Act I — what happened
An hour of work, an hour of wealth
Start with two hours. One belongs to someone who works for a living. The other belongs to someone who owns for a living. Britain has quietly become a country where the second hour is worth far more than the first — and that gap is the whole story.
What a typical UK full-time worker earns in an hour — £37,430 a year.
What the typical FTSE 100 chief executive is paid, relative to that worker. And at the very top, large fortunes grow 7–8% a year on their own — whether anyone works or not.
Sources: ONS (April 2024), High Pay Centre (2024/25), World Inequality Report (1995–2021). The hourly figure is derived from annual pay.
Act I — what happened
The great divergence
For most of the last century, wealth and wages rose together. Not any more. Since 1980, total UK private wealth has swollen from about threetimes the country’s annual income to about seven — while pay stalled.
Here is the honest part: the headline measure of wealth inequality has barely moved in fifteen years, and we’ll say so plainly. That is not the reassurance it sounds like. When the pile of existing wealth grows this much faster than anything you can earn, owning beats working — and the people who already own pull away from everyone else.
As of 2020–22, the wealthiest 1% — households worth £3.12m or more — held about as much as the entire bottom half of the country combined. (Source: ONS)
Act I — what happened
The wages that stopped
If owning pulled away, working stood still. Real median full-time pay was £767 a week in April 2025 — about 2% below where it stood in 2008. Roughly a decade and a half of lost ground.
Put against the trend before the financial crisis, the gap is stark: median incomes grew just 6%between 2009–10 and 2022–23, when the old trend would have delivered about 30%.
One estimate puts the cost of that stagnation at around £11,000 per worker per year — though this is a counterfactual extrapolation of the pre-2008 trend, not an observed figure (March 2023). Sources: House of Commons Library, IFS, Resolution Foundation.
Act I — what happened
It's not your salary, it's assets
Here is the engine under all of it. When the things people already own — homes, shares, businesses — grow in value faster than wages grow, then no salary, however hard-earned, can keep pace. Wealth begets wealth; work does not. Economists have a shorthand: returns on capital outrun the growth of the economy.
The result is that the gains pool at the top. Of all the new wealth created worldwide since 1995, the richest 1% captured 38% of it. The poorest half of humanity captured 2.3%.
These shares illustrate the dynamic of capital outpacing wages, rather than a formal estimate of returns — but the direction is not in doubt, and in Britain it runs above all through housing.
Act I — what happened
The housing trap
Nowhere is “owning beats earning” clearer than housing. In 2024, the average home in England cost 7.7×a typical year’s earnings — up from about 3.5× in the late 1990s. You cannot save your way across a gap that widens faster than you can earn.
And for those who can’t buy, renting eats the paycheque: private renters on a median income spend 36.3% of it on rent — rising to about 63%for the poorest fifth. Their rent is someone else’s asset, growing in value.
The gap is also a map: from Blaenau Gwent at 3.8× to Kensington & Chelsea at 27.1× (2024). Sources: ONS, ONS.
Act I — what happened
Who owns Britain
Britain’s single biggest asset is the ground itself — land is worth about £7.1 trillion, more than any other kind of wealth in the country. And almost nobody owns it. The writer Guy Shrubsole estimates that around half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population.
We can’t even be certain how concentrated it is. About 11% of England and Wales is still unregistered (FY2024-25) — and HM Land Registry says that missing land disproportionately belongs to the Crown, the aristocracy and the Church, because it has never been sold. So the official record understates how few hands hold it. Sources: Who Owns England (Guy Shrubsole) (estimate), HM Land Registry, ONS.
Act I — what happened
The accelerant
None of this happened by accident. After the 2008 crash, the Bank of England created new money on a vast scale — about £895 billion, roughly 40% of the entire economy by end-2021 — and used it to buy financial assets. Quantitative easing lifted the price of those assets, raising household financial wealth by about 16%.
But assets are owned at the top, so the gains went there too.
A House of Lords committee called it “a dangerous addiction.” In fairness, the Bank’s own analysis found the effect on relative inequality was small — gains were similar in percentage terms across households. But in hard cash the gap was enormous, and it is cash that compounds. (The Bank has since reversed course, unwinding QE from 2022.) Sources: Bank of England, House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee.
Act I — what happened
Born rich, stay rich
If you can’t earn it and you can’t buy in, there is one way left to hold wealth: inherit it. For older generations, an inheritance was a footnote to a lifetime’s pay. For the young it is becoming decisive — projected to be worth about 16% of lifetime income for those born in the 1980s, up from 9% for the 1960s-born. Nearly double.
And it lands by birth, not by merit:
Who your parents are is starting to matter more than what you do. (These are IFS model-based projections.) Source: IFS.
Act I — what happened
Regional Britain and the boardroom
The divide is also a map and a ladder. Where you live shapes what you own: median household wealth in the South East is £489,800; in the North East it is £179,900 — less than half.
And inside the firm, the distance from the top to the floor keeps stretching: the median FTSE 100 chief executive is now paid 122× the typical worker — £4,580,000 a year. Sources: ONS, High Pay Centre.
Act II — where it's heading
The billionaires' tax rate
So who pays to keep the country running? Not, it turns out, the people at the very top. Measured against their fortunes, the world’s billionaires pay an effective tax rate of about 0.3% of their wealth a year.
Even measured the ordinary way — against income — the pattern holds:
Britain is no different: someone receiving £1m in income and gains pays about 35% on average — the same rate as someone on £100,000 — and one in ten pay just 11%.
The “0.3% of wealth” figure measures tax against wealth, not income — a framing critics dispute (the economist David Splinter puts the US top-400 nearer 38% on an income basis), so we show both. And roughly 10% of the world’s wealth sits offshore, beyond the reach of tax entirely. Sources: Gabriel Zucman / G20, NBER, LSE / CenTax, EU Tax Observatory.
Act II — where it's heading
A tax system upside down
This isn’t an accident of the market — it’s written into the rules. Britain taxes the income you work for far more heavily than the income your wealth earns for you. The top rate on earnings is 45% (plus National Insurance); on capital gains, just 18–24%.
The distortions run deeper. Council tax is still pegged to property values from 1991— frozen for more than three decades — so it barely touches today’s most valuable homes. And research finds at least half of all “capital gains” are really income from work, rerouted to be taxed more lightly.
The system doesn’t merely tolerate the wealth gap — it widens it. Sources: HMRC / gov.uk, IFS, CenTax.
Act II — where it's heading
The doom loop
Here is the mechanism that ties it together — the part the economist Gary Stevenson has done most to make plain. It begins with an accounting identity, which is simply true: in any economy, one sector’s deficit is another sector’s surplus.
So when the government runs a deficit — as the UK did, at 5.3%of GDP in late 2024 — that money does not vanish. It becomes someone else’s financial asset.
Stevenson’s argument — and we flag it as his interpretation, layered on top of the identity — is that over time those surpluses pool where the assets already are: at the top. Ordinary households and the state take on the matching debt; rising rents and mortgages quietly carry income from those who owe to those who own. The gap isn’t a glitch in the system. It’s a loop — and left alone, it tightens.
The identity is uncontestable; where the surpluses end up is the contested, interpretive part. Source: ONS.
Act II — where it's heading
The human cost
Abstract gaps have concrete edges. This is what the divide looks like on the ground — and, in the end, in the most final measure there is.
Inequality, in the end, is measured in years of life.
Act II — where it's heading
Wealth becomes power
So why doesn’t a system this lopsided simply get fixed? Because wealth does not sit still — it buys influence. Three companies control 90%of Britain’s national newspaper circulation.
And political parties accepted nearly £100m in donations in 2024 — much of it from a small number of very large donors. The people with the most to lose from change tend to have the loudest voice in the argument about it. (The “20% rise since 2014” press figure is the Media Reform Coalition’s own framing; we cite only the verified £97.75m donation total.) Sources: Media Reform Coalition, Electoral Commission.
Act II — where it's heading
The forecast
We’ve shown you what happened. Here is where it points. If the trend of the last four decades simply continued — no worse, no better — this is the road ahead. Drag the year and watch wealth keep pulling away from what the country earns.
This is not a prediction. It is an arrow drawn straight from the past — a way of asking what happens if nothing changes. The point of the rest of this page is that something can.
Act III — what we can do
It's already happening
None of this is a thought experiment. France ran a wealth tax — the ISF — for nearly thirty years, raising roughly €4–5 billion a year. In 2025 the lower house of its parliament passed a new 2% minimum tax on fortunes over €100 million — the “Zucman tax” — though the Senate then rejected it. Globally, Gabriel Zucman’s plan for a 2% minimum tax on the world’s ~3,000 billionaires would raise $250bn a year.
The honest counter: of 12 OECD countries with wealth taxes in 1990, only a few remain — several found them hard to administer or easy to avoid. But Switzerland still raises about 1.1% of GDP from a well-designed one. The lesson isn’t “it can’t be done.” It’s “design matters.” Sources: Wealth Tax Commission, Légifrance / Sénat, Gabriel Zucman / G20, OECD.
Act III — what we can do
Not anti-growth, and not fringe
Two objections do most of the work against any wealth tax. The first: it would wreck growth. The evidence runs the other way. The IMF finds higher inequality is associated with weaker growth; the OECD estimates UK growth would have been more than a fifth higher had inequality not widened since the 1980s. Inequality is part of why Britain feels stuck — it takes about 5 generations for a low-income family here to reach average income.
The second objection: it’s fringe — the politics of envy. It isn’t.
(The IMF and OECD growth findings are associational, by the authors’ own account; the polls are largely campaign-commissioned, so we lead with the neutral YouGov figure.) Sources: IMF, OECD, YouGov, Patriotic Millionaires UK / Survation.
Act III — what we can do
A wealth tax for Britain
So here is the proposal. Not a one-off raid, not a tax on the middle. A permanent 2% a year on the slice of wealth above £10 million — and nothing below it. It would touch about 22,000 people, roughly 0.04% of adults.
Don’t take our word for the numbers — move the sliders.
And it doesn’t stand alone — it comes with fixing the taxes we already have: aligning capital gains with income tax (about £14bn), revaluing council tax off its 1991 base, and closing inheritance-tax reliefs (about £1.5–2bn). Together, on the order of £30 billion a year — a system, not a gimmick.
The designer uses the Wealth Tax Commission’s own revenue modelling, net of a behavioural response. Sources: UK Wealth Tax Commission, CenTax, IFS, IFS.
Act III — what we can do
Where do you rank?
Still worried this is the thin end of the wedge — that once they start taxing wealth, they’ll come for yours? Find out where you actually stand. Put in your household wealth.
of Great Britain by wealth. The proposed tax starts at £10 million — roughly 40×your wealth. You wouldn’t pay a penny.
Almost everyone discovers they are nowhere near it — and that is the point. A tax on £10m-plus fortunes is a tax on a tiny few, not on you. (Percentiles use the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey, which lost its Official Statistics accreditation in June 2025 but remains the best available.) Source: ONS.
Act III — what we can do
The choice
“They’ll all flee,” comes the reply. The best evidence says otherwise. When Britain last raised taxes on its non-doms, only 4.9% left. Abolishing the regime entirely would prompt fewer than 100 people to go — while raising £3.2bn a year. The money is real; the people stay.
So this was never really a question of economics. It is a choice between two futures: one where wealth keeps pulling away from work, and each generation inherits a country it can afford less of — and one where we tax what has quietly become untouchable, and build with it.
The data can show you the first future. Only we can choose the second.