WHY THE RICH ALWAYS WANT MORE | Clifford Thurlow (2024)

There is a good reason why the rich always want more. Money provides status and connections. Big money makes you feel big, bigger than you are. The rich open doors – for each other.

Rich people don’t know and don’t want to know about the lives of poor people, their bills, their empty fridges and pockets, their petty troubles and endless needs. They can’t work out why poor people don’t get up in the morning with determination and go out and get rich.

We do not know how a horse feels when it’s in a field chewing grass. That’s how the rich regard the poor. They see the poor as another species – like horses, docile, but don’t get too close in case they bite.

Rich people like spending time with rich people. They have the same tastes. Tell the same jokes. They know the problems of finding good staff. Rich people trust rich people. Rishi Sunak is the perfect example.

Who Cares About the Law?

With a £730 million fortune, according to the Sunday Times rich list, when Sunak was chosen by his own MPs to be Prime Minister, he made Nadhim Zahawi (worth £100 million), Conservative Party Chairman and appointed Mohamed Mansour (worth £2.3 billion), the Conservative Party’s Senior Treasurer tasked with raising funds for the next general election.

Mr Mansour made a donation of £5 million to the Conservative Party and Mr Sunak has and made him a knight. Sir Mohamed owns Mantrac Vostok – a subsidiary of his UK-based Unatrac – a company that, according to the Daily Mirror, continues to supplyCaterpillar machinery to Russia’s oil and gas industry in spite of sanctions imposed when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Sunak’s father-in-law Narayan Murthy (worth $3.2 billion) is the co-founder of the internet company Infosys. Like Mr Mansour, he has not closed his offices in Moscow.

That’s another thing about rich people, they don’t think the laws apply to them. Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata is a good example. She did not surrender her American Green Card when she moved to the UK and maintained non-dom status to avoid tax until it became too embarrassing to continue.

Mobarak Exemplifies Why the Rich Always Want More

Mohamed Mansour is an Egyptian with dual British citizenship. He served as transport minister in the Egyptian Government under Hosni Mubarak and resigned in 2009 after a train crash killed fifty people.

Hosni Mubarak had risen through the ranks of the air force to become its commander and Egypt’s Vice President. He took over the presidency in 1981 when Anwar Sadat was gunned down by Islamic extremists. For three decades, Mubarak ruled with an iron fist and was finally ousted in 2011 during the uprisings of the Arab Spring.

This is where the question why the rich always want more comes into focus.In the first year of his presidency, Hosni Mubarak squirrelled away $1 billion dollars in Switzerland. He bought a mansion flat in Kensington, a chateau in France, a private plane and ruled, according to Amnesty, with the ‘signature policies of mass torture and arbitrary detention.’

When he died aged 91 in 2020, Mubarak had accumulated a personal fortune, according to Forbes, of $70 billion.

Why the Rich Must Not Rule

With his property holdings and $1 billion, Hosni Mubarak in 1981 was financially secure. There was nothing he could do with $2 billion that he could not do with $1 billion. He had the power and authority to use Egypt’s wealth to create better lives, better housing, better conditions and universal education for the nation’s 100 million people. He had the chance to become a hero, a giant, a Nelson Mandela, a figure remembered with esteem in history.

But no. He wanted the money.

What Mubarak’s wealth had done was separate him from real life and ordinary people. The more distant the rich become, the less they see people as people with hopes and dreams, the more they transmogrify in the rich man’s mind into a faceless mass, just numbers with no more humanity than an algorithm.

How can Rishi Sunak with his £730 million put himself in the shoes of a nurse or fireman or a teacher with a couple of kids who get to the end of the week and don’t have enough money to buy groceries? He cannot imagine the shame, the indignity, the cruelty of poverty, hunger, food banks. He will never look into the eyes of his children and see the lost look of despair and disappointment.

Trickle Down

Sunak and his predecessors – Cameron, May, Johnson and Truss – have since the Conservative Party took power in 2010 usedausterity and wage restraint to break the will and well being ofworking people. They have neglected the NHS and social care system, and allowed the mainly foreign owned private rail, water and energy suppliers to reap massive profits at the expense of wages and investment.

Sunak and his cohorts – like Thatcher and Reagan – believe in deregulated capital markets, the elimination of price controls and the eradicationof state influence in the economythrough privatisation: the debunkedtrickle-down doctrine that assumes if the rich get richer, it would trickle down to the poor. It doesn’t. Money attracts money like a magnet. It doesn’t trickle down. It is sucked up. Since 2010, wages and the buying power of working people has decreased while the number of millionaires has doubled.

The Conservative Party in government through five prime ministers has placed high net worth donors in the House of Lords and key positions as advisers and heads of influential institutions, for example financier Richard Evans shoehorned furtively into the BBC by Boris Johnson.

In collusion with the right-wing press, the 1% rich, elite and privileged in the United Kingdom have freed themselves from the financial oversight and human rights obligations of the European Union. By underfunding, undermining and unpicking the very fabric and foundations of society – health and social care, schools,transport, the probation service, prisons, the border force and the civil service, they have created a social and financial crisis far worse than in any other developed economy in the world.

Rishi Sunak, Mohamed Mansour and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, relatively poor with a mere £14.5 million, refuse to talk to trade union leaders about wage claims and will continue to fight the poor for every penny they can get.

Mr Hunt in a recent interview said the government will be asking ‘everyone for sacrifices.’ What he didn’t say was that by ‘everyone,’ he meant the poor, the increasing number of people on the edge of poverty, the children from unheated homes and broken schools, broken by thirteen years of neglect, mendacity and cruel policies that hurt ordinary people.

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