by Les May
LAST Friday a US doctor interviewed for the PBS (Channel 91) documentary ‘The Virus: What went wrong?’ said that 40 to 50% of American families were ‘just managing’. In the 1990s the British economist and journalist Will Hutton said ‘We live in a 30:30:40 society. Thirty percent of people have made it; thirty percent think they will make it and forty percent know they will never make it.’ Two weeks ago an Indian economist speaking on the AlJazeera programme ‘Inside Story’ (Channel 235) said that if less than 1000 of its most wealthy citizens were made to pay a 4% wealth tax, India could double its spending on health care.
In his August 7 2020 article for The Atlantic US journalist Kurt Andersen writes ‘In 2006 the annual revenues of Goldman Sachs were greater than the annual economic output of two-thirds of the countries on Earth—a treasure chest from which the firm was disbursing the equivalent of $69 million to its CEO and an average of $800,000 each to everybody else at the place… In 40 years, the share of wealth owned by our richest 1 percent has doubled, the collective net worth of the bottom half has dropped to almost zero, the median weekly pay for a full-time worker has increased by just 0.1 percent a year, only the incomes of the top 10 percent have grown in sync with the economy, and so on. Americans’ boats stopped rising together; most of our boats stopped rising at all. Economic inequality has reverted to the levels of a century ago and earlier, and so has economic insecurity, while economic immobility is almost certainly worse than it’s ever been.’
Full text at: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/
Examine it closely and Boris Johnson’s ‘Levelling Up’ agenda is just a re-run of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Trickle Down Economics’; invest in infrastructure to boost productivity in the North to London levels; the rich will get even richer and a bit of that wealth will trickle down. There will be no change in the relative levels of income; it will still be a world of zero hours contracts, food banks, two jobs and insecure tenancies for those at the bottom of the heap.
Who cares? Certainly not the young, or at least not the privileged young, that 30% who will ‘make it’ or the 30% who think they will. They are far too busy demanding the removal of statues, patronising those they see as ‘oppressed’ by demanding ‘safe spaces’ for them, and ‘no platforming’ speakers because they lack the ability or willingness to engage in rational debate with anyone they disagree with.
Speaking at the Oxford Union in 2017 Bernie Sanders said: 'There is an area which is not nearly so sexy as dealing with race, as dealing with gender, as dealing with homophobia and that is the economic struggle and in that struggle we are not only not making progress, we are losing ground'. As if to emphasise his point the applause came when he made reference to ‘gay’ marriage in the UK.
But as Sanders told his Oxford audience the economic issues ‘wrap around’ all the social issues. If you are on a zero hours contract, living in a lousy house for a rent which takes a third of your income, are always one pay packet away from being penniless, working but having to use a food bank, it’s not because you are black/white, male/female, gay/straight, cis/trans, it’s because the people who run the system want it that way. They and their even richer friends benefit from running the political system along neo-liberal lines. And you will find some of the beneficiaries in all the categories listed above. Which is why ‘racist’ Trump has his Black and Hispanic supporters, and ‘racist’ Boris has his Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel. Some of them are doing very nicely thank you!
If the young don’t care, what about ‘The Left’. How about Labour? You’ll remember in February three Labour leadership hopefuls declared themselves Zionists and one, Lisa Nandy, said if she became leader she would press for the IHRA definition of anti-semitism to be accepted by the Labour party. This is some of what the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has to say about that definition;
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is increasingly being adopted or considered by western governments, is worded in such a way as to be easily adopted or considered by western governments to intentionally equate legitimate criticisms of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights with antisemitism, as a means to suppress the former.
This conflation undermines both the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality and the global struggle against antisemitism. It also serves to shield Israel from being held accountable to universal standards of human rights and international law.
Same month, same cast; Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry all pledged support to the 12 demands of the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights. To which one senior Shadow Cabinet member representing a northern constituency is reported to have said ‘My constituents don’t give a flying fuck about transsexual issues’.
Text at: https://twitter.com/Labour_Trans/status/1226939313264394241
Their priorities seem to be different from mine, but I suppose being on £80k or so blunts the judgement when it comes to thinking about poverty. Increasingly ‘wealth creation’ for some is generating the makings of poverty for others. We see this especially in the privately rented housing market where a new ‘rentier’ class has emerged funded by rents which require a significant proportion of tenant income.
But ‘The Left’ isn’t just the Labour party and here we have yet another problem. There are those who like me think that our society is structured along economic lines, more wealth equals more privilege, and that our priority should be to tackle the vast inequalities between the richest and the poorest in our society. And there are those who want to view our society as structured along racial lines and insist that getting rid of what they define as racism is far more important than pursuit of a more economically equitable society.
Terms like ‘structural racism’ are dragooned into explanations for everything that is wrong with our society; they are sufficiently vague that they can be made to mean exactly what the speaker wants them to mean at the time.
Structural inequality is measurable; income ratios, wealth ratios, rates of direct tax, infant mortality, years without disability, differential morbidity and mortality, are all good measures. And if we can measure it, we can measure how successful we are at reducing it. Eliminating the inequalities of wealth in our world would do far more to help what some people like to see as ‘oppressed’ groups than any amount of rolling statues into the local dock or ‘calling out’ someone as a ‘racist’.
Postscript. I write this as someone who in Will Hutton’s terms has ‘made it’. That doesn’t mean I’m rich. It just means that I have always had a regular income, decent working conditions, a place to live I wasn’t going to be kicked out of at my landlord’s whim, a warm bed, four meals a day, a pension in my old age...
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