The super-rich have made Britain into a nation of losers

Think of a football stadium. Not one of the vast caverns like Old Trafford or Wembley, but somewhere rather smaller and more bijou. Somewhere like Fulham’s Craven Cottage, which, once its new stand is completed, will pack in only about 30,000 fans. Now imagine this stadium of 30,000 souls rising up into the air and hovering unnoticed over central London. Thirty thousand men in late middle-age living the high life with the capital at their feet – and there, stuck way below on terra firma are their 66 million fellow Britons, tearing lumps out of each other.

Congratulations: you’ve just pictured the central problem stalking the UK today. Not Brexit. Not the breakdown in civil debate. Not the dark money contaminating Westminster. These are urgent and vitally important, but there is one big factor that forms a large part of the backdrop to all of them. It can be summed up by that gulf between a mid-sized football stadium of super-rich men in their 50s, and the rest of us spread out across our suburbs, our towns, our unpretty stretches of urban sprawl.

That football stadium represents the top 0.1% of earners in the UK. To join their ranks, numbering just 31,000, you’d need a taxable income of at least £650,000 a year – £12,500 per week. In less than a fortnight, you would easily pull in more than the average Briton makes as taxable income over a whole year. But then, those drudges are the earthbound while you, as the old song out of Mary Poppins puts it, live in an entirely different realm: “Up to the highest height! … Up through the atmosphere! / Up where the air is clear!”

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The stratospherically rich are among the subjects of a new report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. An analysis of the tax returns of the highest earning Britons, it shows in uncompromising detail just how our money has ended up in fewer and fewer hands based in less and less of the country. Almost half the super-rich live in London and nearly 90% of them are men. What’s more, they often end up paying a lower tax rate than the pay-as-you-earn mugs like you and me. The generous breaks given by politicians to encourage entrepreneurship, innovation and risk-taking are instead exploited by partners in City law firms and big accountancies and at hedge funds – people whose incomes sit a few zeroes above their value to society.

Nurses can go on TV and beg politicians for a pay rise, and teachers can crash out of their profession under too much pressure. But up among the ranks of the top earners there is no such stress: research last month from Essex University showed that the share of UK income going to the top 0.1% is now at its second-highest in history, not far off where it was at the time of the great banking crash. While the rest of us enter our second lost decade of wage growth, those right at the top enjoy bounties. What was it Dick Van Dyke promised? “You can dance on the breeze / Over houses and trees.”

Pull back your lens and the entire top 1% of earners are just as concentrated. The IFS analysis shows that, at the start of the millennium, half of the 1% lived in 78 out of 650 parliamentary constituencies. That has now dropped to just 65 seats, the overwhelming majority in London and the south-east.

This isn’t a story of the capital versus the rest. Among the parliamentary seats with the highest concentration of top earners is Hornsey and Wood Green in north London: it butts right up against Edmonton, where I was born and raised and which today suffers some of the worst deprivation in the UK, and sees none of the power and glory of the global metropolis.

At heart, this is about how relatively few people in a small cluster of professions and industries, living in a tiny number of neighbourhoods, are enjoying riches beyond belief. And all this while wages for the median worker barely rise, and the schools and hospitals and libraries and parks on which the rest of us depend are run down to breaking point.

And this, mark you, is without factoring in wealth. Indeed, what’s striking about the super-rich is how little we know about them – including how much they really earn. Those at the bottom, on the other hand – well, we intrude on their lives all the time. We interrogate that asylum seeker for graphic detail on how she was raped, or that benefits claimant for why he’d spent that amount of money on seeing his family.

Whatever the critics might allege, Jeremy Corbyn’s complaints about a rigged economy aren’t populism at all; they are a fundamentally accurate depiction of a vastly unpopular system. And until it is dealt with, the chaos that Britain is now in will not go away. Real material grievances sparked the vote to leave, and they make the chess-playing indulged in by the politicians and pundits (national unity! Cross-party alliances!) look just that – indulgent.

Instead, we are now run by the chief wealth apologist of our times. The man now buffooning around No 10 not so long ago claimed that “a pound spent in Croydon is of far more value … than a pound spent in Strathclyde”. When overlord of City Hall, he rejoiced that “London is to billionaires what the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan. It is their natural habitat.”

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And his government is about to follow the same trickle-down economics that got Britain to this political and economic dead end. His trade secretary, Liz Truss, jaunts off to America on fact-finding trips about Reaganomics when the best bit of research she could read on that grotesque failure comes from researchers at the IMF, who found that the more money goes to the rich in any country, the slower an economy grows. They concluded: “The benefits do not trickle down. In contrast, an increase in the income share of the poor is associated with higher GDP growth.”

A few weeks before the 2016 Brexit referendum, I spent a morning at Newport’s Covered Market. So bored did I get with the number of people telling me they were voting to leave that I started asking a supplementary question: do you consider yourself a winner or a loser? It was a deliberately vague question. A winner how? A loser to whom? But the thing that struck me was how many of the leavers instantly told a complete stranger that they were losers. And they knew who the winners were: those refugees on the other side of the city; the next-door neighbour who’d got a cushy number on benefits.

Well, it turns out that we’re all losers – but instead of looking down or across at those getting ahead, we should really have been looking up. “Up through the atmosphere! / Up where the air is clear!”

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

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