Did You Realise How New Your Rights Are?
Our human dignity is so very, very recent… and there’s no reason to think it has to endure.
I often forget how recent “modern” life is.
Did you realise, best beloved, that universal suffrage in the UK is barely 100 years old? Before 1918, only men who met certain property requirements could vote. The Representation of the People Act (1918) allowed all men to vote, and some women. It wasn’t until the 1928 Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act that all men and women over 21 years old could vote. Less than 100 years ago, within living memory for some of our oldest citizens.
Did you realise, best beloved, that the “weekend” is barely 100 years old? It was established in the 1930s, after a century of workers and unions fighting to be seen as respectable. Churches also fought for an extra day of the week, after Sunday, for parishioners to “improve” themselves through wholesome recreation. A 6-day working week had led to Sunday being a 24 hour period when as much debauchery could be accommodated as possible — leading to the infamous “Saint Monday” work absences — and religious leaders were keen to control this. Starting as half-day Saturday, the recently realised railway network offered discount tickets on Saturday. Saturday also became the traditional day for football matches. Finally, in the 1930s, it became the norm for both all of Saturday and Sunday to be free days for workers. My grandparents were born in the 1920’s, they remembered these days.
Did you realise, best beloved, that slavery continued in Britain until 200 years ago? That means the parents of your mother’s grandparents saw it. If they lived in Scotland and worked in a coal mine, they could have been slaves themselves. This is not counting, of course, modern slavery where people are illegally kept as indentured servants.
Income tax is more-or-less the same age as slavery abolition. Since 1700, but before the dawn of the 19th Century, rich Britains paid only a modest tax on their home (2 shillings) and a supplementary tax on the number of windows in said home, over ten: up to twenty windows was 4s and over was 8s. A house with 30 windows — undoubtedly a large property — would have been liable for 10s/ per year, equivalent to £53 today. Prior to this, tax was paid on land as geld, collected through tariffs or brought in from fines. We’ve only been taxing the wealthy in any meaningful sense for 200 years.
On that note, did you realise that for twenty years — during your parent’s or maybe grandparent’s salad days — the UK taxed the income of the wealthy at 90%? That was during the 1950s to the 1960s. Thereafter it dropped a little, to 75% with a 15% surcharge. This applied to anyone earning more than £265,000 a year in today’s money. This paid for our NHS, our schools, roads and other public goods. The notion that we can’t possibly tax the wealthy for reasons X, Y and Z didn’t exist until the 1980s, forty years ago, when neoliberalism was ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan. Right now, the wealthy pay 45% on income over £150,000.
Of course, that’s not the whole story.
We need to diverge quickly into British class. To any Americans reading, the best way to think of it is this: Brits see class the way you see race. Since the Industrial Revolution in the UK brought workers into factories and necessitated overseers, Britain has had three classes of citizen. Lower class, who are blue-collar, manual workers. Middle class, who are white-collar, management, education or research. Upper class: the posh, moneyed, Eton-prepped, Oxbridge educated rulers who know which spoon to use for which course.
That’s the gist but, as they say in football, watch the ball not the player. I forget who said it, but I once heard that “there is no such thing as working, middle or upper class — there are only two classes: people who have to work, and people who choose to work”. You see, there are those who work and those who accrue.
Those who work, earning more than £150,000, do indeed pay 45% of that straight back to the treasury from income tax. Another few percent get nibbled off for National Insurance tax. A host of other day-to-day taxes take a bite as well: council tax, value-added tax on luxuries, inheritance tax, stamp duty, capital gains tax and more. Their input accounts for about 40% of the UK’s income tax revenue. They might be able to edge a few percent here and there through clever accounting, but not much.
Income derived from investments, stocks-and-shares, dividends and sale of appreciated assets (the afore-mentioned capital gains tax) are all taxed far below 45%. Someone who already has a great deal of money probably doesn’t need to work much, or can take only a nominal salary, putting them into the lowest tax bracket — and also putting them into the lowest bracket of tax on dividends, about 9%. Investments in UK gilts and premium bonds are exempt. Again, being on a nominally low salary will put this someone into the lower tax bracket, meaning they will only pay 24% capital gains tax. ISAs and PEP investments are exempt.
Taxing capital gains was brought in during the 1960s to mitigate a property-construction bubble. Up until the 2008, the rates of capital gains tax were closely tied to the rate of taxation: 30-40%. Since then, it’s dropped to between 18–24%; occasionally eeking upwards if private equity firms abuse it too much.
I can tell you that the accruing class has only been accruing like this for about twenty years. Back at the turn of the Millennium, it wasn’t like this. Sure, we had wealthy jerks, trust-fund kids and clever-dick Scrooge-McDuck-types who played games with the tax man… but this?
That data only goes to 2018. Today, in 2025, estimates for the top 10% say their average wealth is £2.4 million. And the top 1%? It’s meaningless to say, because calculating their wealth is tricky and some of that 1% are phenomenally wealthy. What I can tell you is that, post pandemic lockdown, the top 1% have more wealth than the bottom 70% put together. They have billions of pounds, and collectively they have added trillions to their pockets.
This only happened in the last few years, best beloved. This is since Black Panther and The Last Jedi came out!
Did you realise, best beloved, that being gay has only been legal in the UK since 1967? The notion of being homosexual and not being at risk of arrest, charge and sentencing in my country goes back as far as The Who Sell Out. It’s two years younger than the Race Relations Act (1965) which made it a crime to discriminate based on race; prior to that Brits could be as unpleasant to a Black or Indian customer as they liked.
Same-gender marriage is only 11 years old, since 2014. If it were a kid, it would only start high school this year. Legally changing your gender and having the state recognise this change is only 9 years older — to stretch my analogy, it would be finishing up at college.
Did you realise, best beloved, had you or I been born 250 years earlier… our lives would, likely, be tending to the land and farming animals? If we were jobless, we could be run out of town or violently punished. We’d wake early to go to the fields, and come back when it became dark. We’d try to have enough to live through the winter, and sell what little extra we had. Our holidays would be religious-based Saint’s Days. No voting. No democracy. No rights. We would exist in service to the master of whatever land we’d been born on or near — the vestigial remnants of Feudalism.
That was only 250 years ago. 3 modern human lifetimes. Of those 250 years, wherein we abolished slavery and introduced taxes on the rich, much of our progress only happened within the last 100 years. We went from disenfranchised workers, toiling in factories to find dishonourable graves, to individuals with rights, needs and humanity.
Humans have existed for about 500,000 years. For 99.8% of that time, we were serfs, peasants and slaves. We were disposable, of use only to till the duke’s land, to die in war for our King’s honour, or to haul stone for a Pharaoh’s pyramid.
Where we are now, you and I, best beloved, is a very recent aberration in human history. It is an anomaly. It is the result of millions and millions of us fighting in two world wars, fighting in unions, fighting through demonstrations and direct action. We fought, and we won those rights. Those rights are so new, so experimental. And the work is not yet done, not by a long shot. There is still so much more to fight for and so much to remedy and repair.
But always remember: for 99.8% of human history, the vast majority of us lived with nothing. That horror is waiting, now, on the edges of our world. It’s biding its time, waiting for the ground to be fertile. It will always be waiting.
Force must be the last resort, when all other options are exhausted, and should only be used to defend ourselves and those too weak to protect themselves. But, I foresee a time when all other avenues will be spent and we may need to consider alternatives.
Best beloved: remember how recent your human dignity and rights are. Do not let the horror of 99.8% of our history come back, because it is trying and it senses its time is near.
For more historical perspectives, consider my articles “The Nazis: The Call Was Coming from Inside the House” and “The Triumvirate of Horror: How Politicians, Robber Barons and Media Moguls Bring Us Closer to Fascism”.
Now go out and join a union. Meet your neighbours. Draw your own line in the sand.
