Poverty and inequality

From my childhood and mid-teens, 50 or 60 years ago, to today, people have become significantly richer in material consumer goods in the stronger capitalist economies, and, in fact, in some ways, in weaker capitalist economies too. When I was 13 or 14, in the mid 70s, TV came to Australia on a large scale. Initially colour TV in the Carnegie household consisted of plastic coloured wrap on a black and white TV. Eventually dad bowed to family pressure and bought a colour TV on the never-never, slang for hire purchase, with quite high interest rates. In 1963, a black-and-white TV had cost ten...

The Don’t Pay campaign is calling for a household energy bill paymens strike from 1 December, with the demand to reduce the energy price cap to the level before April 2021 (£1,042 for a “typical” household, as against £2,500 now). The campaign started in June 2022. At first it planned to get a million people signed up to payment-strike from 1 October. It dropped that when it didn’t get the numbers and after Liz Truss announced a £150-billion energy prices support scheme (via government subsidies to energy companies). It has revived the payment-strike plan now that the Tories have said that the...

Click here to download the power-point presentation from the 23 October 2022 Workers' Liberty Zoom forum on the aftermath of the Truss government.

Workers from Lewisham College joined the University and College Union (UCU) strike of 23 Further Education (FE) colleges on 6 and 7 October. Two further days next week and three the following week. Six other colleges are striking on other dates. The picket was lively, noisy and well supported by students and other supporters. The strikers rally heard speakers from Lewisham College, an RMT tube driver, UCU speakers from Lambeth College and Goldsmiths University and from UCU General Secretary, Jo Grady. Speakers pointed to the increased salaries of the college's principal and the leadership of...

Behold a gorgeous palace that amid Yon populous city rears its thousand towers And seems itself a city. Gloomy troops Of sentinels in stern and silent ranks Encompass it around; the dweller there Cannot be free and happy; hearest thou not The curses of the fatherless, the groans Of those who have no friend? He passes on - The King, the wearer of a gilded chain That binds his soul to abjectness, the fool Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave Even to the basest appetites - that man Heeds not the shriek of penury; he smiles At the deep curses which the destitute Mutter in secret, and a...

It is good that campaigns such as “Don’t Pay” are promoting the need to fight energy poverty, rising bills, stagnating wages; even if we critique their strategy for doing so. Martin Thomas in “Wage rises, price curbs: where to push” ( Solidarity 641 ) is right that the “most effective working-class response to price surges [is] to push for wage and benefit rises”. However, on one point he is (and I know he recognises this) off-beam. On the serious issue of energy poverty, he adds that we “push for the labour movement to campaign for public ownership and democratic planning of the energy...

On 13 August , the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), with the TUC, the National Education Union, and dozens of charities and campaigns concerned with poverty, called for the package of relief payments announced in May to be at least doubled. That was £1,200 for worse-off families, through a variety of payments. The JRF reckons that worse-off households face an average of £2,800 increased costs, so similar relief plus 130% would do what the May package promised. The JRF and others also call for deductions from benefits for debts to be eased or paused. As of November 2020 (the most recent...

A wage-price spiral would be better than the poverty spiral we face now. Prices are rising about 10%. If wages catch up by rising 10%, workers still lose out, but only temporarily, in the catch-up time. If prices rise 10% and wages rise three or four per cent, then workers are six or seven per cent worse off, and not just for a year. Even if price rises slow down in 2023, we have a worse starting-point for the whole future. But, the Tories reply, if workers win 10% rises, then companies will “have to” raise prices by even more than 10%. They don’t “have to” at all. If everything goes up 10%...

My mother’s mental arithmetic was second to none, and her management skills were astonishing, in the days before Excel spread sheets, her accounting skills were fine tuned to the penny on the back of brown envelopes. Despite having little time for hobbies, but perhaps with a secret desire to run away with the circus, she perfected plate spinning and juggling. She was, during the 1970s, a domestic poverty manager. The pay for this relentless work was exhaustion. The sort of exhaustion that comes from constantly putting a brave face on things, of traipsing from shop to shop to save pennies here...

The only speaker in the opening plenary of the Progressive Economics conference held at the University of Greenwich by the Progressive Economy Forum on 11 June was Professor Michael Marmot. Marmot is director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity and author of the famous “Marmot reviews” on health inequality . Measured in tone and heavy with statistics, Marmot’s speech was a powerful indictment of the Tories’ policies and urging of the case for a clear alternative. His work is a yardstick against which the lack of strong proposals and campaigns from the labour movement - and particularly the...