World news
How do we 'build back better' after coronavirus? Close the income gap | Richard Wilkinson
Almost all problems in British society get worse when class differences increase – addressing this inequality must be a post-pandemic priority
The establishment of a free NHS in 1948 came just two days late for my fifth birthday. By the time I’d reached my twenties it was widely assumed to have eliminated health inequalities: almost no one knew whether life expectancy was longer at the top or bottom of the social ladder. Even doctors mistakenly believed “executive stress” was the biggest risk for heart attacks.
As a research student in the 1970s, my attention was drawn to official data showing not only that most of the major causes of death were two to three times more common among unskilled manual workers and their families than among professionals, but also that the gap in death rates had widened since the 1930s. Such large class differences in death rates came as a shock. Full of righteous indignation, I wrote a newspaper article addressed to the secretary of state for health, David Ennals, urging him to set up an urgent inquiry to address these issues.
Why coronavirus might just create a more equal society in Britain | Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Since the 1980s, inequality has risen. But the pandemic has forced the government to put wellbeing before growth
For those who are cooped up in a flat at the moment with a baby and no garden, worrying about getting the government’s 80% income replacement after losing your job, the lockdown must be almost intolerable. Then there is the rise in people needing food banks and in cases of domestic violence – both predictable results of lockdown. For those working at home with a secure income and a garden, it is much easier.
Governments, careless of the contrasts between rich and poor, always want us to believe “we are all in this together”. In the wake of the 2007-8 financial crisis we didn’t buy it: we remained strongly aware of divided interests and circumstances. However, this time, despite the stark differences in people’s experience, there is a strong feeling that we really are in it together. As with other great challenges, most notably the second world war, the present crisis has given rise to more neighbourliness, sociability and a desire to take care of each other.
Post Truth by Matthew D’Ancona and Post-Truth by Evan Davis review – is this really a new era of politics?
Lying as the norm has been with us for a while. Is the idea of post-truth another example of liberals understanding people wrongly?
“In practice,” Evan Davis writes, “we evidently are quite happy to believe untruths.” Davis is stating what is, perhaps, the most indisputable fact regarding what has been trumpeted as the rise of a new kind of “post-truth” politics. Shrewdly, he describes the belief that we a living in a post-truth era as “an expression of frustration and anguish from a liberal class discombobulated by the political disruptions of 2016”. A catch-all term used by today’s liberals to describe upheavals that confounded their most basic beliefs, “post-truth” politics is like “populism” in implying that these unexpected shifts occurred because reason had been subverted. Duped by demagogues deploying new information technologies, voters disregarded argument and evidence in favour of manipulated emotion and fake news. The idea of truth was lost in a morass of relativism, and the politicians who controlled government for decades were abruptly dislodged from power.
It’s an appealingly simple tale, which many liberals are more than happy to believe. But if we have entered a post-truth era, when did this epoch begin? Matthew d’Ancona is highly specific as to the date: “2016 was the year that definitively launched the era of ‘Post-Truth’.” We have inhabited this new world for not much more than a year, but its dominant characteristic is all too clear. There has been “a crash in the value of truth, comparable to the collapse of a currency or a stock”. It’s not that politicians lie more than they did in the past. “Political lies, spin and falsehood are emphatically not the same as Post-Truth. What is new is not the mendacity of politicians but the public’s response to it. Lying is regarded as the norm, even in democracies.” But if there is such a thing as the post-truth era, it didn’t start last year with Brexit and Trump. It began with the Iraq war, which D’Ancona barely mentions. More than any other single event, it was this stupendous exercise in disinformation and denial that convinced the public that indifference to truth had become the norm in politics.
Say goodbye to capitalism: welcome to the Republic of Wellbeing
If governments and companies are serious about meeting the Sustainable Development Goals then they’ll need to ditch their bad habits
Imagine a country genuinely committed to pursuing the sustainable development goals (SDGs), set to be agreed on by the international community later this month. It would place emphasis on human and ecosystem wellbeing as the ultimate objective of progress. This country – let’s call it the Republic of Wellbeing – and its business sector would need to embark on a profound transformation to achieve durable, long-term change.
Around the world today, companies and governments do precisely the opposite: they put more emphasis on short-term economic dynamics, or what Hillary Clinton criticised as “quarterly capitalism”. If we are serious about meeting the SDGs then this cannot continue.
Climate change is killing us. We must use the law to fight it | Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
The ‘Claim the Sky’ campaign aims to save lives by protecting the atmosphere as a global asset, with governments taking legal action against those who pollute it
How many deaths does climate change have to cause before someone takes responsibility? Our current use of fossil fuels has “potentially catastrophic effects for human health and human survival”, according to a major new report released on Tuesday by medical journal the Lancet and University College London. And it’s not as if we still have time before climate change starts to bite.
As long ago as 2009, Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum estimated that there were already 300,000 deaths a year from additional heatwaves, floods, droughts and forest fires attributable to global warming – a total which would rise to 500,000 a year by 2030. The Madrid-based climate change watch group Dara and the Climate Vulnerable Forum put deaths at about 400,000 a year, increasing to 600,000 by 2030. And last year the World Health Organisation estimated that the number of deaths from just the additional burden of disease and heatwaves would be 250,000 a year between 2030 and 2050.
What scares the new atheists | John Gray
The vocal fervour of today’s missionary atheism conceals a panic that religion is not only refusing to decline – but in fact flourishing
In 1929, the Thinker’s Library, a series established by the Rationalist Press Association to advance secular thinking and counter the influence of religion in Britain, published an English translation of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s 1899 book The Riddle of the Universe. Celebrated as “the German Darwin”, Haeckel was one of the most influential public intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; The Riddle of the Universe sold half a million copies in Germany alone, and was translated into dozens of other languages. Hostile to Jewish and Christian traditions, Haeckel devised his own “religion of science” called Monism, which incorporated an anthropology that divided the human species into a hierarchy of racial groups. Though he died in 1919, before the Nazi Party had been founded, his ideas, and widespread influence in Germany, unquestionably helped to create an intellectual climate in which policies of racial slavery and genocide were able to claim a basis in science.
The Thinker’s Library also featured works by Julian Huxley, grandson of TH Huxley, the Victorian biologist who was known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his fierce defence of evolutionary theory. A proponent of “evolutionary humanism”, which he described as “religion without revelation”, Julian Huxley shared some of Haeckel’s views, including advocacy of eugenics. In 1931, Huxley wrote that there was “a certain amount of evidence that the negro is an earlier product of human evolution than the Mongolian or the European, and as such might be expected to have advanced less, both in body and mind”. Statements of this kind were then commonplace: there were many in the secular intelligentsia – including HG Wells, also a contributor to the Thinker’s Library – who looked forward to a time when “backward” peoples would be remade in a western mould or else vanish from the world.
The truth about evil | John Gray
Our leaders talk a great deal about vanquishing the forces of evil. But their rhetoric reveals a failure to accept that cruelty and conflict are basic human traits
When Barack Obama vows to destroy Isis’s “brand of evil” and David Cameron declares that Isis is an “evil organisation” that must be obliterated, they are echoing Tony Blair’s judgment of Saddam Hussein: “But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?” Blair made this observation in November 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq, when he invited six experts to Downing Street to brief him on the likely consequences of the war. The experts warned that Iraq was a complicated place, riven by deep communal enmities, which Saddam had dominated for over 35 years. Destroying the regime would leave a vacuum; the country could be shaken by Sunni rebellion and might well descend into civil war. These dangers left the prime minster unmoved. What mattered was Saddam’s moral iniquity. The divided society over which he ruled was irrelevant. Get rid of the tyrant and his regime, and the forces of good would prevail.
If Saddam was uniquely evil 12 years ago, we have it on the authority of our leaders that Isis is uniquely evil today. Until it swept into Iraq a few months ago, the jihadist group was just one of several that had benefited from the campaign being waged by western governments and their authoritarian allies in the Gulf in support of the Syrian opposition’s struggle to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Since then Isis has been denounced continuously and with increasing intensity; but there has been no change in the ruthless ferocity of the group, which has always practised what a radical Islamist theorist writing under the name Abu Bakr Naji described in an internet handbook in 2006 as “the management of savagery”.
Isis: an apocalyptic cult carving a place in the modern world | John Gray
History has witnessed millenarian violence before. But Islamic State’s modern barbarism is a daunting new threat
The rapid advance of Islamic State (Isis) through Iraq has produced panic in the west – not all of it irrational. In part this comes from a dawning recognition of the scale of the disaster that western intervention has inflicted throughout the region. By dismantling Saddam’s regime the west broke the Iraqi state. There were no jihadist groups operating in Iraq before regime change. Now the country has been torn apart by one of them. The same is true in Libya, where the overthrow of Gaddafi has produced a complete collapse of government and an “Islamic Emirate” was recently declared in Benghazi. Grandiose schemes of regime change aiming to replace tyranny by democracy have created chaos, leaving zones of anarchy in which jihadist forces can thrive.
Western intervention played an important role in the rise of Isis. By backing the Syrian rebels against Assad – another secular despot – the west gave the group an impetus it would otherwise not have had. With jihadist forces including Isis being funded from Saudi and Qatari sources, there was never much chance of a “moderate opposition” taking over in the event of Assad’s defeat. A radical Islamist regime, another failed state or some mix of the two were – and remain – the likeliest upshot. As things stand, there is not much the west can do to disable Isis in any lasting way. No one can seriously believe that this now self-financing, media-savvy and militarily skilful organisation will be snuffed out by a bombing campaign. At the same time the prospect of being sucked into an unending ground war is deeply disturbing.
George Osborne should be grateful for the Robin Hood tax | Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson
The chancellor has failed to block a tax that could halve child poverty and check a bloated financial sector. Brussels is serving UK interests best
You might have thought George Osborne would be glad of European Union moves to introduce a financial transaction tax, saving him from having to grasp this nettle himself. Such a tax, often called a Robin Hood tax, would help to stabilise financial markets and reduce short-term speculation and the dangerous domination of the financial sector in Britain.
Instead, he instigated a legal challenge to block attempts by 11 countries to develop such a tax. Now that Europe's highest court has rejected this challenge, we should heave a sigh of relief, but instead we see predictable hand-wringing over the UK's loss of power. Ukip's Nigel Farage claims the decision shows that the government is impotent in protecting the country's biggest industry from the EU. The reality is that it is Brussels, not our own government, which in this instance is acting in the best interests of the British population.
The Spirit Level authors: why society is more unequal than ever | Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Five years after The Spirit Level, authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that research backs up their views on the iniquity of inequality
A lot has happened in the five years since we published our book, The Spirit Level. New Labour were still perhaps too relaxed about people becoming "filthy rich". And there was an assumption that inequality mattered only if it increased poverty, and that for most people "real" poverty was a thing of the past.
But so much has changed. In the aftermath of the financial crash and the emergence of Occupy, there has been a resurgence of interest in inequality. Around 80% of Britons now think the income gap is too large, and the message has been taken up by world leaders.