Social exclusion
Prepare for the worst: this inequality rift will tear our society apart | Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
The biggest rise in inequality since Thatcher is on its way, bringing economic instability, poverty, poor health, increased violence and fear among neighbours
Homelessness and child poverty have risen, the NHS is in dire financial straits, understaffed prisons have record suicide rates, the elderly lack social care – yet the rich continue to get richer, and continue to avoid taxes. This is an expression of abject moral bankruptcy.
But, if the Resolution Foundation’s forecast is right, this is just a prelude to the biggest rise in inequality since that seen under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. And with more inequality there will be a growing need for services of every kind – including more prisons and police. An increasing body of scientific evidence has shown that almost all of the problems related to lower social status get worse when inequality escalates. That goes for poor health and child wellbeing, for violence, school bullying and lower maths and literacy scores.
Women in the richest areas enjoy two decades more of healthy life than their poorer sisters. Welcome to unequal England
A third of the population will not reach 60 in good health, new figures reveal. And it’s income, not lifestyle, to blame
New statistics from the ONS have revealed that women in the most deprived areas of England can expect to have 19 fewer years of healthy life than those in the most advantaged areas. For men, the figure isn’t much better, with a gap of over 18 years. To put that into perspective, those born in the poorest parts of England can now expect to live the same, or fewer, healthy years as someone born in war-torn Liberia, Ethiopia or Rwanda. And a third of people in England won’t reach 60 in good health.
The temptation, as always, is to assume that those at the bottom eat poorly, do little exercise, drink a lot and take drugs. In short, it’s their fault. But 94% of people on low incomes don’t take drugs, and people in the richest fifth are actually twice as likely to drink heavily than those in the poorest fifth. Inconvenient as this may be to some, there isn’t some inherent character flaw that only afflicts the poor.
Margaret Thatcher made Britain a less, not more, desirable place to do business | Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
The ex-PM's greatest mistake was her failure to recognise that social cohesion is crucial to long-term economic growth
Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. The widening of income differences between rich and poor that took place during the 80s (particularly from 1985) is the most rapid ever recorded. The most widely used measure of income differences shows inequality increasing by more than a third during her period in office.
The proportion of children living in relative poverty more than doubled during the 80s, and the damage has never been undone. Many of the effects of inequality have long lag periods. As Danny Dorling says in his 2004 study of the rise in violence: "Those who perpetrated the social violence that was done to the lives of young men starting some 20 years ago [the mid-80s] are the prime suspects for most of the murders in Britain." The young men were those whose childhood was blighted by the effects of relative poverty and inequality on family life.
The poison of inequality was behind last summer's riots | Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
A year on from the riots, the government is still failing to identify their underlying causes
If you're trying to explain the riots that started a year ago, the safest strategy is not to put all your eggs in one basket but to come up with a long list of contributory factors. That is what the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel set up by the government did. It lists lack of community, family difficulties, low social mobility, poor relations between police and young people, consumerism – and of course the panel is right. But we need to think a bit further. We need to join up the dots and think about the causes of these causes.
None of these things crop up by chance, quite unrelated to one another. That's like thinking it's just bad luck that smokers are not only at greater risk of lung cancer, but also of cancers of the bladder, larynx, mouth and throat, and of respiratory diseases and cardiovascular diseases too. The truth is that just as tobacco is a physiological poison, Britain's high levels of inequality are a social poison that increases the risks of a wide range of social ills.
Peter Saunders's sleight of hand | Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
A Policy Exchange report's effort to debunk The Spirit Level reveals its prejudice by blaming African Americans for poverty
Despite its acceptance by leading Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour politicians, the evidence that great inequality is socially damaging was bound, sometime, to come under attack from the political far right. But the attacks in Peter Saunders's pamphlet, promoted by Policy Exchange's deputy director, Natalie Evans, fall wide of the mark. In The Spirit Level, we show that most of the problems that are more common further down the social ladder (poor health, violence, teenage births, mental illness, imprisonment, social mobility, etc) are anywhere from 2 to 10 times as common in more unequal societies.
Saunders tries to dismiss our evidence by variously excluding countries (the US, Japan, the Scandinavian countries) from our analyses. When we show the same relationships among the 50 American states, he says that it isn't inequality that matters, but proportion of the population in each state who are African American. But these entirely ad hoc attempts to pick holes in one or another analysis fail on three counts.
A broken society, yes. But broken by Thatcher | Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Cameron is right: society is broken. Labour have failed to fix it, but acute inequality is a Tory legacy
David Cameron is right to point to Britain's "broken society" as an election issue. In his Hugo Young lecture at the end of last year, the Conservative leader cited in support of his thesis our research that found, in his words, that "among the richest countries, it's the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator".
Among 21 developed market democracies, we found that Britain does worst on child wellbeing and badly on teenage births, imprisonment, drug abuse, trust, obesity, social mobility and mental illness. This week brought fresh confirmation of the pervasive and profound inequality in Britain in the form of a 460-page government-commissioned study – An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK – which described a nation in which the richest 10% are more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10%.