Poverty and inequality

Company directors' pay increased 5.3% in 2012: average pay rates are rising by just 1.2%, way below 2.8% price inflation. Chief executives' earnings rose by nearly 16 per cent, according to an annual salary survey by the Chartered Management Institute. The 25 highest paid hedge fund managers actually did less well in 2012, collecting "only" $14 billion (an average of $560 million each) in pay and paper profits, which was less than in 2011. However, they are supposed to be paid for choosing investments for wealthy people more adroitly than those plutocrats could do for themselves. However, the...

If we believed in a hell, we would have no doubt Margaret Thatcher would now be in it. Now we must send to hell, too, the politics which she represented. Labour leader Ed Miliband declared that: “We greatly respect her political achievements and her personal strength”. With a low-key comment that he “disagreed” a bit with Thatcher, he said that she had “moved the centre ground of British politics”. That, from a Labour leadership always keen to claim that it is occupying that same “centre ground”. In 2002 the Labour government — Labour, not Tory — repealed old rules banning monuments for living...

Solidarity spoke to Carl Packman, the author of Loan Sharks: The Rise and Rise of Payday Lending, about the growth of payday loan companies and how working-class people can fight them. The value of the payday loan market has increased massively over the past decade. In 2004, it was worth around £100 million. Now it’s worth between £2-4 billion. That increase has taken place at the same time as we’ve seen wages stagnate to 2003 levels, and massive unemployment and underemployment. High-street banks are increasingly risk-averse, meaning they’re less likely to give credit or overdraft accounts...

Average life expectancy in the UK is one of the lowest among comparably affluent countries in the world. Government fixes focus on life style. But that would be to ignore some of the complex underlying causes as well as political responsibility. Les Hearn reports. In 2008, the WHO reported that life expectancy not only varied widely between countries (a girl in Lesotho has a life expectancy 42 years less than one in Japan) but within countries also (children born eight miles apart in the Glasgow area have 28-year differences in life expectancy). These facts come from the report of the WHO’s...

According to Forbes magazine, there are now 1,426 billionaires on the planet with a total net worth of $5.4 trillion (around £3.5 trillion). What does £3.5 trillion mean? The entire UK budget deficit is less than 0.01% of that amount. A global tax of just a few percent on the wealth of the super rich could wipe out the alleged economic “need” for austerity policies across the globe. The world’s rich, and the governments that serve them, have used the economic crisis to screw down social costs. They have increased their wealth while the rest of us suffer. Workers’ Liberty exists to fight for a...

According to Labour leader Ed Miliband, speaking on 14 February: “Over the last three decades or so, less than 15 pence of every additional pound Britain has made has gone to an entire half of the population... 24 pence in every pound has gone to the top 1 per cent of earners”. Inequality soared under the Tories, continued to increase under Blair and Brown, and is zooming under the coalition. The policies Ed Miliband proposed in that speech would come nowhere near reversing that trend. “We would tax houses worth over £2 million... We would... reintroduce a lower 10 pence starting rate of tax...

Fiddling around with ring-fences isn't enough. To organise investment for social benefit; to redress inequality; to give any reforming government the means it needs to fend off the pressure of global financial markets - there is no alternative but to expropriate the banks and high finance. They should be converted into a public banking, mortgage, and pension service, under public ownership and democratic and workers' control. The last five or six years have indicted the banks. Even the conservative Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf admits, though without drawing full conclusions, that:...

Back in the 1930s, a certain breed of starry-eyed European leftist was eager to make the case that the USSR somehow represented “a new civilisation”. Proof of the superiority of Stalin’s economic policies, they insisted, was to be found in continued expansion, even at a time when western capitalism was deeply mired in depression. The techniques by which this was achieved could therefore felicitously be overlooked in polite Fabian circles. Fast forward to now and you find several writers ready to take a parallel stance in the case of China, and Loretta Napoleoni is a prime example. Maonomics...

Although the Belfast protests, and clashes with the police over limitations on the flying of the Union Flag have continued into the new year, they reveal an undercurrent of desperation amongst sections of Northern Ireland’s loyalist community. Although the protests over limitations on the flying of the Union Flag have continued into the new year, they reveal an undercurrent of rudderless desperation amongst Ulster loyalists. The flag protests, which began in early December with a decision by nationalists and the liberal Alliance Party on Belfast City Council to end the flying of the flag on...

Tory policy in government has been based on an age-old ruling-class mantra: take care of the rich, squeeze the poor. With a few concessions to the barely-alive social conscience of the Lib Dems, George Osborne’s recent Spending Review was no exception. He helped the rich by cutting corporation tax to 21% — a level lower than even big business claims is necessary to make the British economy “competitive”. He squeezed the poor by fixing annual benefit increases at 1% for the next three years. At two percentage points lower than the Retail Price Index this is a big cut. For the jobless, disabled...