UK Poverty Post

Recession? Unemployment? No benefits system? It’s just not fair…

Wealth inequality in the UK – the gap between the richest and the poorest – is larger than it has ever been before (PDF). It’s now 40% higher than it was in 1974. Now I admit that I wasn’t so engaged in social issues at the time (my little sister and my little brother arrived in the years before and after and I was quite busy learning to hug them) – but nonetheless, it’s easily within my lifetime and it’s a pretty shocking increase. What it means, in reality, is that the richest people in Britain are 7.2 times richer than the poorest. It means the UK is the third most unequal society out of the 22 richest countries in the world – only the USA and Portugal beat us.

Well, so what? you might say. After all, even the governing party are ‘intensely relaxed about people being filthy rich’. But according to a whole pile of evidence collected by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in a new book, The Spirit Level, inequality is the cause of most, if not all, of the social ills that the UK suffers from. Teenage pregnancy, obesity, bigger prison populations, more depression, unequal mortality rates for different social classes – all of these are indicators of unequal societies. All are better in more equal societies.

As the Equality Trust website, spurred by the book, explains, there are pretty much two ways to remedy inequality: redistribute through taxation and other economic structures, or ensure less inequality between incomes at source. Which to choose? What a dilemma.

But actually in the UK at the moment, the problem is more basic than that: it is how to get sufficient public support to take action on inequality. For so long this and previous governments have promoted the view that you can end poverty without talking about indecent, disproportionate wealth. While at the same time, consumer culture has driven and been driven by an ever more entrenched belief that we all have a basic right to consume and even overconsume – which of course means that we have a concomitant right and, by implication, duty to chase wealth.

The result is a society where those who have less will always be poor – in health, in expectation, and in aspiration. And where the rich will always look down on them. In a society like that, attitudes towards the poor will never change. And as we’ve argued before if attitudes don’t change, there is less and less chance of supportive anti-poverty policies that really do help people on low incomes get out of poverty.

The proposed Welfare Reform Bill (which gets its second reading on Tuesday late afternoon) is a case in point. Years of rhetoric about ’scroungers’ versus ‘hard working families’ has resulted in proposed benefits changes that will increase compulsion on lone parents, reduce Carers’ Allowance, introduce workfare-style requirements for jobseekers, and a number of other radical changes. And all this at a time when the economy is contracting, jobs are disappearing, and the number of unemployed people is increasing.

I’m reminded of the old saying ‘be careful what you ask for, you will surely get it’ – perhaps this is the payback for being intensely relaxed about excessive wealth. Perhaps now, we’ll really understand what a high price society has to pay for the selfishness that results from inequality.