It's All A Game (for the few)

 

Here's a thing. There was an outburst by a back-bencher in parliament some time ago, just after Sunak was crowned PM by his party - elected or mandated he was not, but whatever - stating that a nurse would have to work for 20,000 years to match the immediate Sunak family's net worth, a period which actually, after tax and NI are deducted, would be even longer. At the same time, reflect that Sunak - wealthy as he is - in the global scheme of all things money, is a relative pauper, with nary a billion to his family name, bechod [that's your actual Welsh: Google it]. Compared to Elon Musk - he of Tesla, Space[Se]X and utterly, utterly questionable moral and philosophical outlook; in sum, the world's richest dickhead - a qualified nurse in the UK would have to work for around 5,500,000 years - before tax etc., natch, just to equal his pile of moolah as it stands today. Put that in further perspective: Homo Sapiens - you and I folks - have been around for just 300,000 years.

Can anyone - anyone - possibly stand up and seriously justify these levels of inequality? How can a literal handful of individuals own the earth? Of course, they don't actually have legal title to the planet, but they might as well have, as they occupy a bubble of such financial resilience that they feel themselves - and probably are, for the time being - invulnerable to the exigencies that the 99.9999999% of the world's population face. Maybe Musk realizes that down here, there is nowhere left that money can shield him from the planet-destroying effects of his ilk's cash-lust, and that his only way out is to go into space and fuck up the Moon and Mars in turn: to infinity and beyond, shithead! Best of luck, pal, we won't be sorry to see the back of your lot, even if it's too late for the rest of us.

On a domestic level, though, I really do seriously propose a wealth ceiling on participation in UK government. Camel, eye of needle, etc. Even relatively poor(!) families like Sunak's should be excluded from governance on the grounds of a complete and, to be fair, understandable lack of financial and moral perspective, which renders them completely unsuited to the task. The era of wealth and higher class de facto holding the reins of government has to be drawn to a close, and a far more sensible and egalitarian one ushered in. Class war should have been a thing of the past a long time ago, but money talks and the prevailing mythology of upward mobility, levelling up; whatever aspirational spin you want to put on it, is simply code for scraps to the hoi polloi to keep them happy for a bit longer, while they starve. We can do better, but on our own terms, not theirs: don't knock your fellows as they man the picket lines attempting to claw back some of the dignity - and worth - we are sorely owed and deserve.