With travel so expensive now, you can easily substitute a trip to the Palace of Versailles with some hours reading the Rich List. The effect is similar.

Press your peasant nose against the gilded window of obscene wealth; gaze into the Hall of Mirrors to see your tiny life reflected in the shadow of towering aristocracy; creep back to your humble home after a permitted peak at where real power lives.

The Rich List, which has just made its annual appearance, is nothing but pornography: a slavering, debased and obsequious genuflection to Mammon.

In the list, we so often see riches in the possession of those already born into unimaginable wealth, not the self-made; or hoarded by those who simply watch their inherited assets accrue vast interest, not those who create jobs or work like the rest of us.

Read more by Neil Mackay

The mere "wealthy" – the comfortable – aren’t in these categories. Anyone who makes a million from nothing but their own sweat deserves respect.

The mere wealthy – those on handsome six-figure salaries – pay their taxes, go to work, and often employ others. The super-rich – the billionaire class – are an entirely different matter altogether.

Even those of the billionaire class who run businesses, are most often job destroyers not creators. How many high street stores died so Jeff Bezos could shoot his phallic rockets into space? How many federal employees did Elon Musk make redundant while he shoots his own phallic rockets into space?

When hedge fund billionaires buy Scottish companies, the first act is often redundancies. It’s stream-lining for efficiencies, we’re told. Lies.

It’s sackings to increase the money going into billionaires’........

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