When the Economist asks “Why aren’t the poor storming the barricades?” something has gone badly wrong.
When the Economist asks “Why aren’t the poor storming the barricades?” something has gone badly wrong
If 2014 is the year that wealth inequality finally came onto the radar, then 2015 must be the year that talk turns to action.
Politicians in the United States have taken to the issue far more brazenly than those here. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders along with the Mayor of New York and even the President himself made wealth inequality the centrepiece of their campaigns in 2014.
It’s time we in the UK caught up with our cousins across the pond.
Whilst there are those that have been crying out for attention to this issue since well before the financial crisis of 2008, it must be the publication of Piketty’s seminal work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century that finally brought the topic to the fore.
Wealth inequality is the single biggest issue of our time. And while it has been talked about a great deal, very little has actually been done. The importance of this cannot be overstated; those who once believed that working hard would inevitably lead to a better life increasingly feel they live in a system that favours only the wealthy.
If this hope continues to be eroded the disenfranchised, the disillusioned and the hopeless will feel that the social contract which has held society together since the 1950s has been broken. They will feel that revolt will be the only means by which to right a terrible wrong.
I am not the only one to fear this. Robert Reich, former secretary of labour during the Clinton administration, warned that the “the working class and the poor as we used to call it, will increasingly become vulnerable to demagogues who come along and take their frustration and anxiety and turn it into and divert it toward targets of animosity. We have seen this before in history. I don’t have to tell you”.
Reich, a long-term Cassandra on the issue of inequality, made this warning not after the financial crash but well before it, in 2005.
Nick Hanauer, billionaire and campaigner on wealth inequality, said: “And if wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks.”
It may be time his fellow plutocrats listened up before anger and anxiety boils over.
To accuse these critics of demagoguery and populism themselves is to dangerously miss the point and to shoot the messenger. Wealth inequality will only grow in 2015 as it has grown over the past 40 years.
If democracy is to continue to work in favour of the majority and not the privileged few, then extremely modest proposals like a wealth tax cannot be continually shot down as mad or unworkable. To say otherwise is to assume that the current situation is workable. It isn’t.
It is a travesty that anyone living in the fifth largest economy in the world is struggling to feed themselves. If you disagree, try listening to a 35-year-old man describing in detail how he cannot afford to eat. The number of homeless young people on the streets of London has doubled since 2010. The number of billionaires worldwide has doubled since the financial crisis. Let that sink in for a moment.
The old maxim about society being only three meals away from anarchy looms large.
When those great bastions of socialism, the IMF and the OECD, warn that not only has wealth inequality grown, but that it hampers growth and that redistributive policies may actually make society richer overall, it is time to listen up. When the Economist asks “Why aren’t the poor storming the barricades?” and Forbes ponders “Could America’s Wealth Gap Lead to a revolt?” something has gone badly wrong.
So, let’s make wealth inequality the issue of 2015. And let’s actually do something about it. It is not enough now to merely talk about it. Wealth inequality, whether in the UK, the United States or globally must be tackled via democratic, peaceful and prudent means. If not, the pitchforks are coming.
Zaheer Rayasat is an activist and social commentator
33 Responses to “2015 must be the year we address wealth inequality”
swat
Good God! This has been on the Agenda since 1789! It keeps cropping up every year, like a New Years Resolution, that always gets kicked into the long grass after after a couple of days, by one and all. The fact is the ‘poor’ will always be with us.
Was it H who said that when the Revolution comes .. ‘ we’ll all all have servants like these flipping aristos!’ Plus ca change!
‘Activists’ need ‘the poor’ otherwise they have no raison d’etre.
What they should be discussing is raising puniticve taxes on the filthy rich and re-distributing the proceeds to the rest of society, equitably, so that ‘the poor’ get a a bit; but they’ll still be poor. C’est la vie.
Keith M
Democracy is at a cross roads, it has already been seriously undermined by Tory and Labour governments kow towing to the bankers and multi nationals – time to take our country back. A wealth tax on the rich would be a start but what really needs tackling is tax avoidance by multi nationals. If they want to trade here then they must pay all taxes on what is earned here. 2015 should be the year in which we start to stop the rot.
littleoddsandpieces
The working poor are the ones losing from pension and welfare reform.
Pension reform just means the Coalition denying the state pension payout from 2013 for
7 years, whilst then denying these poorest amongst the 20 per cent lowest income and below ANY STATE PENSION FOR LIFE and LESS NOT MORE state pension for bulk of rest
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/state-pension-at-60-now
This money is denied the poor, overwhelmingly in work or disabled/chronic sick, 60 and over, equally liable to Bedroom Tax and the 1 million benefit sanctions causing starvation, even though the money is sitting pretty in the ring fenced and full National Insurance Fund since 2013 and wrongly called a surplus.
The working poor and poor pensioners are 97 per cent of benefits bill, but which is going less and less to the poor and more and more spent on benefits admin on less and less money going to the poor and more on admin, both DWP and private contracts.
The Greens have not put into The Greens’ 2015 general election manifesto, policies which are on The Greens’ policy website, so are not offering those permanent solutions not just to Inequality, but to the life threatening Austerity that has killed the poor and most vulnerable whenever this theory has been applied on nations.
The Greens on their website, deeply hidden, offered but not for their 2015 generale lection campaign:
– Replacing all the cruel benefits regime that is causing the massive rise, according to doctors, of malnutrition hospital admissions, and starvation by benefit sanctions to a heavily pregnant woman, young mother with new baby and someone 60 and disabled / chronic sick equally.
– With giving all citizens an automatic and universal Citizen Income, in or out of work just the same, not requiring anyone to be actively seeking work, and equally to those in work, to the level of the basic tax allowance.
– Full State Pension to all citizens, irregardless of National Insurance contribution / credit history, to the same amount as the Citizen Income or even bettered.
Both of the above are listed to have a supplement for those living alone and for those who are disabled.
Mebyon Kernow, a small party in Cornwall, solved inequality in the workplace at least in the public sector, by trying to get elected (without media help for small parties as is being done to the Greens) with their policy pledge to reduce management pay and so be able to afford a living wage for all their staff.
A living wage and capping rents would mean an end to Housing Benefit, that does not give money to those on benefit (most in work) but to wealthy landowners.
The Citizen Income would mean an end to the 750 Jobcentres and all the benefits admin work of the DWP, but more important no private welfare admin contracts costing billions.
With the Citizen Income being automatic, the admin would be minimal and probably within the tax office, where basic rate staff from the DWP could be redeployed.
The full state pension would save councils from pauper funerals that also impact the budgets of Police and HM Coroner, as well as the NHS in removing the departed to places of rest.
Because without benefit and without state pension, someone does not access to Winter Fuel Allowance.
So The Greens hold the key to Money Equality, that is more about the poor not dying from food and fuel poverty, if only they would have the moral courage to bring their new and unique policies of the Citizen Income and Full Citizen State Pension for the general election in May 2015, and start putting those policies up on billboards today.
Because if The Greens told the poorest people that the flat rate pension is more about NIL STATE PENSION FOR LIFE, and that only The Greens offer these people any hope against a starving penniless old age, then The Greens will gain the SY.RIZ.A moment, who are likely to win the Greece election at the end of January.
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/state-pension-at-60-now
ForeignRedTory
When you’ve got friends like this – Part 11
‘Further, why should the progressive side of politics be wanting the
Party to be “focused on maintaining government solvency” when, by
definition, the Australian government never faces insolvency. It issues
the currency, stupid!’
He repeats the point in http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=24850
1. Is the nation sovereign in its own currency and floats it on
international markets? If yes, we immediately know that the practice of
issuing public debt (post 1971 when the Bretton Woods system collapsed)
is an unnecessary (etc).
That works so well in Venezuela. Public debt has a political cost – in addition to the cost of interest-payments.
‘and, thus, voluntary arrangement that the currency-issuing government
pursues to satisfy various neo-liberal constituencies which have
dominated public policy and caused unemployment to remain persistently
high for decades.’
That is of course the political cost I am referring to.
Guest
No, there’s absolutely need need to have “the poor”. I support a Basic Income.