The Sunday Times Rich List appeared just after the Archbishop of Canterbury called on Labour to scrap the Tory two-child benefit cap and Gordon Brown’s co-authored pamphlet on child poverty was published. The timings could be karma or coincidence. But they sure exposed the biggest and most divisive culture clash facing us today.
This celebration is, for some, validation of national greatness. In 2000, there were 26 billionaires in the UK, now there are more than 150. Our Prime Minister and his wife made £120m in 12 months. An aspirational couple deserve big praise. People grumbling about gross inequality and mass suffering are doing the country down. Those who don’t make it are unworthy, lazy, subhuman. As their numbers grow, the monied are projected as heroes, stars in an ever brighter and bigger firmament for us to look up to. Policies favouring this class are passed breezily through Parliament.
Defenders of this caste claim commoners don’t care or mind about Rishi Sunak and his fellow private jet travellers. The truth is they do mind, but have been rendered silent and fatalistic. Capitalists also jabber a lot about “trickle down effect”. I would refer them to the words of the American-Canadian economist, John Kenneth Galbraith: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.” There has been a lot of that recently. What to do if people won’t eat it?
The Archbishop and ex-PM Brown knew their messages would get through to the many in the middle classes who were dismayed and revolted by the revelations in the rich list. This isn’t class envy. It’s about social cohesion and social democracy. And justice.
The Department for Work and Pensions has released figures to show that the UK is experiencing the largest rise in absolute poverty in 30 years. The child poverty rate for 2022-23 rose by 300,000 to 3.6 million children. Food insecurity also rose from 7 per cent to 11 per cent of households, jumping from 4.7 million to 7.2 million.
Brown is evidently appalled, saying last week: “It’s the social crisis, I don’t think people have woken up to the scale of poverty that is affecting children….I did not think we’d be back to a time when I can visit homes where you’ve got bedrooms without beds, You’ve got people who can’t afford soap, shampoo, toothpaste – the very basics that for many people have become luxuries.”
In April, I bumped into a woman and her daughter whom I’d last seen in 2022 at a local church which provides food, haircuts and company to the needy. We chatted a bit and then she started to get upset and weepy. Her daughter had started her periods, “too early, too effing early. Can you help buy some towels? I’ll pay you back, promise”. I bought her enough for four months and will carry on doing so. Not because I am saintly, but because I’ve been there. I too started menstruating early. My father had vanished, as he often did. My mum worked, but with three kids money was tight. So, until I was 14, I used cloths made out of an old sheet and had to wash them out. They still smelt and I was horribly teased in school.
Period poverty, experienced by girls and women in the developing world, is now here too. So are rickets and scurvy, infectious Victorian diseases once eradicated. Sir Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity at University College London, attributed this surge to the cost of living crisis and the cuts to social services and public health over the last few decades, telling The Guardian: “The idea we are starting to suffer the same diseases that in Victorian times people on long ocean voyages suffered because of the shortage of citrus fruits is simply horrendous.” Still proud to be British?
Never forget this is planned poverty. It began with the neoliberal “saviours” of the Western world, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and later, Brown tried to use capitalism to do some social good. Families and children were lifted out of poverty.
But none of the do-good guys ever challenged the neoliberal orthodoxy, by then the established religion of the US and UK. There was no proper regulation of the financial markets, no fair tax system, no punishment for tax dodgers, only savage cutbacks in social welfare and other services.
Things only got worse for millions at the bottom of the pile. And wildly better for those above.
Keir Starmer and co seem cagey about the poorest, and keep their distance. Asked by Trevor Philips on Sky News about the Archbishop’s call to the Government and Labour to scrap the two-child cap, the shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, wriggled and obfuscated, showing once again that the Labour government in waiting offers little to the innocent victims of hyper-neoliberalism.
Maybe they will heed the Archbishop and Brown, find their lost principles and stand up for the nation’s wasted children and families. At present they’re saying nothing to give me hope. But I’ll leave that door a little open. For now.