The widening wealth gap between the poor and rich in the UK and other parts of the West is the result of an outdated economic system in which the affluent classes exploit the economy to their own advantage, an academic from London says.

“The existing system only serves the interests of a narrow elite and now when they have got their hands on the mechanics of power they use it to their advantage,” Rodney Shakespeare said in an interview with Press TV on Sunday.

The expert said there is a “nasty phenomenon” underlying the politics in UK, Europe and in the US where the masses do not enjoy the benefits of economic growth.

“When productive capacity has massively increased and is capable of producing sufficient for everybody, [but] what happens is rather the opposite,” he said.

“The capacity is underused and not developed and what capacity exists goes to the hands of rich and wealthy and rich get richer and poor get poorer, he added.

Shakespeare said a main reason for the current situation in the UK and many other Western countries is their outdated economics which maintains that there is nothing wrong with the existing system.

He said that the middle class and the poor are becoming increasingly fed up with the elite as they have no proper share of the wealth created in the country.

“The economic situation of most people now is not that of a secure middle class, but of an insecure no longer working class,” he said.

Many workers in modern Western economies have temporary jobs with low wages that cannot even satisfy their daily needs.

Shakespeare said old economic theories which maintained that the wealth would trickle down from the wealthy to the poorer are no longer tenable in the current economic situation.

“Wealth does down trickle down to the masses of the population because the really reach just cannot spend all their income let alone get rid of their capital,” he said.

“We have a ludicrous situation in which the rich get richer and richer and it is impossible for the rich to spend all their money.”