Is wealth inequality causing the big issues of our day?

Cossy

Whitewavemark2

To my mind a wealthy person is one whose passive or unearned income is one who earns over £50 million a year.

Good grief! £50m a year isn’t just wealthy is it!

My reaction, too, Cossy.

The subservience to ‘wealth’ on this forum sometimes astonishes me.

I feel so sorry for those poor souls jogging along on more than £1 million a year. How dare we think of depriving them of any of it…

There seem to be two completely opposing views of what our economy should look like. One says that our finances should be arranged so that the whole population is able to lead a decent life and is cared for. The other is indifferent to want and hardship so long as the wealthy can hang on to all they have.

I don’t know why they bother to start threads like this.

GrannyGravy13

butterandjam I am surprised that overall assets of £2 million puts someone in the top 5%

I assumed it would be higher now that property prices have risen 🤷‍♀️

Property prices have been stagnant for several years, small rises in some years, but now falling slightly.

The economic and international situation is making people cautious about committing themselves to taking on mortgages at a time of rising interest rates.

This why the government is unlikely to meet its pledge to build 1.5 million homes during this Parliament.

Whitewavemark2

To my mind a wealthy person is one whose passive or unearned income is one who earns over £50 million a year.

Good grief! £50m a year isn’t just wealthy is it!

I would just like to say that this income comes from earnings on the assets held. In practice these individuals earn far more but I think this is a good starting point when looking at wealth inequality.

Whitewavemark2

To my mind a wealthy person is one whose passive or unearned income is one who earns over £50 million a year.

I agree with you on this 👍🏻

To my mind a wealthy person is one whose passive or unearned income is one who earns over £50 million a year.

butterandjam I am surprised that overall assets of £2 million puts someone in the top 5%

I assumed it would be higher now that property prices have risen 🤷‍♀️

CatCrone

Whitewavemark2
Why do you presume ‘We are talking about the top 1-5% here - definitely not in GN territory’. I’m sure there are people on GN who would fit this description.

I'm sure you're right.

assets of 2 million qualify for "top 5% of wealth"

I absolutely agree 100% with everything in your post at 18:23:23 MaizieD.

When it comes to the ridiculous 'mansion tax' apart from anything else a much smaller 'mansion' in one area can be worth more than one three times the size in another area, but will not necessarily reflect the owner's real wealth in terms of disposable income.

David49

"Rich (Upper Middle Class / Affluent):
Income Range: Usually starting from around £100,000 to several hundred thousand pounds annually.
Characteristics: Wealthy professionals, successful entrepreneurs, and high-level executives. Often owners of multiple properties, substantial savings, and investments"

You conveniently forgot pensioners with their homes paid for and fat pensions.

Of course everyone is in favour of a wealth tax if it doesn't affect them

David49If pensioners have, in pension age, an income range starting from around £100,000 to several hundred thousand pounds annually and are owners of multiple properties, substantial savings, and investments will often have had the characteristics described i.e., they wealthy professionals, successful entrepreneurs, and high-level executives. Being a pensioner is not an overnight change to a different person it's a continuation. We are not a separate species!

M0nica

It doesn't matter whether we are talking 50 houses or 10 million. There will be some people in them who bought houses 20 or more years ago for modest prices who have seen the value of their house rocket, so that some £2 million houses are occupied by people on modest incomes. £2 million houses are not necessarily palatial mansions. they can be uite modest homes on large plots of land now zoned for house building where previously building consent would be refused.

Expensive housing is not scattered evenly across the country, there are areas where housing as a whole is expensive and £2 million houses are more common than elsewhere.

I have lived most of my adult life in Berkshire/Oxfordshire, which of course includes so many delightful riverside properties as well as Oxford itself and environs and it has a uite disproportionate number of properties that sell for over £2 million

Is there any sort of map that shows the distribution of these houses because a fair few of them are within a few miles of my home, (which sadly is not one)? 25 over £2million on just one estate agent's book in one small SE postcode. He has a fair few just under the £2 million too. Obviously this is a small proportion of the houses in that postcode, most are not for sale.

This is not central London or even north London Islington so beloved of many. From the office of national statistics :

For each property type, average prices as of March 2026 in Islington were:

Detached properties: £1,687,000
Semi-detached properties: £1,421,000
Terraced properties: £1,156,000
Flats and maisonettes: £565,000

so for those to be average prices there must be a significant number of houses over £2 million in Islington. Some of those will be family homes people bought many years ago, they are not necessarily millionaires in terms of disposable cash.

I think that a mansion tax is a daft idea. Like with a a land tax, there would be very expensive (for HMRC) difficulty in establishing the value of each property.

There is certainly scope foe equalising some taxes; dividend taxat should be the same as income tax, with no extra allowance because it is dividend. Capital gains tax should be the same rate as income tax and NIC should be abolished and the amount taken into income taxation, for example, At the moment, anyone living solely on rental income pays no NIC. How is that fair? Yet people who are earning below the income tax threshold have to pay NIC. It's crazy.

I'd like to see trusts abolished, but I think that would be too radical a step...But the Duke of Westminster, who inherited £billions, paid no inheritance tax at all because it was all in a trust.

I still really think the focus should be on preventing people from becoming super wealthy rather than depending on taxing what they already have.

Other than Billionaires, how many millions does someone need to have to be classed as wealthy

This seems to be an unanswered question?

Exactly David49

valdali

Goggle says 0.6% of homes in the UK cost above 2 million, that makes them fair game for a mansion tax imo.

Not all the owners will be "cash wealthy" but majority will.

Not sure where "class" comes into it apart from stately homes still owned by the family. Its the super-wealthy and the rest.

Many business and property owners are not cash wealthy extra taxation on top of the other costs would be a big drain making future investment more difficult.
If you need to sell assets to pay a wealth tax you will pay CGT as well and the whole business slides down.

My answer to the OP’s question, is yes, of course.

Enough of this “middle class” nonsense.

My nurse friend married to a GP (sadly no longer with us but was the senior partner), live in a very area of Frinton with lots and lots of lovely houses, very few exceed £2m, like our eldest daughter who lives in an equally lovely part of Herts, in a village and just paid £1.1m for an extremely nice detached listed building.

The point is we currently have more billionaires living in the UK than ever before and unfortunately those with nothing can see these people and sometimes feel very disgruntled with their own lot in life.

My DF always told me to work hard and pay my correct taxes, try and do something for those less fortunate than ourselves and always feel proud of your achievements.

This isn’t always easy to do, it’s simply not true that just by working hard you’ll do well, life isn’t fair and sadly, yet again, social media allows people to share their lives with the world, always managing to make their lives look amazing (whether they are or not)

It’s so easy to blame others, today I saw a clip from Vanessa Feltz’s show, some blustering old white English man on the phone was insisting to her that when he goes to the shops (in London) he wants to be served b a white British person! She asked him three times what difference it made and he simply repeating “I want to be served by a white British person!” She was horrified, I wasn’t!

ronib

So one could ask why Labour is introducing this increase in taxes if it’s not going to bring much revenue?
Also what will be the effect on the general housing market when properties over £2m fail to sell in good time? Price stagnation filtered down so probably a good idea? But a loss to the Treasury on stamp duty revenue overall?

Like VAT on Private Schools it's ideological, Wealth Tax will hit the privately held wealth in the UK, just like estate duty in the past, It's not going to be easy to introduce a new tax collected from individuals, extending existing taxes will be easier and just as effective.

twaddle

No, ronib, the vast majority of the "middle class" does not have £2 million.

I agree.

What is this “class” thing?
I grew up in the west of Scotland and hadn,t heard s peak of class until my late 20s when I did a college course.
Our lecturer asked what class we would be aiming our skills/ businesses at.In all honesty it wasn,t something that was on my radar ,one of my classmates insisted she would be aiming for upper class customers as she herself was “middle class”
When questioned why she believed that was the case ,it was because she had a washing machine and fridge freezer.
She certainly gave the rest of us a laugh.
I think class is a construct to cause division ,where I grew up there were people of diffferent backgrounds in very different jobs.
From a concert pianist to a postman.
We all got along just fine
Now the media uses class along with religion and culture to cause havoc and the constant media attention on the likes of the Kardashians or Beckham family make a lot of young folk feel there’s no point in getting a job at the lower end of the pay scale as they,ll never reach those levels. Which are now seen as the goal they should be aiming for .
Me?Iust wanted a business that paid the bills …whoever the customer was

Whitewavemark2

Oh I had no idea that we had billionaires who contributed to GN😄😄

Don’t know about billionaires but there are definitely a few millionaires on this site 👍

Oh I had no idea that we had billionaires who contributed to GN😄😄

Goggle says 0.6% of homes in the UK cost above 2 million, that makes them fair game for a mansion tax imo.

Not all the owners will be "cash wealthy" but majority will.

Not sure where "class" comes into it apart from stately homes still owned by the family. Its the super-wealthy and the rest.

twaddle

No, ronib, the vast majority of the "middle class" does not have £2 million.

I'd agree.

It doesn't matter whether we are talking 50 houses or 10 million. There will be some people in them who bought houses 20 or more years ago for modest prices who have seen the value of their house rocket, so that some £2 million houses are occupied by people on modest incomes. £2 million houses are not necessarily palatial mansions. they can be uite modest homes on large plots of land now zoned for house building where previously building consent would be refused.

Expensive housing is not scattered evenly across the country, there are areas where housing as a whole is expensive and £2 million houses are more common than elsewhere.

I have lived most of my adult life in Berkshire/Oxfordshire, which of course includes so many delightful riverside properties as well as Oxford itself and environs and it has a uite disproportionate number of properties that sell for over £2 million

Mollygo

Twaddle 😄
The tragedy is that those pulling Reform's strings belong to this group of wealthy and privileged, but somehow they've managed to convince people they're for change.

As a more frequent poster on GN than I am would say,

Evidence?

Evidence?

Has it passed you by that Reform is funded by a crypto billionaire who is resident in Thailand and that its leader 'earns' about £1 million a year (not including his paltry salary as an MP) and his second in command is a rather wealthy man?

Is that enough evidence?