Morning Star Editorial: Oxfam has shone a spotlight on the threat the rich pose to democracy
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/oxfam-has-shone-spotlight-threat-rich-pose-democracy
Activists project a message opposing the US’s oil-driven intervention in Venezuela, in Washington, January 8, 2026THE “billionaires’ decade.” That is how charity Oxfam describes the 2020s, having published research pointing to the extreme — and accelerating — concentration of wealth in Britain and worldwide.
The stats alone are alarming — billionaires’ wealth grew 16 per cent in 2025, three times faster than the five-year average; in Britain, the richest 56 people own more than the poorest 27 million.
But the report goes further in pointing to the way the super rich are monopolising political power and distorting the political process, both by entering office and by controlling the media.
The administration of Donald Trump — himself a property magnate — in the United States is the most obvious example, with the close association of “tech bro” tycoons with the US government well known.
Several of these — Elon Musk and Peter Thiel being the most famous — are explicitly associated with far-right politics, and intend to use the march of digital surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence to further subordinate societies everywhere to corporate control.
US foreign policy has always served to enrich its capitalists — companies like Halliburton and Blackwater, as well of course as arms companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, made a killing from the Iraq war — but is now more openly directed to resource theft and the personal enrichment of the Trump gang and its allies.
This we see in the Big Oil summit hosted by the US president directly after his kidnapping of the president of Venezuela, with demands for corporate access to Venezuelan oil forming part of the public rationale for the outrage.
We see it too in plans to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and develop it as a Mediterranean resort, and in the creation of the so-called Board of Peace, permanent membership of which Trump has now made contingent on down payments of a billion dollars.
Sharp-eyed observers note that the new board’s charter makes no specific reference to Gaza and implies a far wider remit — “to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict” — and, with members including the head of the US-dominated World Bank and Trump’s own son-in-law Jared Kushner, may be intended to serve as a Washington-controlled alternative to the UN security council now the United States is increasingly hostile to the United Nations and the framework of international law around it.
Trump’s relations with “allies” rest on the same profit-grabbing logic. It’s why enriching US drug companies at the expense of our NHS formed a key part of his trade deal with Britain, and why British and European attempts to regulate the internet — dominated globally by US companies — draw threats of retaliation. It’s why he wants Greenland, where the extraction of energy and mineral resources is becoming more practical because of global warming.
Trump’s new world order will rest not on sovereign states acting, at least in theory, on behalf of their citizens but on undisguised corporate power. But Britain is on the same trajectory, and the interests of parasitical profiteers dominate British policy too. Only that can explain Labour’s refusal to act to bring water into public ownership in line with overwhelming majority opinion, or the stubborn persistence of wasteful outsourcing across our public services.
For the left, the great divide between the suffering public and the obscenely wealthy — the many and the few, to take the Corbyn-era slogan — needs to be the overarching narrative when we explain what is wrong with our society and how we change it.
It explains the fundamental continuity between this government and its predecessor — and can spike the guns of a far right that dances to the billionaires’ tune.
It makes the case for the expropriation of private wealth for the public good. Not just to fund services, but to protect democracy — overshadowed more than ever by the power of money.
This article republished from https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/oxfam-has-shone-spotlight-threat-rich-pose-democracy
