The Rich Housing List

Indeed a housing crisis exists, particularly for the rich - a crisis of which country estate to buy. The magazine for the lairds and the squires, Country Life,  has advertised a number of desirable rural residencies in Scotland.

10,143-acre Cluny estate at Laggan, Invernessshire,  ‘offers over £7.5 million'. The house has three main reception rooms along with seven main bedrooms and five bathrooms. Eleven estate houses and cottages are used to house staff or could be developed as holiday lets.

Hoscote estate at Roberton, in the Borthwick Water valley in upper Teviotdale, nine miles south-west of Hawick, little more than an hour's drive from the Scottish capital, for which ‘offers over £2.95 million' are sought. As well as the refurbished nine-bedroom main house surrounded by  formal gardens, the estate includes five modernised houses and cottages, an in-hand livestock farm. It also offers a pheasant shoot, roe-deer stalking, duck-shooting and trout fishing on Borthwick Water.

Culdaremore near Fortingall, in the heart of Highland Perthshire, another small estate with a  five-bedroom main house, gardens and a range of traditional stone buildings, surrounded by 375 acres of pasture, hill grazing and conifer plantations. Offers over £1.25m are sought. Also available is  red- and roe-deer stalking, fishing on the River Lyon, a tributary of the Tay, and the potential to create a low-ground pheasant shoot.

Offers over £1.25m for the picturesque, 194-acre Achara estate near the Highland village of Duror, near Loch Linnhe in coastal Argyll. The house was built in the Scots Baronial style.  In addition to the  eight-bedroom main house overlooking Loch Linnhe, the estate boasts a converted three-bedroom coach house and two cottages suitable for holiday lets.

 At offers over £950,000 Lessudden House on the eastern edge of pretty St Boswells village, 4-and-a-half miles from Melrose, Roxburghshire, and within a realistic commuting distance from both Edinburgh and Newcastle. Lessudden House sits in the midst of 19 acres of enchanting gardens and grounds, surrounded on three sides by parkland grazing. Accommodation includes reception and dining halls, two further main reception rooms, five main bedrooms and an attic bedroom. A range of stabling offers potential for development.

Wellfield House and Lodge at Duns, 15 miles from Berwick. Offers over £1.5m are sought for the five-bedroom house, and its two bedroom lodge. The main house is set in some eight acres of wooded gardens and grounds

Offers over £1.65m are sought for Leithen Lodge at Innerleithen, Peeblesshire, a refurbished the three-storey main house, with courtyard apartment and wing, and  20 acres of gardens, grounds and parkland.

The House of Aquahorthies near Inverurie, ‘offers over £1.3m', A nine-bedroom house, AND  some 38 acres of landscaped grounds, woodland and paddocks

Who Are the Rich?

The rich don’t really think they’re rich. In a new survey, the vast majority of investors in America with $1 million in assets don’t consider themselves wealthy.

A new report from UBS surveyed 4,450 participants, half had $1 million or more in investable assets, and  had at least $250,000 in investments. Compared with the huge portion of the population that barely has any savings. But do these people think they’re rich? For the most part, the answer is no. Of those with investable assets worth $1 million to $5 million, only 28% answered yes to the question “Do you consider yourself wealthy?”

 Just 60% answered yes to the question.of investors surveyed with $5 million or more in investable assets consider themselves wealthy. In other words, 4 in 10 Americans with assets of $5 million or more think they’re not truly rich.

The UBS asked what would have to happen for these individuals to consider themselves rich?  The most popular answer, selected by half of those surveyed, was “no financial constraints on activities.”

However the above pales into insignificance when Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire private equity tycoon and co-founder of the Blackstone Group, with only just 181 people richer than him (of which 56 are Americans) was deluded enough to say “I don’t feel like a wealthy person. Other people think of me as a wealthy person, but I don’t.”

About half of Americans don’t have an emergency fund that’d cover three months of expenses

Understanding class

There are two classes in society - the one possessing wealth and owning the means of its production, the other making the wealth by using those tools and technology but only with the permission and only for the benefit of the possessors. These two classes are necessarily in opposition to one another. We have before us today, in capitalist society, masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited but to put it more bluntly, robbers and the robbed. Two economic forces whose interests ceaselessly clash, are pitted against each other. These two classes can never be reconciled and it is this that we call the class struggle. Workers, be they “white” or “blue” collar, skilled or unskilled, because they are workers, cannot survive except by selling their labouring power. Yet were it not for the working class, the whole social fabric would collapse in an instant. It is they who do the useful work. It is they who produce the wealth.