IT’S a great time to be alive in Britain, if you’re sumptuously rich. That’s the conclusion of a new report by the Resolution Foundation, which shows that the top one per cent’s share of national income is nearing record levels. Those who earn upwards of £275,000 are gobbling up the bulk of any growth, and everyone else is paying the price.

This may seem like an age-old inevitability, but it didn’t always look that way. After 2008, for the first time in three decades, the mega rich wobbled. Their economic model was in ruins, their gold-plated investments were worthless and their banks had been taken into public hands. This was an opportunity to redress the glaring inequalities of 30 years of post-Thatcher economics. But a decade on, all their losses have been recouped; the rich are back and hungrier than ever.

What about the rest of us? Weirdly, inequality among the 99 per cent has fallen over the past 20 years. That’s because the proper plutocrats have enjoyed their bonanza at everyone’s expense, so if you’re only in the second percentile, you’re not a player, you’re not even a substitute – you’re cut from the team! Even the one per cent isn’t as glamorous as it used to be: economist Emmanuel Saez has shown that the main part of America’s post-crisis recovery went to the wealthiest 0.01 per cent, the executive lounge within the plutocracy.

However, while the whole 99 per cent has suffered, the biggest sacrifices are inevitably at the lower end. The poorest half of working families have particularly suffered. Two in five cannot save £10 per month; a further 42 per cent cannot afford an annual one-week holiday. Sadly, these trends are likely to continue. “The danger,” says the Resolution Foundation, “is that 2016-17 may have been just the beginning of a slowdown in income growth for low- to middle-income families and a rise in inequality for us all.”

The lesson here should have been learned long ago: “trickle-down” economics does not work. There is little point in making huge social sacrifices for “growth” when only the richest one in 10,000 can enjoy it.

Officials are starting to take notice of this problem. Larry Summers, the American economist and former Secretary of the Treasury, is nobody’s radical, but he says that “for the first time since the Great Depression, focusing on redistribution makes more sense than focusing on growth”. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals now state that the incomes of the bottom 40 per cent of society should rise faster than richest 60 percent.

These are worthy sentiments. But the real problem is not between the top and bottom halves; it’s the destabilising power of the very select capitalist minority, which cuts across politics and makes a mockery of democracy.

Today, left-wing people are liable to fall out about Brexit, Scottish independence and identity politics. It’s therefore humbling to remember just how much our democracy is controlled by bigger forces that obliviously criss-cross national borders. Regardless of where power lies on the map, our economic problems will remain the same until we’re challenging the upper rank of millionaires who really run Europe and America.

Scotland is a small country of five million people, locked into much wider systems of money-making and politicking. What happens here tends to follow global patterns.

The 2014 referendum was one of many Europe-wide revolts against the wealth and power of the one per cent. Consider the Better Together coalition. It was funded by anonymous hedge funds and politically connected oil dealers, and was thus a more-or-less naked political expression of capitalism. Economic experts predicted doom. But these were the same “experts” who had glorified the UK financial model until it collapsed in 2008 and who defended the economics of George Osborne. The Yes coalition gained its impulse as a revolt against established economic authority.

However, there was one problem. Yes Scotland really was a gloriously odd collection of rebels, outlaws and misfits; its mood was anti-neoliberal, while Better Together was perhaps the purest avatar of neoliberalism I’ve ever seen. But the Scottish Government’s economics were the roaring 90s at their worst. They said that tax cuts for corporations would drive growth, which would create more public spending, an idea that George HW Bush once called “voodoo economics”.

I’m not anti-growth. I’m certainly not a deep green environmentalist. However, simply relying on “trickle-down” to solve your problems is a losing strategy. Even if you’re willing to ignore the environmental chaos unleashed by our current economic model, a glaring problem remains: in coming decades, getting growth will be like squeezing out the remains of the toothpaste. And where we can eke a little bit out, it will be requisitioned by the upper rung of plutocrats.

The economic strategies of the future must make redistribution the first bullet point. If they don’t, they won’t be strategies at all. Lurching from crisis to crisis is not the same as thinking strategically.

Labour, perhaps the world’s most conservative social democratic party, have started to confront these major issues. In Scotland, we should welcome that and see it as a challenge. The rich are never going to like Scottish independence, because they think all change is bad. That’s understandable. If I’d had everything my own way for 40 years, I wouldn’t like change either. But most of society isn’t winning right now, and if we’re clever, we’ll put the unlucky 99 per cent before the fortunate one per cent.