It is a false chocie to between blaming the riots on inequality or moral irresponsbility - in a fragmented society, the two fuel each other
Following the riots, the various sides dig in behind the traditional battle lines of explanation, with one side blaming a breakdown of morality and the other pointing to income inequality. However, evidence suggests that these factors are not alternative explanations: they reinforce each other.
Turning to morality first. David Cameron has blamed “Criminality, pure and simple”, On this morning’s Today programme Nick Clegg referred to a “smash and grab” and “get what you can” culture and the Spectator’s Melissa Kite referred to an “acquisitive” morality of “greed”.
It doesn’t take too much thinking to identify some role models of ‘get what you can’ morality. They include those in the financial services industry who have been seen to collect huge salaries, bonuses and pension payments while others suffered from the recession they helped cause.
They include benefit cheats who enable the demonisation of genuine claimants. They include executives whose multi-million pound performance payments appear entirely unrelated to performance and whose companies expect the taxpayer to subsidise their underpaid staff through state benefits.
They include loan sharks who prosper from others’ misery. They include MPs committing fraud in the expenses scandal. They include well-known companies doing all they can to avoid paying tax.
With the exception of some MPs and benefit cheats, most of these have not been seen to be punished for their sins.
To turn to inequality, we should first recognise that inequality is not the same as poverty. Although worrying numbers do live in poverty, inequality causes damage to society as a whole, not just those in poverty: inequality pulls the strata of society so far from each other that society begins to break apart.
Inequality causes social exclusion, not only because some cannot afford to participate in ‘normal’ society but because there is also social exclusion at the top: the former head of the CBI has said that executives “risk being treated as aliens” because “their pay is so out of step”.
Research suggests that there is a causal relationship between levels of inequality (not levels of poverty) and levels of violence (as measured in homicides).
Further research shows that levels of community trust and cohesion are lower where inequality is higher. This suggests that smash and grab morality, which neither respects nor recognises community obligation, is more common in a more unequal society.
But what can be done, if individual immorality and social inequality reinforce each other? I have three recommendations:
1) We all need to recognise is that “inequality is not inevitable, concerted policy efforts can be used to decrease it as Equality Trust research has found.
2) Policies to reduce undeserved top incomes: the review of Fair Pay currently being considered by the Government, and Vince Cabl’s’ reviews of executive pay, could be a good start.
Coupled with policies to raise undeservedly low incomes, such as promoting Living Wages (advocated by Ed Miliband and others) would help.
3) Policy makers and commentators need to recognise that we are all in this together – that smash and grab morality cannot be tolerated, at any level of society.
33 Responses to “The fragmented society: How irresponsibility and inequality feed off each other”
Tim Worstall
“To turn to inequality, we should first recognise that inequality is not the same as poverty. Although worrying numbers do live in poverty,”
If inequality and poverty are different things then why does your reference to poverty lead to a discussion of inequality?
If we’re going to look at incomes as a percentage of median then that is by dfefinition a measure of inequality, not the poverty which you don’t point us to.
Mike Thomas
Leon,
Don’t be such a soppy lad. This was violent theft and disorder for no good reason other than to take what they wanted and sod everyone else.
A cause? Many fold and many of them can be laid squarely at the door of the last government.
a) For allowing unconstrained immigration to price indigenous people out of unskilled work.
b) For creating the entitlements system without any form of social contract
c) For a total lack of moral compass by knighting dodgy bankers and then bailing them out.
d) For an ‘all win prizes’ education system that did not place discipline, rigour and achievement as its core ethos.
e) For skewing a benefit systems that did not reward families for staying together.
f) For creating a compartmentalised society fragmented on cultural and ethic grounds with no common theme of belonging nor association with a core set of values.
g) For creating a boom and bust economy that put 1.25m out of work.
h) For creating a family courts system that castigates fathers and denegrates fatherhood
i) For creating a legal system with rights, but forgetting the need to enforce responsibilities.
Please, take your pick. I’ll also let you have all of the above.
Michael Reiser
The fragmented society: How irresponsibility and inequality feed off each o: http://bit.ly/oNfjzU : writes @One_Society 's Duncan Exley
John Green
It is nonsense to suggest that inequality is not inevitable. We are all unique individuals with different strengths and weaknesses. We cannot all excel at everything. Some of us are faster, stronger, more energetic, more motivated, more intelligent than others.
A large number of the scum living in the more deprived areas of our cities have been raised by useless parents and have chosen not to benefit from our educational system, thereby rendering themselves unemployable. These people will never have the opportunities available to educated, motivated and hard-working citizens. It was ever thus.
That dreadful little man Harold Wilson worried about the higher levels of attainment achieved by pupils at grammar schools compared with non-grammar schools pupils. His solution was to replace grammar schools with comprehensives in order to eradicate inequality by dragging all pupils down to the same level. The poor man did not realise that education itself produces inequalty. Some kids do well and some do badly, irrespective of the system.
Why have you repeatedly used bankers as the example for a smash and grab society? Why not footballers and show business personalities? Why not point your criticism at the true architects of our appalling economic situation: Brown, Blair, Balls, Miliband and the rest of the New Labour coalition. They created, fostered, encouraged and presided over the system that encouraged some bankers into casino banking.
Maureen Tinkler
The fragmented society: how irresponsibility and inequality feed off each other http://bit.ly/o9vV0N