Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London

"(This book is also a vailable on the Bookstory website here .) Yes. One of the genres of nonfiction I like the most is where you get a serious wonk, if you like, a really proper academic, who nonetheless writes a brilliant narrative. And Caroline Knowles is a great example of that. She’s a professor of sociology at Queen Mary University of London and has written all kinds of papers on this topic. But Serious Money is her attempt to distil some of that academic sociology into something way more readable. It’s fun. I think it’s a good insight into Britain at the moment—some of the political forces in the current debate. But even just taking it on its own merits, this as a book is a great read. It’s set out as a sort of glossary of the modern rich: who they are, how they made their money, and how they spend it. It’s fascinating. “I worry that our political journalism doesn’t trust readers or viewers very much” It’s often taken for granted that class and money are big forces in British politics and society. But here Knowles digs deeper into how that’s changed over the years. The aristocracy make some brief appearances: there’s a little bit on Mayfair, and the influence of the Duke of Westminster and his enormous property holdings in the capital. But there’s a lot more space devoted to modern money: the hedge funds, the art collectors, and in particular the influence of foreign money—areas of the capital that have been dominated by Russians and Saudi Arabians, where money and property has been snapped up by the enormously wealthy, the geographically disconnected. It’s a great insight into inequality, which is one of the big themes at the moment in politics; Rishi Sunak was challenged as to whether the average person felt better off than they did in 2010, when the Tories first came to power. There’s a real sense that the ultra-rich have gotten rich and richer and the average person doesn’t feel all that better off. This book is a way of looking at: Who are these people who have benefited from the way our society is currently set up? And how do they go about benefiting from it?"