Column

Character

Culture

Economics

23 May 2024

4 min read

This revolting rich list is a freak show

What are we to make of this quite nauseating spectacle?

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A collage of famous, rich, people such as King Charles, Elton John and others.

The Sunday Times.

General elections are no longer a clear choice between socialism and capitalism, but we should still be as offended by the privilege of the few over the poverty of many. That’s only natural, whether we’re informed by envy, a secular sense of fairness or a religious faith.

The yawning chasm between rich and poor in the UK is offensive. When PM Rishi Sunak was drenched in his vale of tears this week outside Number 10, as he announced the general election, he was seeking a mandate to preside over this inequality, in which he so richly participates.

He stood there exactly three days after he and his wife waved from the pages of the Sunday Times Rich List, based on the newspaper’s “conservative estimates of the minimum wealth of Britain’s 350 richest people.”

The Sunaks stood at 245th on the list with a measly £651m. Just 20 years ago, when I was in business, that figure would have put them near the top. Some of my business contemporaries had even made the Rich List with just a few tens of millions.

Not anymore. Mere multimillionaires barely make the cut. The ever-widening gulf between the super-rich and the rest of us means that the top 165 of last Sunday’s list of 300 are now billionaires, compared with just 20 a quarter of a century ago, while the “bottom” of today’s heap struggle by as half-billionaires.

It does make you wonder what the Sunday Times is doing with this revolting annual survey. It has become such an anachronism since it started in the Eighties, when greed was good and we worshipped Croesus impersonators.

Every year, we’re invited to press our noses up against their plate-glass window and drool at a world that’s as alien as a pharaoh’s to the slaves building their pyramid. What do they want from us for this display of greed? Envy?

Times (even on Sunday) have changed and the Rich List satirises itself. Look at the ads that support it. There’s one for a 122-metre yacht that can be chartered for three million euros a week. A few pages later there’s one for a Swiss clinic “for the treatment of mental health and issues of substance and behavioural dependency”. Could these ads be related?

So what the Sunday Times is presenting is a kind of freak show. Roll up, roll up, see the people who are tax exiles from the planet.

The Rich List is just for the British mega-rich. So no room here for Meta-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg or space-wingnut Elon Musk. But it’s nice to see at the top of the list, with just a couple of hundred million over the £37bn-mark, the Hinduja family, whose leading lights so publicly acquired British passports some years ago, with or without government help.

And here’s Lakshmi Mittal (No. 8 with £15bn), who was recently accused of profiting from both sides of the Ukraine conflict, after a part-owned Indian company bought nearly £2.4bn of Russian oil since the start of the war. Which newspaper revealed this? Step forward the Sunday Times.

And there’s vacuum magnate Sir James Dyson (No. 5 with £21bn) who backed Brexit and then moved his global HQ to Singapore. That’s the beauty of being so rich; you can escape the consequences of your own actions.

Most of the list is what similarly might be called colourful. These cannot, by virtue of their economic separation, be normal people. So what the Sunday Times is presenting is a kind of freak show. Roll up, roll up, see the people who are tax exiles from the planet.

Money is its own reward. But ultimately its power is empty.

What are we to make of this quite nauseating spectacle? Sure. there is no virtue in poverty. But nor should there be a prosperity gospel, which holds that the righteous are financially rewarded, other than in the outer reaches of an American charismatic movement.

Among the things that make us go “hmm” in this report is the attitude to life. Phones 4u founder John Caudwell (No. 109, £1.5bn) says “If I stopped I’d probably be desperately unhappy.” Hmm. New entrant to the list Graham King (No. 221=, £750m) made his fortune from public money contracts for accommodation for asylum seekers that inspectors have described as “decrepit” and is currently the subject of charges under the Housing Act 2004. Hmm.

Cursed are the rich, for they shall lose touch with reality. That’s not a heretical rewrite of the Sermon on the Mount, with its “Blessed are...” Beatitudes. There are actually four lesser known woes in the Gospel of Luke:

“Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

These woes aren’t about revenge. But they do speak to the consequences of extreme wealth – such as profiteering from desperately vulnerable people or working so hard you can’t think properly.

Money is its own reward. But ultimately its power is empty. Today, the Sunday Times should be as ashamed of idolising it as those it lionises for making so much of it.

Article

Comment

Justice

Leading

Politics

7 July 2025

5 min read

The consequences of truth-telling are so severe our leaders can’t admit their mistakes

When accountability means annihilation, denial is the only way to survive

Leah Brown

Leah is a campaigner for restorative practices and founder of The WayFinders Group.

Baroness Casey.

BBC.

Why do our leaders struggle so profoundly with admitting error?

Media and inquiries regularly report on such failures in the NHS, the Home Office, the Department of Work and Pensions, HMRC, the Metropolitan Police, the Ministry of Defence, and so many more public institutions. Often accompanied by harrowing personal stories of the harm done.

In a recent white paper (From harm to healing: rebuilding trust in Britain’s publicly funded institutions), I defined “harm” as a holistic concept occurring where physical injury or mental distress is committed and sustained and explained that harm is generally something that is caused, possibly resulting in injury or loss of life.

When we look at harm from an institutional perspective, structural power dynamics inevitably oppress certain groups, limit individual freedoms, and negatively affect the safety and security of individuals. But when we look at it through the lens of the individuals who run those institutions, we see people who often believe that they are acting in good faith, believe that their decisions won’t have a significant impact, who don’t have time to think about the decisions they are making, or worse still, prefer to protect what is in their best interest.

Even well-intentioned leaders can become complicit in cycles of harm - not just through malice, but through their lack of self-awareness and unwillingness to put themselves in the shoes of the person on the receiving end of their decisions.

Martin Luther King Jr supposedly said, “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” In contemporary politics, leaders are neither selected nor (largely) do they remain, because of their humility. Humility is synonymous with weakness and showing weakness must be avoided at all cost. Responsibility is perceived as something that lies outside of us, rather than something we can take ownership of from within.

So, why do leaders struggle so profoundly with admitting error?

The issue is cultural and three-fold.

First, we don’t quantify or systematically address human error, allowing small mistakes to escalate.

We then enable those responsible to evade accountability through institutional protection and legal barriers.

Finally, we actively discourage truth-telling by punishing whistle-blowers rather than rewarding transparency. Taken together, these create the very conditions that transform errors into institutional harm.

Nowhere is this plainer than in Baroness Casey’s recent report on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse that caused the Government to announce a grooming gangs inquiry. In this case, the initial harm was compounded by denial and obfuscation, resulting not just in an institutional failure to protect children, but system-wide failures that have enabled the so-called “bad actors” to remain in situ.

Recently, this trend was bucked at Countess of Chester Hospital where the police arrested three hospital managers involved in the Lucy Letby investigation. Previously, senior leadership had been protected, thus allowing them to evade accountability. Humble leadership would look like acting when concerns are raised before they become scandals. However, in this case, leadership did act; they chose to bury the truth rather than believe the whistle-blowers.

Until we separate admission of error from institutional destruction, we will continue to incentivise the very cover-ups that erode public trust.

The answer to our conundrum is obvious. In Britain, accountability is conflated with annihilation. Clinging onto power is the only option because admitting error has become synonymous with career suicide, legal liability, and is tantamount to being hanged in the gallows of social media. We have managed to create systems of governing where the consequences of truth-telling are so severe that denial is the only survival mechanism left. We have successfully weaponised accountability rather than understanding it as the foundation of trust.

If Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council had admitted even half of the failures Alexis Jay OBE identified in her 2013 report and that Baroness Casey identifies in her 2025 audit, leaders would face not only compensation claims but media storms, regulatory sanctions, and individual prosecutions. It’s so unthinkable to put someone through that that we shrink back with empathy as to why someone might not speak up. But this is not justice. Justice is what the families of Hillsborough have been seeking in the Public Authority (Accountability) Bill: legal duties of candour, criminal offences for those who deliberately mislead investigations or cover-up service failures, legal representation, and appropriate disclosure of documentation.

Regardless of your political persuasion, it has to be right that when police misconduct occurs, officers should fear not only disciplinary action and criminal charges. When politicians admit mistakes, they should face calls for their resignation. Public vilification is par for the course. Being ejected from office is the bare minimum required to take accountability for their actions.

The white paper shows that the cover-up always causes more damage than the original error. Institutional denial - whether relating to the Post Office sub-postmasters, the infected blood scandal victims, grooming gang victims, Grenfell Towers victims, Windrush claimants, or Hillsborough families - compounds the original harm exponentially.

In a society beset with blame, shame, and by fame, it is extraordinary that this struggle to admit error is so pervasive. Survivors can and will forgive human fallibility. What they will not forgive is the arrogance of institutions that refuse to acknowledge when they have caused harm.

The white paper refers to a four-fold restorative framework that starts with acknowledgment, not punishment. The courage to say “we were wrong” is merely the first step. Next is apology and accountability followed by amends. It recognises that healing - not just legal resolution - must be at the heart of justice, treating both those harmed and those who caused it as whole human beings deserving of dignity.

Until we separate admission of error from institutional destruction, we will continue to incentivise the very cover-ups that erode public trust. I was recently struck by Baroness Onora O’Neill who insisted that we must demand trustworthiness in our leaders. We cannot have trustworthiness without truth-telling, and we cannot have that without valuing the act of repairing harm over reputation management. True authority comes from service, through vulnerability rather than invulnerability; strength comes through the acknowledgement of weakness not the projection of power.

We must recognise that those entrusted with power have a moral obligation to those they serve. That obligation transcends institutional self-interest. Thus, we must stop asking why leaders struggle to admit error and instead ask why we have made truth-telling so dangerous that lies seem safer.