Lifetime of earnings not enough for UK workers to join wealthiest 10%, report says
The stark reality of economic disparity in the United Kingdom has been laid bare by a sobering new report from the Resolution Foundation, which finds that the average worker would need to save every single penny of their earnings for a staggering 52 years just to amass the wealth currently held by the richest tenth of society. This isn't merely a statistic; it is a profound indictment of a system where a lifetime of labour is rendered insufficient to breach the upper echelons of wealth, a chasm so vast it fundamentally redefines the social contract.The Foundation's analysis, drawing on the Office for National Statistics' latest wealth and assets survey from the tumultuous pandemic period of 2020-22, reveals a landscape where asset ownership—homes, stocks, private pensions—has become the primary engine of prosperity, far outstripping the power of a weekly wage. This dynamic creates a self-perpetuating cycle of advantage, where inherited wealth and property portfolios generate unearned income, insulating the affluent from the economic headwinds that buffet ordinary households.From a feminist and social policy perspective, this has deeply gendered and generational implications; women, often in lower-paid and part-time roles, are disproportionately affected, while younger generations face the grim prospect of being the first in modern history to be worse off than their parents, locked out of the property ladder that served as the bedrock of their parents' financial security. The report's timing, in the wake of a global crisis that saw billionaire wealth soar while millions struggled, adds a layer of moral urgency.It forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about the kind of society we are building—one that rewards ownership over effort, where the accident of birth carries more weight than a lifetime of contribution. The policies that have enabled this concentration—from tax breaks on capital gains to the erosion of social housing—are not acts of God but deliberate political choices, and the Resolution Foundation's work serves as a critical, human-centred map of their consequences, a call to action for a leadership brave enough to rebalance the scales and restore dignity to work.
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