We should celebrate the success of the self-made rich

For an example of social mobility, you'd be hard pushed to beat the story of Jim Ratcliffe, the founder and Chief Executive of petrochemical giant Ineos.

Ratcliffe grew up in a council house near Manchester. His father was a joiner and his mother worked in accounts. He went to a grammar school before university and didn't start a business until he was nearly 40. Yesterday, he was revealed to be the wealthiest person in the country according to The Sunday Times Rich List.

He is far from the only person on the list to have come from humble origins. Housebuilder Tony Pidgley was an orphan who lived for many years in an abandoned railway carriage. Penny Streeter makes the list, having founded recruitment firm Ambition while living as a single mother in a homeless refuge.

It should be a cause of celebration that, for the first time since the Rich List started totting up the worth of the wealthy 30 years ago, almost all of the 1,000 richest people in the country are entrepreneurs who built their own businesses and earned their own money. In 1989 over half of the Rich Listers had simply inherited their wealth. Today, as the Sunday Times puts it, inherited wealth and old money have been all but banished from the list.

The annual publication is of course voyeuristic, but it also offers a chance to look behind the bank balance. Along with being self-made, many of the figures on the list are significant (and often publicity-shy) philanthropists. Furthermore, one should consider the impact many of these people have on employment, investment and tax receipts.

It is therefore disappointing, though not surprising, that the Labour party will today use the Rich List as the backdrop for a speech in which shadow minister John Trickett will claim that the ranking “exposes a warped system in which a super-rich elite runs rings around the rest of us.” Trickett will claim that the elite have been “pinching wealth from the pockets of ordinary people” and will parrot one of Jeremy Corbyn's favourite lines as he pledges to overturn “the rigged system.”

This crass sloganeering aims to provide cover for the vindictive hard-left policies that Labour now offers. What a pity they have nothing positive to say about the working class people who, under their own steam, climbed to the top of the tree. Instead Labour groups together entrepreneurs, industrialists and start-up success stories with the elusive yet potent band of 'bankers and speculators' who so often form the basis of a good Corbyn rant.

With such hostility to the successful, and with such a lack of understanding about aspiration and rewards for hard work, it is little wonder that the Tories, not Labour, currently enjoy such a strong polling lead among working class voters.

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CityAM

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