Still think we're all in it together? The rich CONTINUE to get richer, despite the recession.

Despite the global recession, record unemployment and demands to cut public spending across the world Forbes has revealed that the wealth of the richest billionaires has continued to increase. The global financial crisis has still not stopped the rich from becoming even richer. This year, Bill Gates has been toppled from the number 1 richest by a Mexican Businessman Carlos Slim.

Slim now has a personal wealth estimated at $53 Billion – thats an increase from last year of $18 Billion. Slim’s personal wealth is even more disgusting when you consider that his home country of Mexico still faces widespread poverty – the average Mexican income is only $14,500 and 17% of the country lives below the poverty line. Slim makes his money through his telecom empire Telmex, which operates as a virtual monopoly controlling 90% of Mexico’s phone lines.

Despite his personal wealth increasing by $13 billion, the much more recognisable face of Bill Gates has been bumped into second place. Gates may have made his millions out of a genuine creative ability to redefine how people work with computers, but in order to keep the company he founded – Microsoft – dominant in the market they have had to form their own monopoly like Slim. Microsoft are increasingly threatened by superior and free open source operating systems for computers and have instituted technical measures that will allow them to keep their market share at the price of holding back progress in computer technology.

In at number 5 is Lakshmi Mittal, once the UK’s richest man. Mittal is a steel magnate whose personal wealth stands at $28.7 Billion. Mittal’s Kazakh mines have been condemned by the coalminers working in them, for their appalling safety record. More than 90 miners have died in his mines since 2004, and many of the miners condemn Mittals lax health and safety precautions as being even worse than during the Soviet era. Mittal has also done damage to the environment in the pursuit of naked profit – in 1998 Mittal bought a steel plant for only £1 in Cork, 3 years later not only had he made the workforce of 400 redundant but left the Irish taxpayer of a bill of €70m for the damage his plant had caused to Cork harbour.

The total number of billionaires on the list has increased from 793 to 1011, and their average net worth has increased to $3.5 billion, an increase of $500 million from last year. Interestingly the number of billionaires outside of the western world has rocketed – the number of Chinese Billionaires has doubled, and there are more Billionaires in Russia now than any European country.

Alongside Chinese Billionaires there has been an increase in the number of Indian Billionaires – showing that despite the massive poverty in India, there are a few who are able to live lives beyond the imagination of their workforce. In both China and Russia the dismantling of large parts of the planned economy and the welfare state has allowed a massive transfer of wealth to these Billionaires, which accounts for their ability to challenge the dominance of western Billionaires on the rich list.

The next time David Cameron, Nick Clegg, or Gordon Brown tell us about the necessity of sacrifice, about how were all in it together, or that it’s unreasonable for people to demand a defence of their jobs or living conditions remember this list. For the past 30 years Thatcherism and its equivalents in Europe and the US have made the rich richer than they could have possibly imagined in the 70′s, at the costs of the welfare state and the right to work. Now even in a global recession – the worst in 80 years – they are still getting richer, and expect us to pay for their mistakes.