Either we ask the very rich to pay more in tax or the burden will fall on the rest of us - Andy Brown

It is said that the most likely way to make a small fortune is to start out with a large one. Starting with money, connections and an expensive education is also the most likely way to become very rich. No one ever made their first billion by saving it up from their wages or by being a selfless public servant.

If you happen to be fortunate enough to earn the hefty sum of £100,000 a year then, if you spend nothing on living expenses and put everything away into a bank, it will take you ten years to become a millionaire. It will take ten thousand years to be a billionaire. Ellon Musk is estimated to be worth around 900 billion so that would take you over a million years.

The rich and privileged have of course always been with us. As have the poor. What changes is how big the gap is between the two and how big a share of wealth and power goes to a small elite. Resources and opportunities aren’t shared out equally across society and the gap has been getting substantially worse for decades. In much of the Western world we have moved from a society where there were lots of opportunities for ordinary people to live reasonable lives in relative comfort towards one in which prospects for success are very thin for entire communities.

There are still areas of life in which raw talent can secure major rewards regardless of how tough your upbringing has been. Premier League footballers, rock stars, and … after that I struggled to come up with examples.

There are entire communities in Britain where the bulk of people feel pretty hopeless and that their best interests have been neglected for decades. If you happen to be brought up in a high rise in the back streets of a former industrial heartland you are likely to end up with few educational qualifications, limited job opportunities and few people around you who know how to start a new business or launch a successful career.

If you got brought up in one of those struggling communities then you are likely to live a relatively short and unhealthy life, not likely to do very well at school and extraordinarily unlikely to make it onto the Sunday Times Rich List.

Most ordinary working people don’t actually want to become stinking rich. They do want to have a fair chance to achieve a reasonable lifestyle and to succeed on their own terms. The feeling that the odds are stacked against you and that it is harder to achieve the lifestyle that your own parents experienced has become dangerously widespread.

The Chancellor would do well to remember this when he sets his budget. At the moment working people start paying tax when their income exceeds £12,570. It ought to be self-evident that anyone with so few resources available to them should not be top of the list of targets when it comes to paying tax.

Billionaires who have so much money that they can gift the occasional £36m to the political party most likely to do their bidding might be a more appropriate target for tax rises. It simply isn’t possible to respond to the pressures that public finances are under without getting serious about asking those with exceptionally large incomes to contribute more.

The Chancellor wants more money for defence, for prison building, for border control, for care of the elderly, for the NHS, for schools and for a myriad of other essential public services which are not able to function the way that they should because of lack of resources.

Instead of squeezing the middle income earners or inflicting yet one more round of cutbacks on those who are trying to deliver services for the public we should be looking to those best off in society to contribute more.

That doesn’t just apply to individuals. It applies to businesses. Small high street shops and cafes are currently paying council tax bills that are a much higher proportion of their earnings than large international chains sending parcels to your door from massive warehouses staffed with more robots than people. That can’t be right.

During the 1950s, when Winston Churchill was in charge of the economy the top rate of income tax in Britain never went below 85 per cent. It is now 45 per cent.

Cutting those tax rates hasn’t stopped tax dodging. It has increased. The ultra rich have become very skilled at using offshore bitcoin accounts to hide money.

It is however a lot harder to hide physical assets held in this country such as large estates, grouse shooting moors and luxury yachts. Fixed assets of the very wealthy are therefore the most sensible targets for tax rises. In the middle of a cost of living crisis it is deeply unrealistic to expect ordinary tax payers to cough up more. It is much more reasonable to expect very rich companies and individuals to take a little more of the strain.

Let’s be honest with voters. Either we ask the very rich to pay more in tax or the burden will fall on the rest of us.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley.