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Last weekend the Sunday Times’ Rich List 2017 was published. It’s a highly anticipated week in the year, and always makes for talking points on radio phone–ins. This peek into the lives of the rich and famous is wonderfully exciting (even entertaining) for some and immensely frustrating for others. The Rich List – and the accompanying 158–page magazine – provides a tiny snapshot into a world quite removed from the average experience.

The Times predicts that on this weekend each year they sell 10% more papers than on an average weekend. On Sunday morning when I wandered into our local convenience store, unbeknown to me the richness of the morning ahead, the paper and the supplement was piled high, oozing expectation.

The qualifying wealth for ones addition to the Rich List 2017 was £110 million – the number one spot taken by Sri and Gopi Hinduja, with a total wealth of £16.2 billion. This is a purpose–built list of the UK’s richest 1000 people/families, a tiny 0.0015% of the population, but this a group that holds within its grasp a huge amount of wealth. Their lauding frustrates those who have a concern for social justice. Beneath these glorious heights of the select few are millions of people residing in a bleak reality, who lack not just excessive disposable income but the necessities of life. Experts agree that the character of poverty has changed radically in recent years – it is now not a matter of unemployment, but of low pay and rising prices. In short, in work poverty.

The statistical picture is paradoxical. Overall, income inequality has reduced since the Second World War, and because of tax and benefit changes it has decreased even in the last few years of austerity. Comparing the incomes with the 90th percentile with the 10th makes the point. According to the Financial Times, the 90/10 ratio stood at 4.3 in 1992 — that is, those at the 90th percentile had income 4.3 times larger than those at the tenth. By 2007 the ratio had barely moved and stood at 4.2. It then fell during the financial crisis and was 3.9 in 2014, the most recent year for which data are available (though forecasts suggest that the next few years will see inequality worsen).

What this hides, of course, is the acceleration of the super–rich not only away from the average but also away from the relatively wealthy. Recent studies suggest that the richest 5% of the country hold 44% of the wealth and the top 1% holds 24% – and they don’t even make the Rich List. In order to make the top 1% of households between 2012 and 2014 one had to accumulate £2.8 million, the cut off for the Rich List 2017 was £110 million, 39 times the average wealth of the top 1%.

All (free) societies have their super–rich, so one response to this might be “big deal”. But you don’t have to be a Marxist to think that this imbalance – and the celebration of such imbalances – shows a bizarrely distorted attitude to wealth. What good is it for a man, or a woman to gain the whole world to then simply forfeit their soul? And what good is it for wealth to simply accumulate for the sake of flattering the reputation of a tiny minority. During the general election, it would be worth political parties asking not just who has money, but how they can discourage the mere amassing of it.

In his 2015 speech on ‘The Good Economy’, Justin Welby referred to the wisdom of the 4th century’s St Basil the Great: “A great torrent rushes in thousands of channels through the fertile land. By a thousand different paths make your riches reach the homes of the poor. Wealth is like water that issues forth from the fountain. The greater the frequency with which it is drawn, the purer it is, while it becomes foul if the fountain becomes unused.”

The stagnation of wealth in the hands of the 0.0015%, or even the 1%, is of no true human, or indeed divine, value. Accumulation for the sake of accumulation ignores the reality of the majority and turns a blind eye to the daily struggles experienced by those, perhaps not on our doorsteps, but certainly in our cities. Changing this distorted attitude towards the unused fountains of wealth requires the opening of hands, allowing it to flow, rolling on like a river and reaching the dry and parched places across this land.

Imogen Ball is Research Assistant at Theos |  @ImogenAdderley

Image by Luke Addison from Flickr, available under this Creative Commons Licence

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