Guido has noticed a few Shadow Cabinet members using the phrase “Cabinet of Millionaires”, a charge usually made by trots selling papers. Red Ed clearly calculates this will harm the government in an era of cuts. Over the weekend he said it didn’t matter if millionaires were given child benefit because “there aren’t that many millionaires in this country”. Well there seems to be disproportionate amount in his top team.
There are quite a few millionaires around the Shadow Cabinet table, some inherited their money, some made their money. If the politics of envy is back we should look at the net worth of those making the charge. Guido is estimating net worth based on pension assets, property and other known assets.
Millionaire Ed Miliband inherited a share of a multi-million pound property from his Marxist father, some nifty footwork by him and his brother David allowed them to avoid paying six-figure inheritance taxes. Combining marital assets and his inheritance from his father Ralph, Ed himself is comfortably a millionaire.
Millionaress Harriet Harman, privately educated at St Paul’s girls school (Osborne went to St Paul’s boys school) is, given her eighteen year parliamentary career, set to get at least a half a million pounds from her pension pot. Along with her husband’s salary and pension, things are looking comfortable with one house in Herne Hill and a country pile in Suffolk. Putting the trade unionist and the toff well into the millionaire’s class…
Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper trousered a joint household income of some £300,000 per year for their five years or so in goverment positions. Ed trousered nigh on £100,000 in 2005 for writing a few pamphlets for Gordon Brown’s now struck-off dubious charity known as the Smith Institute. With the couple’s triple-house-flipping, generous expenses claims, on top of their ministerial salaries and taking into account their gold-plated ministerial pension pots, they will comfortably have a net worth that puts the power couple in the millionaire’s bracket by now. Though they are however down to a meagre two homes…
But it’s not just the big names at the forefront, Baroness Scotland spent many years at the top of the Bar and the ennobled QC’s bank balance would reflect that. The millionairess will have had no problem paying her five-thousand pound fine for employing an illegal immigrant as a maid…
Baldemort himself, Liam Byrne, benefitted handsomely from his time as an investment banker at Rothchilds. He certainly won’t have left their employ without having trousered enough to put him in the millionaire bracket before counting his six-figure government salary…
Oh and let’s not forget Shaun Woodward whose property empire includes a castle. He even has his own butler.
Can co-conspirators crowd-source evidence of other millionaire members of Red Ed’s new generation?
See also: More Millionaire Shadow Cabinet Members
