Locked into their

From the marbled 20th floor of a glass tower in Canary Wharf….. the view of the river is breathtaking. It snakes down to the Thames barrier, glinting in the sunset. Close to the new city lie the serried ranks of East End estate blocks. The view is typical of London: glossy new wealth nestling close to old and persisting penury. Precious little money has trickled down from this gilded new town in the sky to its neighbours below.

The view is a reminder of the widening gap. History, many like to believe, is a Whiggish tale of wealth, social progress and fairer distribution, an onward march: we all wear the same clothes, meet on equal terms on Facebook. Yet background predicts who will run the banks and who will clean their floors. It's not happenstance; it is largely pre-programmed. General mobility is a myth. The top 10% of income earners get 27.3% of the cake, while the bottom 10% get just 2.6%. Twenty years ago the average chief executive of a FTSE 100 company earned 17 times the average employee's pay; how it is more than 75 times. Since Labour came to power in 1997 the proportion of personal wealth held by the top 10% has swelled from 47% to 54%. Labour did try to tug in the opposite direction, but after Gordon Brown's last budget as chancellor axed the lop tax rate, many of the lowest paid were left bearing a heavier burden.

Those who make the most money, meanwhile, seem less willing than ever to see it redistributed. Tax consultants Grant Thornton estimated that in 2006 at least 32 of the UK's 54 billionaires paid no income tax at all.

High-earners tend to be elusive, preserving their privacy at home and at work, journeying between them in expensive cars. But in sessions conducted by Ipsos Mori over two evenings we did meet partners in a law firm of international renown and senior staff from equally world-famous merchant banks. Their business is money, and they make it: the law partners earned between £500,000 and £i.5m per year, putting them in the top 0.1% of earners in the UK, while the merchant bankers ranged from £150,000 up to £l0m.

We hoped to gain an insight into their notions of fairness - what might persuade them to share more of their wealth with others. What we encountered was a startling demonstration of ignorance. Here were professionals who deal daily with money, yet know next to nothing about other people's incomes. When asked to relate themselves to the rest of the population, these high-earners utterly misjudged the magnitude of their privilege.

How much, we asked our group, would it take to put someone in the top 10% of earners? They put the figure at £162,000. In fact, in 2007 it was around £39,825, the point at which the top tax band began. Our group found it hard to believe that nine-tenths of the UK's 32m taxpayers earned less than that. As for the poverty threshold, our lawyers and bankers fixed it at £22,000. But that sum was just under median earnings, which meant they regarded ordinary wages as poverty pay.

Mistakes such as these should disqualify the wealthy from pontificating about taxation or redistribution. And yet City views carry great weight with ministers and politicians of all parties.

Fortunately, Professor John Hills, director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, was on hand at the focus groups to provide correct figures. Once he had done so, one youngish banker said sheepishly: "My appreciation of the numbers was quite hopeless. Given my age and my level of experience in the City I wouldn't have thought that I would be so out of touch with reality." Another realised how much he had lost touch: "It sounds an awful thing to say, but I know people I went to school with, and I've no idea how they survive on the incomes they have." But they got over their initial embarrassment quickly enough. An encounter with the facts didn't seem to impinge in the ensuing discussion: in no time they reverted to an underinformed view of the world.

Justifying their own high incomes, they said: it's not us, it's globalisation, and anyway we are the nation's economic benefactors. "The goose that lays the golden egg is the people who come to London to make wealth," one said, echoed by all. The growing gap between rich and poor is "a reflection of the success of policies here... making the City one of the pre-eminent financial centres of the world". Another said defiantly (this was on the eve of the banking sector's implosion), "I don't think we should sit here and say London should be guilty for being successful." They put themselves inside a golden enclave, but one on which the entire UK depended for its wellbeing. Don't mess with its denizens: they deserve thanks for providing invisible exports and powering GDP growth. We high-earners belong to a global elite, able to work anywhere, always mobile.

But the City's importance is exaggerated. Finance, including the City, insurance and high street banks, forms 7.9% of the UK's GDP, compared with manufacturing at 14.7% and property services at 16.5%. Added together, hotels, catering and telecoms account for nearly the same share of GDP as finance. As for their threats of flight, both our bankers and lawyers turned out to be remarkably immobile, most having worked for their firms for a long number of years. The warmth with which they described their London lives with partners and children suggested they would be loth to leave.

"We work harder and aspire the most," one said. The longer we talked, the more they turned : moral reasons for success and failure, moving away from the structural globalisation reasons given above. One banker said: "It's a fact of modem life that there is disparity and 'Is it fair or unfair?' is not a valid question. It's just the way it is, and you have to get on with it. People just say it's unfair when they don't do anything to change their circumstances." In other words, they see themselves as makers of their own fortune as another banker said, "Quite a lot " people have done well who want to achieve, if quite a lot of people haven't done well just because they don't want to achieve." One woman banker described escaping from a provincial town where the main employer was the public sector: "If you aspire to anything beyond that you're not going to live [there] any more, and that's the choice you make."

They had chosen a life that would make them rich while others, making different and morally equivalent choices, had abdicated their right to complain. "Some of these are vocational, things like nurses ... It's accepted - they go into it knowing that that's part of the deal." Another said: "Many people, like teachers, don't do things for the pay. But you won't find a teacher that works as hard as we do." This was categorical, evidence unnecessary. They spoke of heroic all-nighters drawing up contracts for clients in time zones on the other side of the globe, a Herculean effort that justified fat pay. But did they work 10 times as hard as a teacher on £30,000 a year or, in the case of some lawyers and bankers, 100 times as hard? Such disproportionality did not enter their scheme of things.

None of us like to feel guilty about our comfortable lives, and it would have been absurd to expect mea culpas from these people just because they earned so much. What we had hoped for was more awareness, some recognition that their position needed explaining and even justification. Instead, with the exception of a couple of progressive lawyers, they simply denied they were rich.

They could scarcely deny they had money indeed they spoke of the pleasures that high incomes bought. "I do enjoy the fact I can have nice holidays and don't think twice about buying particular items," said one lawyer. But most blocked out the suggestion they were extremely well off. Living in London cost a lot they said: the city that made them rich was reason you had to be rich. You had to afford London property. "I'm sick of this, because with £1oo,ooo in Manchester you are well off; £1oo,o00 is a not a wealthy person down here."

A lawyer admitted that he couldn't imagine surviving on an income as low as £100,000, and in discussions about higher tax bands his colleagues objected to any such low sum being used as a benchmark. One of the more imaginative lawyers described their social isolation: "We now live in a separate economy, we live or separate level to the vast majority of people the country. We don't send our kids to the same schools, we have more choice over schools,¹have more choice over health, we have more choice over where we live, we have more choice over where we go on holiday and what we do our jobs. And we live in a completely different world to the people we live next door to."

"Providing for children" was flourished as a trump card, as if spending on offspring was automatically moral and good, regardless of how other people's children fare. "I work hard, I've got two boys and I want to provide for them." Providing for children meant buying them access to high-earning jobs, taking trusted routes through school and university. One result of such social selection is already being seen on the City's doorstep. Applicants at this law firm are "becoming posher", a senior partner noted. Older partners were often grammar school, but now recruits almost exclusively have been to private schools. They are also greedier: the same older partner said he was shocked that the first question high-flying graduates ask now is about the salary.

Once our conversation turned to tax, the high-earners' arguments against rebalancing the system ranged from threat to bluster to attack. Response one: we will leave, and you will be poorer. Or: we don't deserve to be forced to pay more. Or: even if we were taxed more, the money would all be wasted. John Hills's charts showed how the modern UK tax system can barely be called progressive, with the top 10th of income earners paying a smaller proportion of their total income in tax than the bottom 10th. The poor are hit hard by VAT and other indirect taxes: they spend relatively more on taxable goods and services. Even when confronted with that evidence, the bankers especially gave the crudest response, saying flatly that they contributed more in cash - denying the point of a progressive tax system, which is that higher earners pay a larger proportionate share.

"Politics of envy!" one lawyer exploded furiously. "I really object because what it does is take the whole emphasis and focus away into something that's totally irrelevant and won't help a poor person at all." The idea of redistributing more was, he said, "all kinds of bullshit crap which doesn't help the people". They felt a passionate hatred of capital gains tax and inheritance tax.

One banker, bearing a distinct resemblance to Mr Scrooge, said: "People don't starve in this country - it's OK. Compared with other countries, here you don't go hungry because you can just go and get money for free." Some thought benefits already too high. One banker said he thought a family of four receives "say, £3,000 a month in their hands, and they're somewhere miles up north. They're not going to earn that sort of money, so where's the incentive for them to go out to work?" In fact, a family of four would in 2008 receive a net total of £1,328 a month.

Whatever, the poor didn't deserve it. Masters of the universe our groups might be, but their outlook was pure Daily Mail: "Single people... get pregnant and get a flat and more money. You just see everybody pushing prams, then they'll get more income and a little flat that they can stay in for life." There was much talk of the perverse incentives for single parenthood, with one banker complaining that the 18-year-old mother on benefits "doesn't get that much less money than another 18-year-old working in a shop". It didn't seem to occur to this speaker that the shop worker's pay might also be too low. They were contemptuous of anything that gave extra money directly to poorer people: "This thing of giving pregnant women £200 for dietary supplements. Like, as if they'll really spend it on fruit." Most were adamant, along with this banker: "We don't think just chucking money at the welfare state is the answer."

A last defence against paying more tax was their absolute conviction that government is inefficient and could not to be trusted with a penny more. When it comes to government, "lack of ability is the main basis on which you get a job", said one lawyer. "Nobody in the public sector is actually trained to do the job that they're required to do." Another argued: "Labour did a bit of that, with extra taxes and windfall taxes and the famous raid on pensions. The big debate is about how effectively all that money-raising has been applied. Most people would say not all of it was well applied."

We heard this get-out time and again. Public money is always misspent. Our bankers airily said the administrative cost of paying tax credits was astronomical; Hills said it was actually 3%. And what was the ratio of office costs to turnover in a big City bank? A good deal more - nearer 8%, it turned out. But their error was delivered with all the aplomb of power.

The entire public realm was dismissed in one sweep. As if he hailed from the planet Zog, one of the bankers said: "I have absolutely no idea how my taxes are spent and therefore I do not trust the system at all." But he knew his taxes would be misspent. "The classic is how much you pay in your taxation versus what's invested in the roads and the transport system. It goes into a black hole." Another banker asserted that there is "little accountability and measurability in the way that tax is actually used": Several lawyers, meanwhile, swivelled in their chairs to point downriver from Canary Wharf, to where the Millennium Dome floats like a jellyfish on its spit of land. "Doesn't that," they cried in triumph, "say all we need to say about the waste and futility of public spending?"

Here were people who might be technically adept, or good at deal-making, but as a group -with one or two exceptions - they were less intelligent, less intellectually inquisitive, less knowledgeable and, despite their good schools, less broadly educated than high-flyers in other professions. Their high salaries were not a sign of any obvious superiority. Most dismaying was their lack of empathy and their unwillingness to contemplate other, less luxurious lives. They could not see that the pleasure they derived from possessions, prospects and doing well by their children is universal and that others deserve a share of that, too •

Extracted from Unjust Rewards by Polly Toynbee and David Walker, published by Granta at £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.

Britain's 'completely useless' Trident nuclear deterrent will be a £20bn waste of money, say retired generals

Britain's nuclear missile submarines have become ' irrelevant' in the modern world and should be scrapped, a group of retired senior military commanders have claimed.

The Government is to spend at least £20billion replacing the Royal Navy's Vanguard submarines and their long-range Trident missiles with a new fleet set to enter service in the 2020s - patrolling the waters to deter a nuclear attack on the UK.

But according to three former defence chiefs the massively expensive system will be pointless, as it will not deter terrorists or nuclear blackmailers and will make it far harder for Britain to encourage nuclear disarmament around the globe. The warnings came in a letter to The Times from former Chief of the Defence Staff Field Marshal Lord Bramall, and Generals Lord Ramsbotham, former Adjutant General, and Sir Hugh Beach, former Deputy Commander-in-Chief of UK Land Forces.

They argue that the huge cost of replacing Trident would be better spent on improving conventional forces. And they dismiss the idea that nuclear weapons are needed to boost Britain's influence in the world, claiming that would be done far better by having more well-equipped troops with hi-tech weapons ready to intervene around the globe. 'Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently face or are likely to face, particularly international terrorism,' the letter stated.'Our independent deterrent has become virtually irrelevant, expect in the context of domestic politics.' Retired Army General Lord Ramsbotham, who also signed the letter, said he wanted to restart the debate over the renewal of Trident, which was approved by the House of Commons in March 2007, despite a large rebellion by Labour MPs. Lord Ramsbotham told BBC2's Newsnight: 'I think it needs to be questioned. We want to have a proper argument about this.

More...EDWARD HEATHCOAT-AMORY: How can we spend £20billion on Trident when our troops are so badly equipped? We come to the question of affordability. There are two definitions of

affordability - can you afford it and can you afford to give up what you have got to give up to afford it? We argue that it is conventional weapon's we now need. Their pin-point accuracy, their ability to help our forces in the sort of conflicts that are taking place is something which means you have to question the huge expense of Trident, which is limiting what we can do. 'Lord Ramsbotham said he no longer believes Britain's nuclear deterrent is truly independent.

Useless: Test firing of a Trident missile 'We don't own the missiles and it is absolutely unthinkable that we should ever consider using it or threatening to use it without having the clearance of the United States,' he said. And he added: 'The fact is that Trident is an inappropriate weapons system. You can't see Trident being used against something like nuclear blackmail by international terrorism. It is a Cold War weapon. It is not a weapon for the situation where we are now'.

'Lord Ramsbotham said he was 'quite certain' that his doubts are shared by some serving members of the military. And he suggested that the decision to renew Trident was driven more by political considerations than by the true requirements of national defence.He said: 'The question of whether or not we buy something of this sort is not a military argument, it is a political argument

'Shadow defence secretary Liam Fox said: 'In a world where nuclear proliferation is becoming an ever greater threat, and when dangerous regimes such as Iran are developing their own nuclear programmes, the best protection from nuclear blackmail is for Britain to maintain our own minimum deterrent. 'Nobody can predict what the world will be like in 10, 15 or 20 years' time and it would be irresponsible for any Government to disarm Britain of her nuclear deterrent.'

GM approval 'will be influenced by money

BY MARIE WOOLF

Chief Political Correspondent

AN ENVIRONMENTAL group criticised the Government yesterday after it emerged ministers could take into account finance as well as science in deciding whether GM crops can be grown commercially. Previously ministers have insisted that approval would be based solely on the scientific and environmental evaluation of farm trials.

Friends of the Earth-(FoE) accused the Government of trying to "skew the argument". Pete Riley, a spokesman, said he was worried the decision would be based on "a biased economic analysis".

FOE issued its warning after the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said other factors, including "costs and benefits", would be considered. In a response to a select committee report on genetically modified organisms, Defra said a public debate on whether to approve planting will be steered by scientists rather than environmentalists, public health experts or consumer groups. The conclusions will be summarised for the Secretary of State for the Environment, Margaret Beckett.

Defra said: "The Government believes that public trust is vital to progress and innovation and that we must take note of people's concerns, but not exaggerate them."

The Prime Minister has ordered his strategy unit to produce a report on the economic benefits of GM crops. It is likely to argue that the benefits of commercialisation will be positive for "UK pic".