Poverty and inequality

Two sets of data released in the last week show the extent to which the distribution of wealth in Britain is highly unequal, and increasingly so. The first data come from the government’s Office of National Statistics wealth survey for 2010 to 2012. This shows that the richest 10% own 44% of all household health, and the bottom half own only 9%. The top five billionaires own the same wealth as the poorest 20% of the population. The ONS carefully spun the figures to suggest that although the figures show inequality, this inequality is getting no worse. This largely rests on most people’s wealth...

The National Union of Students (NUS) has expressed its concern at the rise of students using food banks. At the University of Hull, the number of students having to use the unistudent on’s food parcel service has doubled in the past 12 months to 200. Around half a dozen student unions have similar services. Other institutions, including Walsall College in the West Midlands, are having to look into initiatives designed to help their students cope with finding food. The increase in students using these services has been blamed on the rising cost of living, as well as the Student Loans Company...

Perhaps even two years ago I had never actually heard of such a thing as a “Food Bank”, and even then, despite growing financial difficulties, I would not have expected to need it. However, times change — albeit in a more or less predictable direction, in many cases — and I have since joined the percentage of the population that does need to use food banks. Three times now I have visited the People Before Profit Food Bank on New Cross Road, south east London. I signed up as a member with a minimal donation (£1) which I pay again each time I visit, with an occasional added contribution of spare...

On 24 April, Scott London, the former head of the southern California audit practice for KPMG, one of the world’s “Big Four” audit companies, was jailed for 14 months. He had pleaded guilty to leaking information to cronies so that they could profit in share trading. He got bribes in return, including packs of money wrapped in paper bags and handed to him in car-park rendezvous. The “Big Four” used to be the “Big Five”. The other giant audit company, Arthur Andersen, collapsed in 2002 after being found guilty of criminal charges about its auditing of the energy company Enron. Auditors are...

Chancellor George Osborne says "the economy" is recovering, and boasts that for the first time since 2010 average wage rises are running ahead of price rises. From February 2013 to February 2014, wages rose an average of 1.7%, and prices 1.6%. But if we strip out bonuses, wages are still falling behind prices. Some ordinary workers get bonuses, but most don't. 40% of all bonuses are paid in high finance, and mostly to a rich few. Even including bonuses, wages still lag behind prices if we calculate on the RPI index (including housing costs) and not the CPI. Workers are still being pushed down...

A recent Oxfam report reveals that just five of the UK’s richest families own as much wealth as the poorest 20% of the population — some 12.6 million people. In the last twenty years, the incomes of the top 0.1% have grown by around £24,000 a year. Over the same period of time, the bottom 90% have seen a real terms increase of only £147 a year — a tiny increase of £2.82 a week! This stagnation has taken place during a decade in which the cost of living has soared. “Since 2003 the majority of the British public (95%) have seen a 12% real terms drop in their disposable income after housing costs...

Economic recovery? Only for a few. Wages are still lagging behind inflation. The average annual increase in wages is still onIy 1.0%, while prices (even on the conservative CPI measure) are going up about 2% per year. Real wages (wage growth minus inflation) have been falling consistently since the end of 2009. It is certainly the longest squeeze since modern records began in 1964, and probably the longest since the 1870s. Average house prices have risen, relative to wages, from five years’ worth to ten years’ worth, since 1997. As the Daily Mirror pointed out (11 February), wages would now...

If you think that the economic crisis afflicts us like a curse from heaven, you should read Capital in the 21st century , the latest book by Thomas Piketty. This is a longer version of the article than in the printed paper. . Not for the answers it offers, which are tame. Piketty, who is very close to the Socialist Party [French equivalent of the Labour Party], and was the economic adviser of Ségolène Royal [SP presidential candidate in 2007], limits himself to wanting to regulate capitalism by way of a world-wide progressive tax on capital. This is a "useful utopia", he says, a way to...

The top ten per cent in Britain pocket over £300 billion a year. Just a ten per cent tax bite from that flow would be enough to offset all the cuts that the Government is making. Yet shadow chancellor’s Ed Balls’s minimal proposal to tax fewer of the rich, and more lightly — to raise the top income tax rate from 45% to 50% — has brought an outcry. Digby Jones, former chief of the bosses’ federation the CBI, and briefly a minister in the last Labour government, squealed that it meant “kicking” those who “create wealth and jobs”. Stock exchange boss Xavier Rolet said it would stop new enterprise...

Just 85 of the world’s richest people have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion people in the poorer half of the world’s population. Within Britain inequality is not quite as wide as that world-scale gap calculated by Oxfam. But inequality is huge even within Britain. It has been rising ever since the Thatcher days. And the Government is using the economic crisis as a lever to increase it further. Under pressure on the issue, chancellor George Osborne has recommended to the Low Pay Commission that the minimum wage be raised by a grand 69p per hour, from £6.31 to £7, from October 2014. (For over...