Thanks Tory scum: UK most unequal country in the West

[ttosca]

Huge gap between rich and poor in Britain is the same as Nigeria and worse than Ethiopia, UN report reveals

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Britain is now the most unequal country in the Western world, an authoritative new United Nations report reveals. The gap between rich and poor is as great as in Nigeria.

Detailed statistics in the Human Development Report published last week also demonstrate that inequality has grown sharply during Conservative rule and that the poor in Britain now have to live on much the same incomes as their equivalents in Hungary and Korea.

While growing inequality might once have been a cause for congratulation - Margaret Thatcher called on us to "glory" in it - the consensus among experts in such bodies as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the rich nations' club, and even the World Bank is now moving against.

Lady Thatcher, like Ronald Reagan, believed that if the rich got richer, everybody would benefit. Now many economists believe that inequality hinders growth. In an unpublished paper Michael Bruno, chief economist of the World Bank, says: "Reducing inequality not only benefits the poor immediately but will benefit all through higher growth."

The United Nations Development Programme, which published the Human Development Report, said last week: "The United Kingdom, unfortunately, has an exceptionally high degree of inequality."

The report shows that the poorest 40 per cent of Britons share a lower proportion of the national wealth - 14.6 per cent - than in any other Western country. This is only marginally better than in Russia, the only industrialised nation, east or west, to have a worse record. Measurements of the gap between rich and poor tell a similar story. The richest fifth of Britons enjoy, on average, incomes 10 times as high as the poorest fifth. Britain ties for the worst performance by this yardstick among Western nations with Australia. That country was run for more than a decade by a Labor government which has heavily influenced the policies of Tony Blair.

The gap in Britain and Australia is exactly the same as in Nigeria, much worse than in Jamaica, Ghana or the Ivory Coast and twice as bad as in Sri Lanka or Ethiopia.

The British poor are much better off in absolute terms than the poor in most Third World countries, but they are worse off than those in other Western nations. The poorest fifth of Britons have an average per capita income 32 per cent lower than their equivalents in the US and 44 per cent lower than in the Netherlands.

Comparison with earlier Human Development Reports shows that inequality is growing fast in Britain. The 1991 report ranks Britain around the middle of industrialised countries both for the share of national income that went to the poorest two fifths of the population (17.3 per cent) and for the gap between the richest and the poorest fifth (6.8 times).

Mr Bruno's paper identifies Britain as one of only a handful of countries where inequality is increasingly rapidly. The Human Development Report also highlighted the world's billionaires - observing that the 358 people with assets of more than $1bn were worth more than the combined annual income of 45 per cent of the world's people.

But last week's issue of Forbes Magazine showed that the figures were out of date. There are now 447 billionaires. According to calculations by an American think-tank, their combined wealth is now worth more than the annual incomes of at least half the world's population.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk-most-unequal-country-in-the-west-1329614.html

Comparisons with Nigeria are the very point of the opening post, hence it seems pretty relevant to me!

The best way to improve the lot of the poor is to encourage the creation of more jobs. The easiest way to do this is for the government to get out of the way and let capitalism do its thing. We need lower business taxes, lower payroll taxes, cheaper energy (fracking) and fewer regulations on businesses. Instead, what we get is an ever more meddlesome state, higher taxes, corporatism and a green movement that wants our industry to commit collective hari-kari.

"Labour are just the Tories in Red" How convenient for you.

Social mobility stalled when people were paid not to be socially mobile.

Tories ARE scum & they do suck corporate cock.

Labour, however, are almost as bad but in a different sense.

Tories are self-entitled dicks whereas labour are unrealistic, non-delivering humanists.

How charming. Labour created the situation we live in now and are responsible for much of the social immobility we're. You'd think anyone prone to being insulting would call that a bit scummy.

Mrjudgypants - you automatically lose by quoting Jeremy Clarkson.

The inequality is the cause of the poverty. The poverty is the cause of so much wealth. The two are linked.

"In 1975, an average American family needed 18 weeks of earnings to buy an average-priced car; by 1995 the cost of the new car consumed 28 weeks of income." The problem with uber-exploitation of workers is this.....< If workers are exploited for greater surplus value and have less income in relation to goods/services produced it leads to a situation where no one in their right mind would continue to invest in areas that create work. To do so is too risky because workers are too poor to spend and thus there is a greater risk of not seeing a return.

Over the last 30 years, wages have stagnated, unemployment has risen, personal and sovereign debt has risen, corporate taxation has fallen, wealth inequality has risen, welfare has been eroded and we have levels of wealth inequality not seen since the early 20th century.

As a result of the corporate elite attack on workers pay and conditions alongside outsourcing of labour, we now have a situation where those great surpluses are not being invested into areas that create employment. Instead money is used to make money and the workers are encouraged to take on higher levels of debt. The result of this is crippling levels of not just inequality but poverty.

Capitalism's crises never affect billionaires and Wall Street. In 2001, despite economic downturn, the number of millionaires still increased by 3%, since 2007 the worlds richest have seen their wealth increase whilst welfare is cut, governments debt rises and the poorest in society turn to food banks.

But Ho Hum, if you believe the mainstream politicos, economists and the neo-libbers then you probably believe in little green aliens as well.

Who controls our media? who makes huge party donations in lieu of policy and knighthoods? Which schools turn out these corrupt puppets we have round the table? I guess its only to be expected that only the least critical of minds would accept on sight what they are told without having any apprehension. To accept the lies is base ignorance. If your not ignorant Mr Pants then you must be one of these people who benefit from this system.

Mini, if anyone benefits then it is the state which takes more than half of the wealth my company generates through taxation in one form or another. I also manage to provide employment for my workers - three at the moment - but were I not paying as much tax I could probably expand my business and take on more people. If you honestly believe that equality means taking more from the wealth creators, rather than allowing people to stand on their own two feet and provide for themselves, then god help you.

I do not believe that "taking" wealth away from "wealth creators" and redistribution is the answer and I think you know that. The surplus comes from the fact that workers are not paid for the value they create. So if anyone is robbing anyone, the capitalist is robbing the workers. The answer is for people to be paid a greater share of the value created, ie less to management, CEOs and shareholders and more to workers. Really is that simple. Mr Ford knew a thing or two when he said that he wanted his workers to be able to afford to buy a car.

And working people are unable to stand on their own two feet on account of the fact that they are kneeling with a bowl hoping to catch crumbs! because this system that favours investment into large companies and multi-nationals seriously means little companies like yours will seldom do well. You are not in the big league and quite frankly deregulation, globalisation and tax avoidance combined with the imperialist monopoly tendency in capitalism means that small business face very uncertain futures. What you are arguing for will in no way benefit a small business.

FFS please don't claim Ford was a nice bloke. He was the arch capitalist who only paid his staff well because he'd proved that paying them more would reduce staff turnover and, ultimately, make him bigger profits. Make no mistake about it, if he could have raised profits by birching his workers and getting away with it, he probably would.

As for the value a worker creates, it is value that wouldn't exist without an entrepreneur to organise the extraction of value.

ahh, that would be why for thousands of years the human race sat on its bum and did nowt! all that was needed was a few entrepreneurs. Tell that to the many thousands of displaced people turned off their land to make way for capital investment, all the many thousands forced to relocate to shanty towns and pick over the rubbish, all the unemployed who lack the means to create their own subsistence now, all those unemployed that now are so disenfranchised they wait for work to fall in their lap because they lack the means to set themselves up in business. Even if they had the basic means to be self employed, most know that the odds are stacked in favour of big business and they can't compete on equal terms.

So Ford proved that better wages = good business. So there you have it, over exploitation and rising inequality is bad for business, bad for capitalism. Mr Pants, what are you arguing for? because it seems that even you agree that capitalists when left to their own devices could just as easily in an unregulated environment "take the birch" to their workers.

No. Ford proved that minimal turn over of trained staff is good for business.

Increasing the wage of an employee to the point where they can now afford to buy your product is no different from keeping their wages were they were and then giving your staff free produce. In itself that doesn't benefit your business at all.

Ford realised that he could bribe his more experienced employees to work harder through the motivator of money. Interestingly enough, in the modern world we don't do mass employment in the same way as Ford's did. We've replaced that mass labour with robotics and automation meaning there is no need to pay 'inflated' wages to your workforce as almost anyone can be trained to operate a machine - which, I think, neatly proves my point.

We used to live in Holland.
Surely England isn't that bad a place to live. Not even for poor people.

But when you're here you don't know how bad things can be in another country. You also don't know how good and how lucky you're to live here.

Nothing is perfect, but England is absolutely NOT a bad country to live in.

If anyone has any doubt about that. Move for about a year to Holland. Then let's have another chat about how terrible England is.

Sylvia

"We've replaced that mass labour with robotics and automation meaning there is no need to pay 'inflated' wages to your workforce as almost anyone can be trained to operate a machine - which, I think, neatly proves my point"

which simply leads us back to the falling rate of profit and less demand for labour which in turn creates, less investment into production to meet human need and higher unemployment.

Nice dismissive attitude to anyone who works with machines, there, judgey. Let's hope the next mechanic who fixes your car knows how much you respect their skills, huh?

FWIW, there is far less skill in, for example, managing other people's investments. Every time the experiment is done with picking stocks, the monkey/small child/sticking pin in at random comes out on top. So maybe we should sneer more at high finance, and less at people who do jobs that involve some skill?

"If the workers manage to sufficiently maintain their share of the total social product and resist the pressure to work longer and longer hours of surplus labour time, and/or the capitalists are unable to shorten the cycle of reproduction and realise their output from their investment in a shorter time, then the tendency of the rate of profit to fall eventuates"

But there is another way in which the profit rate is driven down and that is by the capitalist being able to shorten the cycle of production by use of fixed capital/machinery. Having recouped investment into technologies, the tendency towards devaluation kicks in because of competition. As one competitor upgrades machinery and uses less labour time they undercut the others, the others must follow suit until no one is able to undercut because the profit is now marginal. The only other thing to do is further exploit labour, ie lower wages/share of the total social product, this made possible because of the rising tide of surplus labour/unemployed.

This system you so love Mr Pants is deeply flawed and eventually more and more people will come to realise this.

Mini, demand is coming from the developing world. To maintain our preeminence / lifestyle, we need to compete with them. Our economy developed to where it is in more complacent times and now the game has changed, we need to adapt to survive. Perhaps, in a few hundred years time, capitalism will have done its thing and given everyone three square a day and a change of clothes and at that point we are all globally buggered but, your argument sounds very similar to that of the loom workers early in the industrial revolution who would smash machines to protect their jobs. Sure, it was tough on them but we couldn't have got where we are without moving beyond their parochial viewpoint. Technology creates new demands, from the computer you are reading this on to Mr. Ford's finest. I wouldn't bet too much money on similar developments being too far off. Sure, the system may be flawed but its a fuck side better than any alternatives that maybe on the table.

Edam, if you choose to conflate a mechanic with a machine operator, go ahead. I didn't.

I agree that some demand comes from the developing world and much of the world is under-developed but the term development in an economic sense only relates to capitalist penetration. But is much of the world under-developed or simply over exploited? We have developed at their expense.

The problem is that developed countries have few natural resources and because of state support of banking/corporations we have exploited the resources of poorer countries, preventing development because corporations gain from lax labour and environmental controls & trade restrictions that benefit corporations over countries, along with massive levels of debt servitude which gives us a further lever to impose privatisation on a scale that we haven't yet seen in the UK. What is quite interesting is that for much of our development from the 19th century onwards we saw an increase in the size of the state, introduction of welfare and education and introduction of regulations, which we often assume are there to benefit workers but could be argued actually have also benefited the development of capitalism. Because this benefits the development of capitalist social relations and we have meddled, the third world doesn't have this development of the state infrastructure that is needed to nurture economic development along capitalist lines, so instead we have exploited pre-capitalist modes of production(near slavery, and look into land enclosure) to enrich us.

I am reading this at the moment digamo.free.fr/brewer1990.pdf Brewers Marxist Theories of Imperialism (free book, bought mine before I found this Doh!) Its interesting even if you are not a marxist and I confess so far I haven't found much in here to agree with when it comes to predicting the course of future development.

I am inclined to think that we can not make up demand from much of the under-developed world because A)we have always needed to super exploit as mentioned above B) workers themselves (labour theory of value) can never purchase all they create C) Money is increasingly falling into fewer and fewer hands, this means that the wealthy can not keep pace with personal spending and create demand, D) As money is concentrated in fewer hands the capital absorption problem will become like a run away green house effect, the problem is still there but it will become more of a problem because individuals can only buy so many cars, so many boats, planes, pay private staff etc, this leaves the rest to to find suitable investments, this will be impossible. E) We can not have equalibrium under capitalism, we can develop and invest in much of the third world but they can never have the same living standards, or we can not hope to maintain ours whilst the third world is developed. F) whilst this catch up occurs they will have a difficult time not just with internal demand but with export because we can not generate demand now, heaven only knows how we will when most of us will be working for peanuts or unemployed. Because remember, we have NO natural resources/raw commodities to export and therefore we have no way of making up demand for what they would need to export. G) One of the reasons capital goes global (always has been) is because internal markets can not exist and self perpetuate.

You will always have vast inequalities across the globe and across classes, the system creates this and it relies upon it. We could accept that mature economies are in decline and that this decline will only effect working people, not the top 10%. But at some point whilst this global balancing act takes place you will have equilibria, then it fails.

Amicissimma, super post.

Mini, whilst I appreciate your reasoned reply, there are one or two points that you are ignoring that change the game somewhat. Firstly, you assert that wealth is disproportionately accumulating at the top. In truth, it is being distributed amongst the developing world (in places such as China) in ways and volumes unimaginable half a century ago. The increase in GDP per person in England between 1650 and 1950 - three hundred years of upwardly trending incomes brought about by industrialisation - has been matched in China in the years 1975 to 2005. Quite simply, growth that took us 300 years has been achieved by China in just 30.

Secondly, there is no global rule which says that a poor country today will still be poor a hundred years from now*. South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and even post 1945 Germany all show spectacular rags to riches stories with wealth that rivals (or even exceeds) our own. Meanwhile, China, India, Brazil and Russia are all on the right path and will have a wealth per capita that is comparable with our own within a few generations. Eventually, I believe, the penny will drop in places like Somalia and Afghanistan and they will get with the program too. When that happens, and there are eventually no more sources of cheap labour to be found, a) I, and everyone alive now, will be long dead and b) the process of globalisation will be complete.

Thirdly, your theory takes no account of the theory of Competitive Advantage.

Finally, I am simply not convinced that 'the few' earning massive multiples of 'the many' is such an evil thing. As I've said upthread, it is the absolute level of poverty, not the gap between rich and poor, that we need to worry about. As long as living standards for the vast majority continue to trend upwards which, not withstanding the current recession, I believe they will, it really doesn't matter how many superyachts, Ferraris or Breitlings the rich consume - at least they're keeping us plebs in employment!

*Or that a rich one will stay rich. Prior to the First World War, Argentina was one of the richest nations on the planet with personal wealth being around 90% that of a typical Americans. Today, that figure is nearer to 30%.

Thanks Tory scum: UK most unequal country in the West

Yes, and there are real down to earth socialists like Tony and Cherie just to prove the point.