Yasmin’s Eye on …. The Rich Moan, the Poor Suffer

The just released Forbes list of the world’s billionaires shows the swell’s club is swelling and that members are richer than ever. There are now 141 more billionaires in the world than last year. Their total wealth is now worth trillions. Soon to be quadrillions, I expect.

Bernard Arnault, the French, luxury fashions magnet has been at the top since 2022. Elon Musk has fallen to no 2, Facebook’s Zuckerberg to no 4, and Bill Gates only makes it to no 7.  Must hit them hard.

Rupert Murdoch is too far down to matter. Rishi Sunak merely has millions, so doesn’t make it into this inventory. ( Oh the sacrifices he’s had to make just so he could get to run this country) Billionaires Michelle Mone and Doug Barrowman seem to be missing too. Last we heard, they were sailing around on their lux yacht, while the National Crime Agency investigates their company Medpro, for allegedly supplying faulty PPE equipment during the Covid crisis. When some of their bank accounts were frozen, aggrieved Mone moaned that she was being treated like the drug baron ‘Pablo Escobar’.

We average folk don’t know how hard it is to be rich. The pain of Sir Philip Green, after allegations of bad behaviour and the collapse of his fashion empire, has all but been forgotten by the masses. Imagine how he feels, drifting between London and the tax haven Monaco. Ardent Brexiter James Dyson, who, post-Brexit, moved Dysons manufacturing to Singapore, sued a columnist on the Mirror last December for writing this: ‘ talk the talk but then screw your country and if anyone complains, tell them to suck it up.’ He claimed this was hurtful and distressing. He lost the case. And got no public sympathy. How bad is that? Sunak’s visible anguish every time he is asked about his wife’s limitless wealth, leaves most Britons unmoved. Damned ingrates that we are.

Meanwhile the suffering of the middle classes, upper middle classes, upper classes  and the aristocracy has only got worse.

Through the cost of living crisis, ‘Us Too! they cried. Oh dear readers, The times I’ve had to listen to their sorry tales of how ‘unaffordable’, the really nice ski resorts are this year. Or how much their ‘greedy’ nannies now want or how their poppets lose out when it comes to childcare subsidies. Or the undeserved resentment building up against holiday homes in beautiful parts of the country. Most of all, private schools, which they fear will lose tax advantages under Labour. You see them getting hysterical on mums online circles even though, as with everything, Labour is vacillating and hopelessly unclear about their actual policies.

I am often paired on TV or radio with tax-hating, self-loving, self-justifying guys and dames who really do believe that to care about equal societies is just ‘envy’, and that wealth A listers are justly rewarded for ‘hard work’. In their universe, council street sweepers could get rich too if only they swept more streets, worked harder. And investing and profiting is harder work than nursing, being a doctor, child caring, road building or teaching. And all humans want loadsamoney. This one doesn’t.

To check I wasn’t lying to myself, I looked at Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s online supplier of everything for people who have everything. You can get a rafia basket for $745, a device which flashes red lights to stick into your vagina- not for erotic pleasure but for therapeutic ‘ intimate well-being’ – costs $395 and so much more. Trust me, I didn’t turn green. Though did, God forgive me, feel a frisson of superiority. How dumb do you have to be to covet and purchase this stuff?

That brings me to Shabaz Ali, a young teacher from Blackburn, an arch-critic  of the witless, global rich. On TikTok, he relishes exposing the pretentiousness and sordid consumerism of the super-monied who buy stupid stuff, fly in private jets, own islands in the sun, down champagne in garish, exclusive joints and all that jazz. It’s a detox programme for his  aspirational pupils, many of whom crave those lifestyles. Master Ali, who remains grounded, now reaches three and a half million online fans and has just published a new book titled I’m Rich, You’re Poor.

Will he be heard? Only, I suspect, if he can turn his messages into well-being memes and get Goop excited. A dismal prospect. But it’s the way the world is now.