Over a third of UK’s top earners live in London while workers struggle to get by

Thomas Scripps

Figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) show that London’s share of the UK’s top one percent of earners has increased by a fifth, from 29 percent in 2000-2001 to 35 percent in 2014-2015. The trend deepens the transformation of the city into a playground for the rich, serviced by an impoverished working class living in a different world.

London represents a grotesque concentration of all the social contradictions and inequities of British capitalism. The longstanding regional imbalance in the development of the UK economy, based on the domination of London as the country’s financial and services centre, has forced more and more people into the metropolis. Fully 35 percent of the 2.7 million new jobs created between 2007 and 2017 were in London. The UK2070 commission on regional inequality estimates that London and the South East will account for 55 percent of new jobs created up to 2051 if present demographic and economic trends continue.

The skew towards the capital is especially pronounced in the case of skilled white-collar work. Over half the jobs in London in 2017 were classed as skilled professional occupations, compared to an average of around one in four for the rest of the country outside the South East of England.

Combined, these workers produce an immense amount of value—enough to equip the city with a comprehensive social infrastructure and guarantee everyone in it a high standard of living. This is not the case because the wealth produced is monopolised by an obscenely rich elite.

According to the Trust for London, the city’s total weekly income in the 2015-2016 period was £2.4 billion. The top 10 percent of earners received almost a third of this total, more than the bottom 50 percent of earners.

So concentrated is wealth in the capital that while an annual income of £160,000 is enough to put someone in the top one percent of earners nationally, it is not enough even to break into the top five percent in London. More than £300,000 is required to enter the city’s top one percent of earners.

The chasm widens further when it comes to wealth. In the period 2012-2014, total wealth in London was estimated at £1.8 trillion. A staggering 52 percent of this is owned by the richest 10 percent of London households. The top 20 percent own 70 percent, while the bottom half own just 5.3 percent.

For the majority of London’s workforce, these huge inequities mean a life of struggle just to maintain the basics of an ordinary family life. Amid fantastic wealth, workers in the capital face the same struggle for existence as those nationwide.

Those who fall into low-pay jobs or unemployment are thrown into conditions of near-permanent social crisis, forced to visit food banks or go without meals or heating, living in substandard accommodation or ending up completely homeless.

Even those who would be widely considered as earning a high wage are left struggling.