National Income Rose by £4 Trillion Over The Past 15 Years - Lib Dems Say It Should Be Fairly Shared Out

Yes, Britain's been doing very well recently - or at least until Brexit came along to spoil everything. From 2000 to 2015 UK's GDP rose by 4 trillion pounds.

You may be looking around wondering where it all went. Well almost everybody got a little bit of the action and almost everybody's living standards improved.

But not to the same extent.

The poorer 32 million of the population (half) got 7% of the increase while the richer 32 million got 93%. But the richest 640,000 (just 1% of us) trousered 26% (over a quarter) of all the new wealth.

To put it another way - each one of the 640,000 in the top 1% saw their wealth increase from £2.2m in 2000 to £3.7m in 2015. That's £1.5 million more.

Nice work if you can get it. You didn't? Well, we'll come to that at the end.

Now let's see how the poorest 10% fared. Not so well, of course. Their 'wealth' rose from £1,100 in 2000 to £1,600 in 2015 - just £500 more over the 15 years.

Thanks to Oxfam for having worked out these figures.

And they worked out something else too - collectively the top 1% are keeping more than £170 billion in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. This, incidentally, loses the Treasury about £5 billion in uncollected tax revenue.

So, the super rich have arranged things well for themselves - with the Conservative Government's connivance.

The government allows the tax havens to do business and it keeps the loopholes open, so wealthy hedge funds, corporations and individuals pay less tax. And of course many of them have expressed their gratitude - as any examination of the Conservative Donor list will show - by making substantial donations to the Conservative Party. Examples from 2015 are hedgefunds such as RK Capital Management and CQS and other companies and/or their top directors who have donated. For example Next, Autotrader and Ginsters Pies (!) and Betfair.

I expect these political donations are good value for money. Certainly there is no shortage of wealth-friendly tax policies!

Quite apart from offshore tax savings, Osbourne's last budget proposed tax changes that would benefit the higher earners 5 times more than other more typical citizens.

It's a gravy train on a merry-go-round!

And now the Tories have got their way with Brexit. Our GDP may fall and our imports may become more expensive but I think we can be quite sure that the Tories will continue to look after their own!

Ah, that nice work - I said I'd come back to it. Well, Jeremy Corbyn may not agree but I think the rest of us do - the best vehicle found so far for increasing wealth is a liberal democratic capitalist economy. But to achieve a tolerable connection between effort and reward, it cannot be left to its own devices. Mega-effecient high tech businesses need to make an adequate contribution to maintaining the regulatory and social infrastructure that makes their profits possible. But there also has to be some mechanisms to compensate the unfortunate, the infirm and the elderly for the undeserved misfortunes that can strike any of us.

That's where the 'democratic' bit comes in - it's not just about voting now and again, it's also about the society to which we all contribute, sharing out the benefits fairly and supporting those who need help.

But you'll never get that with a Conservative government - for that, you need Liberal Democrats!