Poverty and inequality

In the midst of the cost-of-living misery, the Sunday Times has released its “Rich List” for this year. Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murthy are on for the first time; their £730 million puts them 222nd. The total wealth of the thousand richest individuals or households listed is £711 billion, up 8% from last year. The combined wealth of the top 250 is more than that of the entire list five years ago. In 2019 the UK had 151 billionaries; in 2021 171; and now 177. The richest thousand are only a small minority of the capitalist class in the UK, and many other capitalists are doing well too...

A few days before Solidarity went to press, Tory MPs and the Tory press were declaring that critics of Boris Johnson over the “Partygate” scandals should shut up. “What a farcical waste of time and £460,000” shouted the front page of Daily Mail . Then on Monday 23 May new photos of Johnson, apparently showing him making a speech making a speech at a packed party, drink in hand, reopened the affair. Johnson and co. are a disgrace. But even the Partygate misdemeanours are a relatively minor part of that. They didn’t just ignore lockdown rules they insisted on for others, but oversaw policies...

After the 23 March Spring Statement from Rishi Sunak, the UK’s richest MP with personal wealth of over £200m, the government’s own Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts that average real household incomes will fall 2.2% over the next 12 months — “the biggest fall in living standards in any single financial year since ONS [Office of National Statistics] records began in 1956-7”. Meanwhile, the latest gross rate of return (profits) for private non-financial corporations was 10.8% (Q2-3, 2021), up on the rate in 2019 Q2-3. The FTSE share index, a measure of capitalists’ expectations of...

The Tories’ parliamentary majority is 73. But on 10 January a proposal to retain a cap on large elements of welfare spending passed with a majority of 252. 306 voted for the proposal and only 52 against. (This is different from the better known “benefit cap” limiting the total amount people can receive in benefits. However it is another aspect of the same Tory war on the welfare state.) In the midst of Boris Johnson’s crisis over flouting lockdown restrictions, this attack should be generating more outrage. In fact it seems to be largely passing under the radar. The reason for the government’s...

Corruption. Conservatives. And the other big c-word here, really, is contracting-out. Contracting-out of public functions has expanded hugely over decades, since the 1980s. It generates lush and repeated profit-chances for those who can make the introductions, drop words in the right ears, or just give inside knowledge on the right notes to strike in applications. The squall about sleaze set off by the affair of paid-lobbying MP Owen Paterson comes on the back of two great contracting-out scandals which, somehow, so far, the Tories had managed to navigate with little punishment. The PPE...

The British government is acting as if it has opted for extra jabs as its first line against the probable new Covid surge in winter. Those, rather than social improvements (ventilation, workers’ control of workplace safety, full isolation pay for all, boosting the NHS and reversing privatisation, improved housing, improved social care) or mild restrictions (mandatory mask-wearing and work-from-home, limits on indoor crowding). While the government has spent billions on extra vaccines, and test-trace contracts of dubious efficacy, it still stonewalls on proper isolation pay for workers in...

Over the longer term, several studies suggest that the biggest factor reducing Covid toll so far has been lower income inequality . In separate studies Annabel Tan and others , and Tim Liao and others have found that for US counties; Carlos Oronce and others and Youyang Gu , for US states; Frank Elgar and others , for countries (among 84 that they studied). There are obviously many other factors: vaccines, of course, and judicious lockdowns and quarantines which can usefully slow (but on all evidence, not end ) Covid spread. Hospitals get less swamped, and, in the meantime, more people get...

The Tory-dominated Education select committee released a report, The Forgotten: How white working class pupils have been let down , on 22 June. The main conclusion of the report should have been: poor students are disadvantaged at school and New Labour and Tory education “reforms” coupled with cuts, austerity and increasing inequality in the UK have made matters worse. Labour members of the committee commented, “The evidence we received clearly indicated that the main determining factors of poor educational outcomes were class and regional inequalities caused by more than a decade of austerity...

World prices for basic food commodities (grains, soyabeans, vegetable oils) were up 40% in May 2021 on their level in May 2020, and the trend is accelerating. The impact on food prices in shops is high at present in Nigeria and West Africa. It has been low in Britain, Europe, the USA, and China. Food prices are now moderating in India, after about 10% inflation in 2020. Shop food prices depend on processing costs as well as world basic-commodity prices, and those may filter through into shop prices only with delay. Still, the rise in the underlying index is comparable in size to the food...

The world’s richest man, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has increased his wealth from $130 billion to $186 billion during the pandemic. US billionaires in general have gained by about the same. Meanwhile poverty in the US has exploded. Thirty years ago US billionaires owned less wealth than the poorest half of US society. Today they own four times as much. It’s the same basic picture in the UK, and worldwide. The number of billionaires in the world has increased by a third in the last year. Those 2,700-odd people now control combined wealth of almost £10 trillion, up from £6 trillion a year ago. This...