Poverty and inequality

For the best part of a decade disability rights activists have been battling the management of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to prevent the burying of information about deaths of benefit claimants.

Capitalist society generates and regenerates a class division between capitalists and workers (with at least one large intermediate class, the “petty bourgeoisie”, and many grey areas). Like many other societies, its course is shaped by class struggle. Victory by the working class in that class struggle will bring not a rearrangement, but the withering-away, of class divisions. Not complete and uniform equality of everyone in every respect (hard to imagine what that would even look like), but removal of the class exploitation, domination, and oppression that has blighted life under capitalism...

The FTSE 100 index of the share prices of top companies has just reached an all-time high, 16% up on October 2022. Those top companies paid out about £83 billion in dividends in 2022, and £50.3 bn in share buybacks. MoneyWeek expects "FTSE 100 ordinary dividend payments to keep setting new records in 2023". To get an idea of scale here, the journalist Philip Inman calculates that a 10.1% pay rise across the public sector would cost the government £8.5 billion (if we factor in the government recouping some of the rise through income tax and VAT on workers' spending). Supporters of capitalism...

Nadhim Zahawi, the Tory minister and ex-chancellor now disgraced for tax evasion, atypically did not go to Oxford University. He went to University College London instead. But his entry to high-level Tory politics was through the entourage of Jeffrey Archer, who did go to Oxford. A small group of Tory men (and a few women here) educated at Oxford and also often at Eton are the base of the current ruling elite in the UK: deeply undemocratic, unaccountable, elitist, corrupt, repulsive, and many of them quite stupid. Simon Kuper’s book Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK...

Nadim Zahawi, chair of the Tory party, last year Chancellor of the Exchequer, famously claimed public money to warm his stables. The same entrepreneurial spirit inspired him to try to avoid paying tax on £20 million he made selling shares — at a time when many, forced onto pre-payment meters, literally cannot afford to heat their homes in the freezing cold. Zahawi should resign, and corruption and tax avoidance should be rooted out. But the much bigger issue is the spiralling wealth of the rich per se. That spiralling, and the bad situation huge swathes of the population find ourselves in —...

The UN’s International Labour Organisation has described the level of benefits in the UK as a “policy of keeping [people] below the absolute poverty line... using social security as a means of economic compulsion to labour”. Universal Credit (UC) rose only 3.1% in April 2022. After a year of falling way behind inflation, in April 2023 it will rise by 10.1%, to £85 a week. For people under 25 and couples it’s even less. £85 is still lower than the rate before the Tories cut UC, in October 2021, from £95 to £75. The standard rate of UC is equivalent to about 16% of workers’ previous earnings. In...

Around 10% of people in richer capitalist countries are on antidepressants , though they usually do no better than placebo. Almost certainly the recent rise in young people with mental illness is a real rise, not just a result of there being less stigma about reporting. Previous modes of production where low technology meant that poverty in food and other basics was more generalised than today probably also had more mental distress. In French the word for poverty, misère , is directly connected to the word miserable ; in German, elend can mean either poor or miserable. In medieval Europe, the...

Over 90 years ago, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that the grandchildren of his readers would have to work only 15 hours a week to assure a good living standard for all. Now, even at a time of relatively low unemployment, millions are going short of basics like food and heating. Many thousands are homeless on the streets, and many more crammed into substandard or overcrowded accommodation. Poverty still blights lives. And in recent years the average working week, after decades of gradually getting shorter, has been getting longer again. Keynes was not wrong about labour productivity...

After 12 grisly years of “austerity” — cuts to living standards and public services to further enrich employers and the rich — and decades of rising inequality, the working class in the UK faces a dramatic new assault. One that poses a stark challenge to workers, the labour movement and every individual who wants a better society. The growing surge of workers’ struggles can defeat these attacks and start to turn things around — but only if we organise to take it much further . Under the Tories’ plan, people in this country will suffer the biggest fall in living standards on record: a 4.3% cut...

The regulator Ofgem, as reported by the BBC , says some 60,000 households had been switched to pre-payment remotely over the past three months. More than 152,000 households with smart meters were remotely switched to prepayment plans for gas or electricity in 2021, up from 95,000 in 2020. Citizens’ Advice predicts that 450,000 people could be forced onto a prepayment plan this winter, 180,000 of them via smart-meter. With smart meters, households can be switched to pre-payment from the energy retailer’s offices, with no need to send an engineer out. On paper retailers are obliged to consult...