The tenants cannot now ask for repairs, for a decent water-supply, or for the slightest boon in the way of improvement. They must put up with dirt, and filth, and putrefaction; with dripping walls and broken windows: with all the nameless cedents, were they known, would make a careful householder nervous about asking them into his hall if there were any coat and umbrella about. George R Sims, Legislation Wanted, Not Almsgiving
We walk along a narrow dirty passage, which would effectually have stopped the Claimant had he come to this neighbourhood in search of witnesses, and at the end we find ourselves in what we should call a back-yard, but which, in the language of the neighbourhood, is a square. The square is full of refuse; heaps of dust and decaying vegetable matter lie about here and there, under the windows and in front of the doors of the squalid tumble-down houses. The windows above and below are broken and patched; the roofs of these two-storied eligible residences look as though Lord Alcester had been having some preliminary practice with his guns here before he set sail for Alexandria. All these places are let out in single rooms at prices varying from 2s 6d to 4s a week. We can see a good deal of the inside through the cracks and crevices and broken panes, but if we knock at the door we shall get a view of the in-habitants. George R Sims, How the Poor Live, and Horrible London
Whilst we have been building our churches and solacing ourselves with our religion and dreaming that the millennium was coming, the poor have been growing poorer, the wretched more miserable, and the immoral more corrupt; the gulf has been daily widening which separates the lowest classes of the community from our churches and chapels, and from all decency and civilisation. W C Preston 1883, ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Conditions of the Abject Poor’ attributed
Rich and powerful people are always explaining how they wish to expand their wealth and power not for themselves but for everyone else. Their basic claim for the ‘free-market’ system which has made them rich is that it is the only known system which fits what is produced to what people want and need.
Yet the plainest fact of all about a world dominated by the free market system demonstrates exactly the opposite. From every corner of the world comes the suffocated howl of millions of people whose desperate needs and wants are being systematically ignored. Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism chapter 4
On the rare occasions when the rich are called to account, they accuse their accusers of jealousy. They claim two major justifications for their wealth. The first is that ability and enterprise has to be rewarded. The rich, they say, are rich because of their contribution to society, which is exceptional and therefore deserves to be rewarded exceptionally.
Most rich people, however, are rich through no ability of their own. A recent survey of wealth in Britain found that the greatest amount of wealth is still owned by people who have inherited it. In other words, they are rich because their fathers, grandfathers or ancestors, with a great spurt of initiative and enterprise, died; leaving all their wealth – which was almost certainly acquired by some form of privilege or plunder – to their children, grandchildren and so on for evermore.
A lot of very rich people have no recognisable ability – with inherited wealth you don’t need ability. Many are rich precisely because they have no sensitivity or intellectual depth: they can read a financial balance sheet while ignoring the human exploitation that the profit figures represent. Such a man, for instance, was Roy Thomson, who became boss of one of the world’s greatest paper and publishing chains. Howard Hughes was another from the same mould. He started life as a playboy and ended it as a lunatic. He designed a plane which crashed and made a film which no one went to see. Because of an ability to be at the right place at the right time, and to read a balance sheet, he became head of a vast financial and industrial empire, and was able to nominate the president of the United States.
The new millionaires who emerged in the 1980s, almost to a man, are people without any noticeable skill, intellect or ability. They are expert only at playing the stock market or sacking workers – the two activities most likely to make a fast million.
The second justification for vast riches has been used by the high and mighty throughout history. It is that the wealth of rich men rubs off on poor people too. This argument is also taken from the bible, which tells the story of a beggar who sat at the foot of the rich man’s table so that he could catch the crumbs which fell from it. The sophisticated argument of the rich man was that if there were no rich man, there would be no crumbs.
Slightly embarrassed by the ‘crumbs’ metaphor, the rich today have invented a new, just as disgusting, notion to justify their riches. They call it the ‘trickle down’ theory. The richer the rich, it is argued, the more will ‘trickle down’ to the poor. No one can explain exactly how this trickling down works – and the facts of the past ten years prove the opposite. While the rich have gorged themselves, as we have seen, the poor have got poorer. ibid.
The Four Horsemen – Famine, Disease, Ignorance and Death – have been riding roughshod over the world ever since. The World Bank estimated in 1988 that a billion people – one in five of the total world population – were living in ‘absolute poverty’ in conditions where the chief hope for any of them was survival beyond the age of five. The World Bank, as ever, underestimated the problem. A report on the decade of the 1980s from the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute put the figure at a higher 1.2 billion people, or 23.4 per cent of the world population. ibid.
The poor of the world are not found only in the non-developing countries, the poorer countries. There are large numbers of them in the richer countries too. They too are increasing as the market system – the one which claims it matches production to people – gets more successful. By 1988, in the United States of America, the land of the free market, there were 32 million people (including one-fifth of all American children) living below what the government itself said was the poverty line. In the great free market boom of 1980 to 1984, the real incomes of the poorest 40 per cent of the population fell by 3 per cent. ibid.
Between 1981 and 1987, the US federal government showed its commitment to the free market by cutting its spending on housing from eight billion dollars to three billion. Housing for the poor, which had to be subsidised, was cut from 20,000 units a year in the 1970s to 5,000 a year in the 1980s.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pursued exactly the same free-market policies in Britain, with exactly the same results. Perhaps the most astonishing feature of the great decade of the free market in Britain was the increase in the numbers of poor and homeless people. At the start of the decade, 6.1 million people were living on or below the level at which they were entitled to supplementary benefit. By 1985, this had grown to 9.4 million, and has been growing ever since.
As in the United States, Margaret Thatcher’s interpretation of the free market is that only people who can afford expensive housing really want or need houses. Under her guidance, councils have been almost completely prevented from building subsidised houses to rent. For the first time since the 1880s the streets of central London are filled with hungry, homeless people, begging for money for a meal and preferring to risk the elements rather than spend their pittance on an insanitary and dangerous dosshouse.
This astonishing increase in the starving millions, with all the indescribable wretchedness and hopelessness which goes with it, is the chief achievement of the free market in its Great Decade. Its supporters, led by the American president and the British prime minister, have from time to time harked back to that famous dictum of Christ: ‘the poor ye have always with you’. Jesus Christ, who, if he existed, was certainly poor, seemed to be saying that since there was not enough to go round, some people were bound to end up with next to nothing. Like so many of the remarks attributed to him, this one has been taken up by supporters of the free market everywhere to blame poverty on the poor themselves: on their own fecklessness and inability to ‘better themselves’. ibid.
The poor are set to labour – for what? Not the food for which they famish; not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels; not those comforts of civilisation without which civilised man is far more miserable than the meanest savage – no: for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of one hundredth part of society.
Employments are lucrative in inverse ratio to their usefulness. The jeweller, the toyman, the actor gains fame and wealth by the exercise of his useless and ridiculous art; whilst the cultivator of the earth, he without whom society must cease to exist, struggles through contempt and penury, and perishes by that famine which, but for his unceasing exertions, would annihilate the rest of mankind. Percy Bysshe Shelley, notes to Queen Mab
They [poor] have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault, Le Lys Rouge, 1894
It’s no disgrace t’be poor, but it might as well be. Frank McKinney Hubbard
We have been miserably deficient in the instruction of the poor, perhaps the only means of really raising their condition. Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population. ‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, and fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’ ‘You speak of –’ said Egremont, hesitatingly, ‘THE RICH AND THE POOR.’ Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil
I was told that the Privileged and the People formed Two Nations. ibid.
‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
‘It’s so dreadful to be poor!’ sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.
‘I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all,’ added little Amy, with an injured sniff.
‘We’ve got Father and Mother and each other,’ said Beth contentedly from her corner.
The four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words,, but darkened again as Jo said sadly, ‘We haven’t got Father, and shall not have him for a long time.’ Louisa M Alcott, Little Women Chapter 1: Playing Pilgrims p1