The Secret Millionaire

I am on the tenth day of my water fast, the last day (thank God), and I am weak as a baby kitten. For seven days now, I have been suffering from real bad insomnia, which has added to the weakness. I’ve tried to do things while fasting, but I really struggle. Just walking up the stairs to my bedroom puts me properly out of breath. It is like being a seriously old person!

Being unable to do anything, I have succumbed to just lying on my bed and watching stuff on Netflix and You Tube. Yesterday, I chanced upon The Secret Millionaire, which is a programme where some really rich person pretends to be something other than what they are and goes to live in one of the really poor areas of the UK or Ireland, and looks for people or charity projects they want to give their money to.

The programme should actually be called “The Secret Multi-Millionaire” as those who have declared their net worth – some don’t – are worth over fifty million quid.

It is a really touching programme, and I’m not ashamed to admit, I have shed the odd tear, but my biggest criticism of it is, that these multi-millionaires only dole out, in total, about fifty thousand quid, which is a tiny drop in the ocean of their vast wealth. I mean, if I was worth sixty million, I am certain I would dish out a lot more than that.

These multi-millionaires are beneficiaries of the destruction of the economic system we had in place before Thatcher arrived, with her Friedmanite laissez-faire policies, which destroyed the infrastructures of every industrial town and city in the UK; redistributing wealth to the already wealthy.

These urban hell holes, which the multi-millionaires drop into for a week or ten days, before returning to their 17 room mansions, are the result of the wholesale decimation of local industries, privatisation and lack of investment in education and other resources. The people who live in them are mostly stuck there, with little opportunity for improving themselves and escaping their environments. Most of them will have to live there their whole lives.

Millionaires (and multi-millionaires) used to pay a healthy amount of tax, which went into the exchequer, which helped to pay for housing, schools and hospitals. Now they pay a paltry sum in comparison, allowing many to accrue monstrous sums of money; some of them even accumulating billions. This is abhorrent and amoral. It should actually be illegal. Any wealth over ten million should be confiscated in whole, and re-distributed to regenerate these urban hell holes. The few projects that try to help people there are struggling and under-funded.

The worst thing is everyone just accepts this; and no-one tries to combat it, and very few people actually give a damn; and I’ll be honest, I have no idea what I can personally do. My only “weapon” is my ability to write, but what is that worth? Probably not very much.

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