An advert for the RNLI caught my attention because it indicated that the majority of their income comes from bequests in wills. The pitch was that, after you provide for your loved ones, you should leave money to the RNLI. I have no problem with this, having generations of lifeboatmen in my ancestry, but it tied in with criticism I had seen recently on X of “boomers” for hoarding wealth.

It appears to me simply true that those of my generation were able to acquire wealth, often largely invested in residential property, simply in the normal course of our working lives. It also is true that succeeding generations do not appear so easily to do this.

It is not that wealth is no longer created. It is that my generation benefited from a social democratic consensus in which wealth was much more equally spread around society. I lived through and witnessed in real time the destruction of the social democratic system that produced that outcome – the advent of neoliberalism and its mechanisms of deregulation and globalisation.

This framing is misleading, however. The establishment narrative is that extreme wealth concentration and inequality is the natural order of things and that deregulation is the removal of artificial constraints. But actually the opposite is the truth. The entire economic structure is unnatural. The very concepts of capital itself, of company structures, of banking systems, of taxation are each a carefully manufactured construct.

Extreme concentration of wealth is produced by design, not by accident. Hedge funds, family offices, share dividends, banking bonuses, massive salaries – none of this is ordained either by God or by nature. It is a construct which is becoming unworkable.

The chief executive of a FTSE 100 listed company now earns over 130 times the median UK salary. Listed companies are themselves the less extreme end of capitalist excess. I am struck that this median salary itself is about £38,000 pa. I was earning £38,000 as a muddling diplomat in about 1995, 30 years ago. Wage stagnation for ordinary people is stunning.

In 1985 I bought my first home for £32,000. My salary was £14,500. Those same little terraced houses in Abbey Wood now sell for over £400,000. They have gone from twice a normal salary to ten times the average salary. I have no idea how a normal person can buy a house now. But the housing market is only a symptom of the distorting effects of the extreme inequalities of late capitalism.

Foodbanks, benefit dependency, lack of career progression opportunity, the collapse of social mobility. This is all incredibly unhealthy. The rise of the world’s first trillionaire and of incredible concentrations of wealth. I stood for election in Blackburn – a city with pockets of real deprivation and, incredibly, seven billionaires.

Wealth is largely digits in laptops. Some of it translates into physical control of property or productive units. All of it needs to be fundamentally rebalanced in favour of those who actually produce the wealth. The accounting tricks of Jim Ratcliffe do not amount to wealth creation. In fact asset stripping and dismantling of productive capacity is much more often the path to riches than producing material things.

The world is deeply sick. Society needs a thorough and imaginative re-engineering, with altruism as a founding principle.

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