Times are tough if you happen to be a member of the working class in Britain today. The owning class seem to be surviving OK though. "The UK's richest people have defied the double-dip recession to become even richer over the past year, according to the annual Sunday Times Rich List. The newspaper's research found the combined worth of the country's 1,000 wealthiest people is £414bn, up 4.7%. ..... Top spot for the eighth straight year is held by Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, 61, with £12.7bn. There are now 77 billionaires on the list, with individuals needing to have at least £72m to make the top 1,000." (BBC News, 29 April) A double dip recession means a 4.7% income increase to that lucky 1,000. RD
The Glasgow & Edinburgh Branches Blog. Towards a better understanding of the world, in order to change it.
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Paternalism is a common attitude among well-meaning social reformers. Stemming from the root pater, or father, paternalism implies a patria...
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"Boom time for the wealthy; crisis for everybody else. How are they getting away with it? The simple answer is because they can. Trade unions provide a means of securing for working people more of the wealth sloshing around. But they were battered in the 1980s, and their membership is nearly half of what it was in 1979. As their power has declined, the share of our national income going to the wealthiest 1 per cent has gone from 6 per cent in the late 1970s to over 14 per cent today."
Owen Jones in the Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-great-for-the-rich--but-what-if-youre-poor-7689163.html
Have you heard about a maverick Australian mining billionaire, Clive Palmer, who plans to build the Titanic II and sail it from England to New York by the end of 2016?
http://tinyurl.com/bmomuaf
Even with the technological advances over the past century, this will be an impressive feat for one man! You will recall T1 took 26 months to complete and the combined efforts of 15,000 workers!
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