Britain under Gordon Brown is a more unequal country than at any time since modern records began in the early 1960s, after the incomes of the poor fell and those of the rich rose in the three years after the 2005 general election.
Deprivation and inequality in the UK rose for a third successive year in 2007-08, according to data from the Department for Work and Pensions that prompted strong criticism from campaign groups for the government's backsliding on its anti-poverty goals.
The detail is all in the article. I won’t repeat it here. I note two things. First, as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett note at the Equality Trust the following all get worse with increasing inequality in society:
Education outcomes
The cost of inequality is enormous. The human tragedy more so.
Second, this is a choice. As the IFS note in the Guardian article, it would cost £4 billion a year to eliminate child poverty in the UK. That could be raised by any one of:
- Abolishing the domicile rule
- Introducing country by country reporting for companies — and picking up the tax shown to be due
- Restricting tax allowances for those earning more than £100,000 a year
- Making the top rate of tax 50% over £100,000
- Eliminating all pension relief at higher rates
- Charging NIC on investment income of more than £5,000 a year, or £15,000 a year for pensioners
There are plenty of other options too. CGT at income tax rates, and more. But what this demonstrates is that this increase in poverty is a choice.
What Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett so clearly show in their work is that it is an incredibly poor choice. We are all worse off as a result. It’s not just the poor who have the worse outcomes noted: we all do.
There has never been a time when we have needed equality more — precisely because the excess of some is now so great. The failure to supply it will tear out society apart.
The message is simple: we need a bias to the poor. Now.
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What do we mean by having a ‘bias to the poor’? Part of the ‘social’ problem as it concerns poverty is that people have a natural tendency to put ‘self’ before ‘society’. Society then reflects the sum total of ‘self’ interest – the rich get richer leaving the rest in relative poverty.
What we need is a fundamental change in our personal attitudes to the things that we value the most, and when those values include a concern for those having less ‘fortune’ than ourselves the problem of poverty will have a better chance of being addressed. It is not the acquisition of wealth that is the root of evil, it is the selfish love of it & the strong desire to keep most of it to ourselves.
The biblical ‘sermon on the mount’ was an altruistic discourse on values – about getting our priorities right & realising what matters the most in life. It would not be a bad start if we used the tenets therein as the basis for reappraising the values that we hold.
But people in government also to be wedded to the values that are the most important, and right now in the UK that looks a tall order as we see ‘self’ in government enlarging its self interest at the taxpayer’s expense.
Richard — there is a problem with this line of argument in that it assumes that when poverty is spoken of it is assumed to be absolute. I would venture to say that poverty in the UK and the rest of the Western World is, in fact, subjective i.e. it is relative to some norm and is not absolute. Whilst it would certainly be true that absolute poverty could lead to the evils mentioned it is by no means clear that subjective poverty is, per se, necessarily going to cause them. We might be better off contemplating the work of people such as John Gray and Oliver James, who make a pretty convincing case that it is the requirements of the Anglo-American “Selfish Capitalism” economic system which are to blame (at least in great part). The English-speaking nations certainly seem to suffer from these difficulties much more than the “Unselfish Capitalism” of mainland Europe, although such economies give rise to problems of their own.
What is needed is a capitalist economy and a people who are not unduly materialistic and self-centred. It is only then that the problems of which you speak will be significantly alleviated. How likely such a spiritual transformation might be is an open question!
Simply attempting to remove all inequalities from a society is, in itself, an undertaking destined to failure – inequalities will always arise and exist. It is in a transformation of human motivations that true success will come.
“Part of the ’social’ problem as it concerns poverty is that people have a natural tendency to put ’self’ before ’society’. Society then reflects the sum total of ’self’ interest”
Jim – any society which is not based on the pursuit by individuals of their own enlightened self-interest is destined to fail. What is needed is for people to see that their own enlightened self interest requires them to have a care for others and cannot sensibly be restricted to their individual material wellbeing.
Jim and Clarke
Remarkable agreement with you both
Bias to the Poor was the title of a book by David Shepherd in 1983 after the Brixton riots based on liberation theology reflecting many of the ideals you mention
I agree with you bioth re the need for a revised version of our value system – it is a pre-condition of justice
Richard
@ Clarke Keig…. Hi!…I believe we are in effect saying the same thing! 😉