Wealth & Money Quote by Ferdinand Mount

“In real terms” is a small phrase doing heavy political work. Mount isn’t just pointing to inequality; he’s pre-empting the usual rhetorical escape hatches. Not “in perception,” not “in relative terms,” not “if you adjust the graph this way.” He’s insisting on the lived math: what people can actually buy, how rents and childcare and food land on a household budget, how wealth compounds while wages stall. The line reads like someone tired of debates that treat inequality as a semantic disagreement rather than a material condition.

The subtext is equally pointed: disparity isn’t an abstraction; it’s a social engineering project with beneficiaries. “The very rich” and “the very poor” are not neutral demographic categories here but endpoints of a system that sorts, rewards, and abandons. By choosing “earnings” rather than “wealth,” Mount narrows the frame to what a society claims is fair: pay for work. That makes the disparity feel less like an accident of inheritance and more like a moral failure in the distribution of economic value.

Context matters because Mount, a British writer associated with serious policy-adjacent commentary, is speaking into late-20th and early-21st century Britain’s long argument about Thatcherism’s legacy, New Labour’s triangulation, and the normalization of top-end pay. The sentence is deliberately plain, almost bureaucratic, because plainness sells credibility. It’s a calm line with a hot implication: if the gap is widening “in real terms,” then the country’s story about merit and mobility is getting less believable by the year.