24.9% of American children live in poverty, while the proportions in Germany, France and Italy are 8.6, 7.4 and 10.5%. And once born on the wrong side of the tracks, Americans are more likely to stay there than their counterparts in Europe. Those born to better-off families are more likely to stay better off. America is developing an aristocracy of the rich and a serfdom of the poor – the inevitable result of a twenty-year erosion of its social contract. Will Hutton
I always say that we don’t want to be rich. Our aim is not material wealth. It is to live with dignity. Of course to come out of poverty, and to come out of extreme poverty, above all. And to live, to live with dignity, this is the objective ... The issue of poverty affects us deeply. It’s most of our daily struggle. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, The War on Democracy
All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, show it to be evidently a great evil. You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune. Samuel Johnson
There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty. George Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem
You’re asking us for more money – us, the scum or rebels as you call us, who work hard for every penny. I want food in my stomach and clothes on my child’s back. Woman defying court summons to pay poll tax, cited Paul Foot ‘The Case for Socialism’, 1990
In his speech in the House of Commons debate on war with Iraq, Tony Blair allowed himself a rather rambling excursion into what he saw as the basic reasons for the conflict. Perhaps unwittingly slapping down those of his ministerial colleagues who had likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler, he accepted that comparisons with the 1930s were not very relevant. The real battle, he said, is not between relatively rich countries, as it was then. Instead, the battle now is between civilised democracies like Britain and the United States and rogue regimes that could get control of weapons of mass destruction.
This analysis conveniently avoids the real reason for the world crisis – the growing division between rich and poor, between those who have enough money so that they enjoy democracy and those who have hardly any money, food or water, and therefore can’t. Paul Foot, article ‘Born Unfree and Unequal’
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. Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism ch4
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.
When five or six million adult people in a population of some forty million adults are struggling on the very rim of existence, utterly without hope, the people with property get scared.
The greater their property, the more ill-gotten their gains, the more scared they become. They seek for their protection bodies of armed and powerful men who will keep the mob at bay. The more desperate the mob become, the more repressive is the power ranged against them. Paul Foot, Confessions & Repressions, 1988
In his speech in the House of Commons debate on war with Iraq, Tony Blair allowed himself a rather rambling excursion into what he saw as the basic reasons for the conflict. Perhaps unwittingly slapping down those of his ministerial colleagues who had likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler, he accepted that comparisons with the 1930s were not very relevant. The real battle, he said, is not between relatively rich countries, as it was then. Instead, the battle now is between civilised democracies like Britain and the United States and rogue regimes that could get control of weapons of mass destruction.
This analysis conveniently avoids the real reason for the world crisis – the growing division between rich and poor, between those who have enough money so that they enjoy democracy and those who have hardly any money, food or water, and therefore can’t. Paul Foot, Born Unfree and Unequal
There are great divisions but they’re now divisions of wealth ... Hundreds of thousands of people in this country, hundreds of thousands, live in complete slums that you can only find in dark continents ... in one room with rats. Melvyn Bragg, interview The Alan Titchmarsh Show February 2012
The Road to Wigan Pier was based on Orwell’s experiences of January and February 1936. And his observations of the realities of working class life and unemployment have entered the canon of human observation. Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture, BBC 2012