What BBC2's 'The Super-Rich and Us' Told Us About Britain's Great Wealth Divide

Part one of BBC2's The Super-Rich and Us started last night with Prokofiev's now grossly over-familiar "Dance of the Knights", best known these days as soundtrack to which The Apprentice is frogmarched into the home. Its usage was partly classic BBC self-reference and partly a light form of subversion: "See these mega rich blokes like Alan Sugar," it seemed to imply. "They're not your friends."

It is an interesting trend for the BBC, and maybe an inevitable one. If the corporation is going to take sides then it might as well take the side of the 99 percent of people paying its licence fee. It would be nice if it could follow through and stop using the dullard one percent as "entertainment" for us, a la Dragons Den (though some, I'm sure, will miss Peter Jones's socks).

The presenter of The Super-Rich and Us, Jacques Peretti, is an affable host, as if BBC producers finally decided to go Wizard of Oz on Adam Curtis, finding behind the curtain not a steely-eyed conspiracist spouting portentous free-prose, but a mild-mannered chap who could have made a great Blue Peter presenter ten years ago.

Peretti has been accused of hyperbolic, unsubtle filmmaking in the past but his directness made sense here. It was a film with intent, akin to a man screaming, "THIS IS FUCKED, QUICK, LET'S DO SOMETHING," albeit in a nice, smiley fashion.

He gamely shows us how the super-wealthy splurge – the more ridiculous end being gold jelly face mask treatments in South Kensington that cost more than most house deposits. There are moments when you fantasise about Peretti as a kind of jolly British version of Michael Douglas in Falling Down: you half wish he'd lose his shit at the classic car fair, piss on the dashboard of the £180,000 Lamborghini, and twat the man who boasts he owns "less than ten" sports cars, with the proviso: "Don't tell the wife".

The myth of "trickle-down" is quashed, despite the caddish South African multi-millionaire Rob Hersov trying to convince Peretti that the super-rich do great things for the economy when they come to Britain, like "get taxis".

One of the ferociously well-heeled who comes out of it quite well is Nick Hanauer, the Seattle entrepreneur who senses that the pitchforks are coming for the plutocrats. "We used to call it Divine Right – and now we call it 'trickle down'," says Hanauer, lifting the veil. "The idea that I matter and you don't."

But we do matter, the documentary cajoles us into believing – and I suppose the most depressing element of all this is that many do need reminding that the current malaise, in which the UK is the only leading economy to become more unequal this century, shouldn't be happening in an apparently civilised society. When Peretti asked a friendly middle-class lady in Twickenham what she thinks her future looks like, after describing how she will have very little pension she cries: "I'll be off to Diginitas!"

Peretti travels to Paris to meet Thomas Picketty, economist of the moment, who says there should be an annual tax on wealth to avert the major threat to democracy, the shrinking middle class shrink. (Unsurprisingly, the middle class is largely who he means by "us" in the title).

There are 104 billionaires in Britain – more than any other country—and at the same time the middle class is in decline, while the working class is erased: Newham's Labour mayor told Focus E15 campaigners, "If you can't afford to live in Newham, you can't afford to live in Newham," when they tackled him on social housing.

The most graphic display of the UK's predicament is shown at a trade fair in Olympia. As protesters voice their disgust outside, British councils sell off land all over the country to foreign investors. You could see Peretti was visibly taken aback in what was basically a kind of Thatcherism theme park, where the consequences were very real.

Developers are building and selling fake histories and supposed celebrity lifestyles to future landlords everywhere – the majestic Battersea Power Station, for example, is being redeveloped into flats and a mall with Malaysian money. At the One Hyde Park development – resembling some kind of great, towering glass cruise-liner – the cheapest apartment is £6.5 million. In turn, London prices have increased 25 per cent in the last year. By 2032, the programme told us, the majority will rent – a bleak reality that was enough to make you choke on whatever you were eating while watching.

On the subject of taxing, the programme answered the question as to why successive governments lower taxes to lure the super rich. The answer? They window dress GDP for the country, masking over the fact that living standards haven't improved, says Matt Whittaker, chief economist at the Resolution Foundation Foundation. The 1960s is where the awfulness began, says Peretti, its strutting rock stars personifications of the entitled, post-imperial, tax dodging Britain. The nation's wealth was built on Empire, but, when that ran out, Britain reinvented itself as a casino for the super-rich, ushering in an era of the jet-set, remaking the landscape for international tycoons and non-doms. The age of Absolute Coutts.

Of course, not much of this is news. Writers and artists from James Meek and Patrick Keiller to Ian Sinclair and Laura Oldfield Ford have been pointing to the effects of this country's deference to a small but powerful band of economic anomalies for years: the ludicrously rising rents, the disappearance of social housing and the restructuring of the welfare state to suit the business classes rather than those scrabbling around beneath them.

In mainstreaming this line of dissent in a primetime slot, The Super-Rich and Us reflected the general feeling in the UK in early 2015: a feeling of a country at the end of its tether, politically, economically, culturally; a general exasperation that comes from the effects of turning the island into a destination of opportunity for the financial betters – wherever they are.

James Meek's recent book Private Islands in particular makes a good accompaniment to the show, as does his recent essay on Nigel Farage and Ukip in the London Review of Books, in which he explores Farage's wish to "make London a more competitive marketplace for foreign banks from all over the world."

After the show, Ukip supporters attached their campaign to the fight against the super-rich on social media, but it's people like former broker Farage who have helped fan the flames of this current epidemic. Someone should force the Ukip leader and his cynical band to watch this, to show them what damaging immigrants really look like.

@timburrows

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