Towards the end of last year, Mayor of London Boris Johnson published an op-ed in the Telegraph entitled We Should Be Humbly Thanking The Super-rich, Not Bashing Them.

He constructed an deceitful argument, which went: “I just wonder, a bit, what it is like to be so stonkingly rich, and I wonder — as the rest of us have wondered down the ages — whether you can really expect to be any happier for having so much dosh. 

“I suspect that the answer, as Solon pointed out to Croesus, is not really, frankly; or no happier than the man with just enough to live on. If that is the case, and it really is true that having stupendous sums of money is very far from the same as being happy, then surely we should stop bashing the rich.”

Johnson confounds a seemingly hackneyed argument about wealth and happiness, which through insidious rhetoric reinforces the absoluteness of our current financial system. 

By saying “as the rest of us have wondered down the ages” he suggests that money always has been our way of life, and within a continuum culture can only go on being our way of life. 

The pseudo-intellectual and throwaway reference to Solon and Croeseus creates a semblance of elitist knowledge-based authority. 

And of course the overall point, that if the rich are not happy we should stop bashing them, indicates that jealousy and not fairness is the only motivator of the non-rich — that all who are not rich want to be rich, and that this is the way things work. 

This is not the way that things work. Money is not an absolute of either history or physics. It is a concept constructed by mankind’s thinking and only exists because of our worldwide continuing collective faith in it. 

In an ideal world, we would simply remove this belief and move forward with a new system of global human interaction based on the accruement of communal emotional happiness rather than individual financial reward. However, we are sadly very far from an ideal world, and so we must address what we may achieve for greater equality in the short term under this financial system. 

Britain needs a pay rise — everyone in Britain but Johnson’s coveted super-rich. According to a Guardian article published in May, “the combined fortune of Britain’s richest 1,000 people has hit a new high of £519 billion — equivalent to a third of the nation’s economic output, and double the figure of five years ago.” 

Meanwhile in the same month Daisy-May Hudson published on Vice UK an article entitled I Am One of Britain’s Hidden Homeless, outlining how she and her single-parent family had been priced out of their rented accomodation and into a halfway-home for the statutory homeless. Hudson describes how the problem is of a far greater significance than its immediate visibility within mainstream media implies: “The UK is now more polarised by housing wealth than at any time since the Victorian era, but the headlines scream about ‘benefits scroungers’ ... Eighty thousand children were homeless at Christmas, living in shelters like the one I’m in with my family now… 1.7 million people are waiting for social housing but there simply isn’t enough. 

“More and more families are being outpriced and it’s going unnoticed. Every 15 minutes another family find themselves homeless. Homelessness has increased for three consecutive years and housing shortages and cuts to benefits mean an estimated 185,000 people were affected in England last year.”

In addition to a housing and homes crisis, the BBC reported in June that we have 2.6 million unemployed, of whom 1.1 million are claiming jobseekers’ allowance. Wages have stagnated, with the average worker worse off by £1,600 a year compared to 2010, according to Labour.

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s the wealth of the top 1 per cent in Britain has soared to the equivalent of the bottom 55 per cent put together, minority communities are among the hardest hit as much-needed services are cut. 

A London Met University report published last month commissioned by the TUC describes the effects of statutory funding cuts on LGBT voluntary and community organisations, where funding from the public sector in London dropped by 34 per cent, with some groups suffering a 50 per cent loss. Elsewhere in the UK, 75 per cent of LGBT groups saw state income remain stagnant or fall. 

Indeed, when I interviewed Matthew Hodson, the chief executive of gay men’s HIV prevention charity GMFA earlier this year, he spoke of how the organisation, like many other LGBT groups, is having to make up for its damaging loss of statutory funding through other routes. 

“Currently we’re getting by on the support we have from the gay community, but we are running at a loss. We were lucky enough that we actually own the building we are in, so when we lost that huge chunk of our funding, we had to make a decision, well do we carry on?”

Hodson explained how GMFA was able to sell off some of its property assets to continue operating. 

Not everyone is lucky enough to be in the same position. GMFA has a two-year self-funding window, but if the organisation does not obtain a reverse of its statutory funding status, we will lose a valuable asset in the continuing battle against HIV within the gay male community. 

This battle has actually become more pronounced with the purveyance of “chemsex,” as gay men are using drugs in sexualised contexts, a trend linked by Public Health England to rapidly rising HIV rates in London. 

To adequately tackle the widespread purveyance of chemsex amongst the gay male community will require not only new ways of thinking, but also adequate statutory funding to realise these approaches. 

So how can we give Britain — ordinary, non-super rich Britain — a pay rise? The first and presumably most self-evident step is don’t vote Conservative. 

The Tory Party has a long tradition of protecting the rich and private companies’ interests, and the underlying subtext behind Johnson’s spineless and sickeningly sycophantic paean to the super rich is the hope that they will donate generously to any of his future election campaigns. 

While Labour receives the majority of its funding from the trade unions, the Conservatives are bankrolled by hundreds of millionaire backers. 

But there are undoubtedly other, more radical and even more desperately needed avenues of overhauling our flawed financial heirarchy than simply changing the political party in power. 

In January, Owen Jones outlined his nine-point manifesto, the Agenda for Hope, which included a statutory living wage with immediate effect for large businesses and the public sector, regulating private rents and lifting the caps on councils to let them build hundreds of thousands of houses, a 50 per cent tax on all earnings above £100,000 or on the top 2 per cent of earners, and an all-out campaign to recoup the £25 billion worth of tax avoided by the wealthiest each year. 

Concurring with these ideals, Lauren Razavi published an article in the New Statesman last month entitled: A Citizen’s Income of £71 a Week Per Person Would Make Britain Fairer. 

In it she outlines the positive arguments for a universal income across the country for anyone with citizenship status. A total of £3,962 per year is unlikely to deter anyone in work from working, but instead, according to Razavi: “It would prevent the poorest sections of society falling into dependency on state welfare and being discouraged from entering paid employment for fear of losing benefit entitlements. This welfare trap would be eliminated — a citizen’s income would be paid, tax-free, regardless of an individual’s working status or income level.”

There are many ideas in circulation as to how to achieve a theoretically fairer society for Britain and give its most-in-need citizens the pay rise they deserve. 

How to get these theories disseminated widely is the first hurdle — so that we can build a political consensus behind making them a reality.  

Direct action and the sharing of factually accurate information over social media will undoubtedly be our tools in democratically overcoming this hurdle, as most of the mainstream media repeatedly demonstrates their inability or deliberate refusal to reflect the frustration over Britain’s ingrained inequality. 

The BBC has been targeted on Twitter for not covering key austerity protests, meanwhile Channel 4 has commissioned its highly provocative series Benefits Street and is reportedly planning an Immigrants Street, while tabloids like the Daily Mail again and again shriek about immigrants and benefits claimants as the root cause of our economic woes. 

This distracts from the real core of the problem — that unbridled capitalism has led us to a top-down, pyramid-shaped society where the few at the top hoard the majority of our wealth. 

The surprise hit book of the past year has been French economist Thomas Pikkety’s Capitalism in the 21st Century. 

His essential argument is that capitalism isn’t working. We should listen to this message, for while in the short-term Britain may need a pay rise, in the long-term the world itself urgently needs a peaceful but complete financial revolution. 

Pat Cash is assistant editor of QX Magazine. This article is based on a speech given at a meeting organised by Sertuc LGBT Network at TUC Congress House last month.