Kevin Maguire - As I please

TORY billionaire Michael Aschcroft should sit down with his accountant and then wave goodbye to David Cameron, because the Victor Kaim of the Conservatives – who liked the Tories so much he bought the party – is doing obscenely well under Labour.

His personal fortune shot up by a stratospheric £300 million last year to a blood-boiling £1.1 billion – a sum impossible to visualise unless you are a billionaire, which, giving away no secrets here, I am not.

Doing a few sums on the back of an envelope, I calculate a worker on the national minimum wage would have to live to be 95,800 years old to amass enough loot to look Lord Ashcroft of Belize in the eyes and see pound signs reflected back – longer, if our tireless employee pays tax and National Insurance and buys the odd meal. Now, medical science is moving forward in leaps and bounds, but I suspect it’s unlikely any time soon to be able to keep anyone alive for close on 96 millennia.

So perhaps it would be simpler to arrange for nearly five million low-paid employees to pool their money and donate a week’s wages each to join Ashcroft at number 65 on the Sunday Times Rich List.

Publication of this annual review of the wealth of the wealthiest should trigger a revolution, the working and middle classes uniting to march on Belgravia, Stamford Bridge or wherever the filthy rich are lurking to demand a bit of redistribution. Monarchies and governments have been toppled for less.

There can be no greater indictment of the past 11 years than the assertion that the wealth of the richest 1,000 people in Britain has quadrupled – up from £99 billion to £412 billion – while the “people’s party” has been in power.

Perhaps we should rename Labour the “rich people’s party”. We’re all used to the figures showing the rich getting richer under Labour, but this was shaming.

Tory donor and deputy chairman Ashcroft’s unappreciative support for Cameron when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have done so much for him may stem from the peer’s hostility to the minimum wage, or perhaps it’s the envy of a billionaire who dreams of being even richer.

I guess £1.1 billion isn’t enough if you live next door to the Mittals. The steel magnate – and Labour donor – Lakshmi Mittal and his family are, according to the guide, worth

£27.7 billion, which is a lot of fivers.

The upper reaches of the list are dominated by non-domiciles (or tycoons, such as Ashcroft, who decline to make their tax status clear). Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich is at number two with £11.7 billion. This lot won’t struggle to pay the £30,000 a year Alistair Darling will be charging in return for allowing the world’s super rich to slum it in Britain while keeping the bulk of their fortunes well beyond the reach of the taxman.

This Labour Government has done more to help the low paid than any previous administration – a proud boast that it’s easy to forget or overlook in the wake of the 10p tax blunder. That £5.52 per hour on the minimum wage our long-living Stakhanovite would have to earn for 95,800 years to equal Ashcroft.

Tax credits which put some £14 billion a year in the wallets and purses of lower and middle-income earners, child benefit that will soon be worth £20 for the first child, and employment reforms such as the right to four weeks plus bank holidays off with pay, make a real difference to people’s lives.

But Britain isn’t a fairer country when you leaf through the Rich List and see an avaricious elite amassing grotesque fortunes. Our toleration of what they accumulate must leave them laughing all the way to the bank.

The strikes in schools, colleges and the civil service last week had the soothsayers in the media predicting a summer of discontent – the oldest industrial cliché in the book, dusted down and trotted out whenever there’s a bit of a ruck.

Last September and October, it was to be an autumn of discontent and a winter of discontent. Not so very long ago, a spring of discontent was also forecast.

None of them materialised – certainly not as re-runs of the 1978-79 winter of discontent when walkouts over James Callaghan’s ill-fated pay policy were part of the disintegration of his Labour Government.

My hunch is that there will not be a tidal wave of strikes this year and the discontent will be political rather than industrial – public service workers asking why they should continue supporting a Government that cuts their living standards.

The simple answer is that the Tories would be worse, but public services deserve better from Brown than below-inflation wage increases, job losses and the constant threat of privatisation.

And when the Prime Minister flicks through the Rich List to see who he knows, he should remember it will be the votes of ordinary people that decide whether he wins the next general election in 2009 or 2010.