Rich and poor: the gap widens

Submitted by Anon on 26 October, 2007 - 8:02 Author: Gerry Bates

“Britain remains a nation dominated by class division”, reported the Guardian on 20 October. The division is dramatised by David Cameron’s Tory front bench, which includes no fewer than 15 men schooled at Eton. The Lib Dem leadership contest is being fought out by two men schooled at Westminster, a school almost as posh as Eton.

Thirty-two per cent of current MPs went to fee-paying schools, which educate just 7% of the population. 43% went to one of the 13 poshest universities and over a quarter (27%) to Oxford or Cambridge.

The Tories are what they always have been. New Labour is becoming more like the Tories or the Lib-Dems; among Labour front-benchers, 25% went to fee-paying schools and 23% to Oxford or Cambridge university.

That’s Britain in 2007, not 1807 or 1907!

The problem is probably not so much unreasoning snobbery, as the underlying increase in inequality of wealth and income since Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government took office 38 years ago, and the huge cumulative advantages of the wealthy over the poor and those who are “just getting by”.

The inequality of income and wealth has increased further under New Labour, though not as fast as under the Tories.

The Gini coefficient measures inequality of income, calibrated so that it is 100 when one person gets all income and everyone else zero, and 0 when everyone gets exactly the same. The UK’s Gini is 35 (on the latest figures, 2003); was 33 in 1996, and around 25 in the 1970s.

Nearly 600,000 individuals in the top one per cent of the UK wealth league owned assets worth £355bn in 1996, the last full year of Conservative rule. By 2002 that had increased to £797bn.

The top one per cent increased their share of national wealth from 20% to 23% in the first six years of the Labour government.

The wealth of the poorest 50% of the population shrank from 10% in 1986 to 7% in 1996 and 5% in 2002.

As Solidarity showed in our last issue*, a push from inequality comes from world trends. But it is not just that. Many capitalist countries fully immersed in the world market are less unequal than Britain.

Government policies are not rigidly determined by “globalisation”; and New Labour’s policy choices have been choices guaranteed to keep inequality high.

A strong labour movement can reduce inequality, even within capitalist limits. Go figure: Sweden and Finland, with trade union movements bearing up relatively well under the stress of sharper global capitalist competition, have Ginis of 23 and 25; the USA, where the trade unions are punch-drunk, has a Gini of 46. The UK, at 35, stands midway.

To tame inequality, we need to rebuild the trade unions — at every level from detailed workplace organisation upwards — and restore proper independent political representation of the working class.

www.workersliberty.org/node/9333

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