Poverty and inequality

Speculators starve the poor

Corn prices have gone up since 40% since July. The European wheat price has doubled since April, and the United Nations says that “global meat prices are already at the highest in 20 years”. The UN's overall food price index is up 15% over the last year, and the odds must be that further price rises will work their way through from the rise in price of animal feed. In Britain, these trends will squeeze living standards of the low-paid, and people losing their jobs. In large parts of the world, they mean desperate hunger, malnutrition, or even starvation, as happened during the previous world...

Time for a squeeze? Depends who you are

The PCS union estimates that the government loses £70 billion a year through (illegal) tax evasion and £25 billion a year through (legal-but-dodgy) tax avoidance. Is the "must-cut-the-deficit" Lib/Tory government as eager to squeeze there as it is in benefits and services? Not at all. Offshore tax dodgers are currently being offered what they call "the best amnesty ever". Revenue and Customs recently paid millions of pounds to get copies of computer disks stolen from Liechtenstein banks which showed what some super-rich were up to. Now the tax authorities say that people who own up to...

Who stole that £300 from you?

Benefit fraud? It adds up to much less than the money "saved" by people not getting benefits they are entitled, usually because of the difficulty of claiming them. It is also tiny compared to business fraud. According to a new report by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the typical organisation loses 5% of its annual revenue to fraud. More than $2.9 trillion is embezzled world-wide, each year - that's over $400 (nearly £300) for each child, woman, and man in the world. And most of it is embezzled by bosses. "Frauds committed by owners/executives were more than three times as costly...

Slump for some, boom for others

Do we have an economic recovery, or continuing slump? It depends who you are. The Financial Times (4 September) reports: "The lopsided economic recovery is... increasing iunequality inside [countries]. It seems like a happy combination for luxury goods companies – [their] shares have more than doubled since investors first scented recovery in March last year. Persistently high unemployment and public sector retrenchment – issues that affect ordinary people’s spending decisions – hardly matter right now to the typical buyers of luxury goods. What does matter is that corporate profits have...

23 out of 29 Cabinet members are millionaires

The Daily Mail (23 May) has revealed that 23 out of the 29 members of the coalition Cabinet are millionaires. Since the Mail's report relied mainly on valuations of the ministers' houses, it probably underestimates their wealth.

What makes you get richer? Starting off rich

Harsh times for us all, promises David Cameron. But, as ever, much less harsh for the heroes of capitalism - the "entrepreneurs" who, so the theory goes, must have luxury to keep them at the "risk-taking" which supposedly makes capitalism uniquely dynamic. The Financial Times (24 April) recently reported an interesting little bit of research. Entrepreneurs, so Simeon Djankov and others, are actually more averse to taking risks than other people (for example, boring old workers). Willingness to take risks does not define entrepreneurs. What does, so resarch suggests, is receiving large...

Inequality in Britain

About 50 per cent of the population identify as “working class”. Despite the term ‘working class’ vanishing completely from the official language of the Labour Party, the proportion claiming this now-unspoken identity has been fairly stable since the 1950s. To be working class is to be at one pole of a pair. The other pole is the capitalist class. There are many middling groups, but the two main poles are clear. Most of us sell our labour-power to capital (or try to), and receive in exchange a more-or-less “living wage”. At the other pole is a small group of bosses and elite officials who live...

Evening Standard: back to the Victorian era

The Evening Standard 's 'campaign against poverty' is a campaign for a return to the Victoria era. In its series of articles under the heading 'The Dispossessed', the paper notes that 40 percent of London children live in poverty and 20 percent in "severe poverty", while inequality continues to widen. The conclusion it draws is that public services will never cope and that more private philanthropy is needed. Simon Jenkins: "But another answer lies in an unfashionable quarter, in reverting to the voluntary and charitable sector from which London's welfare state emerged. We thought we could do...

New Labour, inequality and class

Published February 2010 “Harriet Harman puts class at heart of election battle,” shouted the Guardian front page on 20 January, while the 21 January Telegraph proclaimed “Harriet Harman reopens class war with speech on inequality”. What prompted all this? Harman had given a speech to the left-Blairite pressure group Compass, in which she said: “Since 1997, we have stopped the trend of rising inequality and have made good progress on tackling inequality and improving people’s lives through focussed Government intervention. But we inherited a vast legacy of inequality which dated back to a...

The Tories made society more unequal - and so have Blair and Brown

The richest 10% own 44% of all wealth in the UK. They own, of course, the great bulk of the shares and other financial assets in private hands; they also, less obviously, own the big majority of the wealth held in pension-fund assets. Quite a lot of people outside the top 10% may own a house. But the top 10% hold about 37% of real-estate wealth, too. Inequality of income has also been rising. Its big jump came in the 1980s, with the Thatcher Tory government. But since 1997 inequality has continued to rise, more slowly, and mostly driven by runaway rises for the very well-off. New figures from...

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