Madam Miaow on the Super Rich: Resonance FM Tuesday 5.30pm

MADAM MIAOW'S CULTURE LOUNGE 4/8
News, music and poetry
RESONANCE 104.4FM
Presented by Anna Chen
5.30-6.30pm Tuesday 5th November
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or
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THERE IS NO RECESSION AT THE TOP

The Super Rich
Guests: Aditya Chakrabortty and Kate Belgrave. With Charles Shaar Murray.

In this Tuesday's Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge on Resonance FM, Anna Chen turns her attention to the Super Rich, accompanied by Aditya Chakrabortty, Kate Belgrave and Charles Shaar Murray.

Happy days are here again: for some. The economy's bouncing back, profits are up, taxes are down, but we're still sticking it to the have-nots rather than the have-yachts.

Bras that cost a million pounds, rounds of drinks topping a quarter of million, diamond-encrusted everything and the steady insistence on that £20 a week in bedroom tax. Is the relentless hammering of the poor, the elderly, the disabled and immigrants just tiresome old schtick?

The BBC's new series, Britain on the Fiddle, says "don't look here, look over there at the benefit scroungers". Madam Miaow says, hell no, let's take a closer look at where the real money is and exactly what all that saved tax and super-profits can buy you.

Remember — there is no recession at the top.

THE SUPER RICH — 5.30pm TUESDAY 5TH NOVEMBER
Listen live
or afterwards
listen online

Previously … the shows so far ...



Even Labour ... Another reason we need meaningful change. Gordon Brown allowed the Co-op bank to merge with Britannia Building Society and has wrecked it.

Legalised larceny: Aditya Chakrabortty on how the train companies hog the profits while investing little.

Aditya Chakrabortty's Guardian article on how champagne-swilling councils are selling off our housing to developers.

John Kampfner on the history of the super rich.

Myth-busting: #inactualfact
Follow: @inactualfact

World's most expensive everything for the rich: £1000 coq au vin

Are the rich buying these thousand-quid meals with the tax they'll be saving when the top rate drops from 50 per cent? Or with their gargantuan bonuses?

I've been banging on about obscene conspicuous consumption for a while now, especially during the increasing attacks on the poor in the midst of a triple-dip recession. We've had squillion quid burgers and today I read about the £1,000 coq au vin for champion cocks. Glad to see the Guardian commenting on the trend for world's most expensive food marketing ploys.

There's something particularly degenerate about the need for the super-rich to rub it in like this when they should be paying their fair share of taxes. Remember, there is no recession for the top 1 per cent.

We're all in it together: no recession for the top 1 per cent

This bra costs £1.6 million in London's Bond Street.

Half a milion quid's worth of handbags owned by one woman, bras costing £1.6 million, diamond encrusted EVERYTHING. The super-rich have never had it so good.

I'm dizzy from all this high altitude spending while we have to juggle fixing pot-holes with keeping libraries open. The world's richest 100 people could end world hunger now. The 358 people with assets of more than $1bn were worth more than the combined annual income of 45 per cent of the world's people. There are 447 billonaires January 2013.

This pattern of wealth accumulation continues in the UK, according to SK Walker's blog: "from 1997 to 2007 the average income of the top 1% of UK earners increased from £187,989 to £301,325 – an increase of just over 60% (income of the top 0.1% almost doubled). ... The wealthiest are now paying substantially less toward our national upkeep than they were 15 years ago, relative to their wealth."

Which means that it's the poor who are funding that wealth splurge.

We have to end the deficit myth. It's an excuse for the reverse Robin Hood policies impoverishing us. The wealth is there but it's the rich who are nicking what was ours.

It does horrify me when I hear low paid people wanting to stick it to the poor instead of the rich who are laughing at their stupidity — shall we have the turkeys voting for Christmas or the duck shoot in a barrel, Smithers?

[Note: The value of Tamara Ecclestone's handbags have dipped strangely since her TV show displayed the most bonkers waste of wealth since Marie Antoinette tried to feed cake to the peasants. Daddy has apparently advised her not to show-off as spoilsports like me will call for the liberation of her Christain Louboutins for the masses.]

UK most unequal country in the West

It's official: the United Kingdom is the most unequal country in the West according to a UN report.

The report shows that the poorest 40 per cent of Britons share a lower proportion of the national wealth - 14.6 per cent - than in any other Western country. This is only marginally better than in Russia, the only industrialised nation, east or west, to have a worse record. Measurements of the gap between rich and poor tell a similar story. The richest fifth of Britons enjoy, on average, incomes 10 times as high as the poorest fifth.

The income gap in Britain and Australia is exactly the same as in Nigeria, much worse than in Jamaica, Ghana or the Ivory Coast and twice as bad as in Sri Lanka or Ethiopia.

And the Tories with the help of their Lib Dem human shields aren't finished yet. Unless there's a concerted defence of the British people — whether this comes from leadership from Labour or the TUC (some hope!) — we're looking forward to feudalism.

Otherwise people are going to have to start doing it for themselves. And, do you know, maybe that's not such a bad idea.

Looting at the top: Marie Antoinette meet George Orwell

The two million dollar bra

The looting at the top carries on apace. While we wait for the results of the next vote on the break-up of the NHS, here's a delightful Rogues' Gallery of Tory peers and their connections to private health companies.

Essentially, they are privatising our public services, removing the wealth via tax havens, making the majority capitalise their banks, finding more mad luxury items to waste our money on at a time when corporate profits are at a 50-year high and the Sunday Times Rich List is breaking records.

Luxury items include the £100 million yacht recently built for former Miss UK Kirsty Bertarelli and her Swiss pharma tycoon husband, multi-million dollar bras, spider silk fabric because they reckon they're worth it and Beckham and Ecclestone owning Birkin handbags worth between £500K - £1.5 million. Ever suspect we are being run by a bunch of degenerates?


The Tories were not elected to power and have no mandate for any of this. Their Lib Dems human shields are helping to usher in major healthcare companies in a feeding frenzy as they use tax havens to suck out public money. Lib Dems who talk about "bloated public services" being the problem are ill-informed at best. A friend tells me that, according to a World Service report, over 30% of local authority expenditures are private 'Special Services' run by ex civil servents who avoid income tax on their fees by being paid directly by the private company.

Meanwhile, the cop with the machine gun in Trafalgar Square on Saturday's NHS protest goes unreported in the mainstream press.Welcome to Britain, George Orwell stylee.

Don't tell me there's no money: great facts and figures from Mark Wright