarded investment under Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government, reported the Guardian. It only paid tax in 2023—£18.7 million after £27 billion revenue from sales. Amazon employees on the other hand labour under arduous conditions to earn £12.41 an hour in the warehouses, barely above the minimum wage of £12.21.

The report notes that “Gambling billionaires have also thrived over the past few decades, particularly after the [Blair Labour government’s] 2005 Gambling Act allowed aggressive and predatory new practices. This has created a surge in people suffering with gambling addictions and mental health problems related to gambling, creating a serious public health issue. NIESR estimated the financial cost of problem gambling to have reached £1.4bn each year in 2023. However, it has also created enormous wealth for a few billionaires.”

In the creative and media industries, the number of billionaires rose from zero to 20 today amid layoffs throughout the sector.

The Equality Trust report coincided with the Sunday Times Rich List 2025, which documents the 1,000 wealthiest individuals or families in the UK. In first position this year, for the fourth-year running, was the Hinduja family, with £35.3 billion. 

A piece by the High Pay Centre (HPC) think tank on the Sunday Times Rich List addressed media focus on the Equality Trust’s statistics illustrating a dip in the number of billionaires this year and their total wealth—from 165 to 156, and a decrease in aggregate wealth by 3 percent.

This, the HPC concluded, was a blip or “slight decline” rather than a reversal in the tendency towards growing inequality due to, “Fluctuations in global financial markets”. It pointed out, “Since 2008, rich list wealth has increased about 4 x faster than median UK household wealth.”

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) report “UK poverty 2025” reveals the terrible impact of the pauperisation of millions. Figures for 2022/23 showed more than one in five people in the UK were living in poverty—21 percent of the population or 14.3 million people. “It is 20 years since we last saw a prolonged period of falling poverty,” wrote the JRF.

Six million or four in 10 of those in poverty in 2022-2023 lived on an income far below the poverty line—“the average person in poverty had an income 28 percent below the poverty line, compared to 23 percent between 1994/95 and 1996/97.” The very poorest families were surviving on an average income 57 percent below the poverty line.

Since Labour came to office a year ago, “unacceptably high rates of poverty… persist”, according to the JRF. This must worsen drastically as the government implements a war economy and doubles military spending in line with Nato’s confrontation of Russia and China.