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Philip Green took £586m in dividends from one of his companies, leaving a pensions deficit of £571m. The shortfall was paid by the government. There were moves to strip him of his knighthood, so he agreed to pay £363m. He was still £208m up on the scam, and he never lost his knighthood. The shortfall remained paid by the public.
The owner of an estate on the Isle of Jura, on the west coast of Scotland, is an Australian hedge fund manager. He made a golf course there, extended the house so that it was fit for the super-rich, and rents it out when people want some seclusion. It costs £20,000 per night (~27,500 USD), and of course the public are not at all welcome on that land.
Philip Green and his guests were resident there for a week in August.
Boomers at least have some justification for their perceived decadence. Their parents lived through one, perhaps two world wars. They suffered rationing, carpet bombing, loss of family, trench warfare, the list goes on. Who wouldn't raise their children with the benefits of progress?
Yet we have 'OK Boomer'. Boomers vs Zoomers, Blacks vs Whites, Celtic vs Rangers, Catholics vs Protestants, and again the list goes on. That's not to say we're not tribal in nature, but this goes beyond tribalism. I'd suggest it's fostered, cultivated perhaps.
There's very little Super-Rich vs Plebs. Yet there are, for example, Buy-to-Let mortgages. With a little capital to leverage, you can exploit people for the ultimate benefit of banks and investors. You can even leverage your leverage. The resulting effects are even more obvious than Philip Green's pension fund scam.
Why are we not protesting about this? Banning buy-to-let mortgages seems like a reasonably achievable goal. Perhaps we're too distracted by meaningless strifes. We can start by rejecting these absurd polarising categorisations. They're maybe even intended to distract us.