Peak Injustice and Seven Children

By 2023 the latest statistics, looked at in the round, began to suggest that it was not fanciful to believe that we had seen income inequality peak in 2018 and wealth inequality peak shortly afterwards. In early 2024 The Times reported that: ‘Some major UK employers spend tens of millions on two or three executives alone. This inevitably means there is less available for their lower-earning colleagues.’ This gross economic inequality was not just as measured between individuals but included income and wealth inequality between areas becoming extreme. How we treat others, what we tolerate and ignore, is at the core of injustice.

So why write a book on peak injustice now? The title comes from a Guardian article published in 2017, ‘We’ve hit peak injustice’, in which Hugh Muir explained that:

‘Revelations about the wealthy buying citizenships confirm a sorry truth: the migration door, closed to the poor, swings open to those with vast fortunes… In our regression from liberal aspiration to the brutal realities of Trump and Brexit, one of the nirvanas set aside has been the notion of a world without borders. ‘America first,’ says the president. ‘Britain first and always,’ chant the Brexiters. The majority demand is for migration curbs in principle, even if they are unlikely to be achieved in practice. The global village will be refashioned with barbed-wire fencing. And yet in this, as in most things, money talks.’

The Labour Party had become just as divided as the Tories by 2023 and into 2024. Although they presented a more unified public face, they had become run by zealotry, paranoia, and a command-and-control style that backfired and looked weak. Even when this ensured an election victory on 4 July 2024, what was actually won?

Voters in the 2023 Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election explained to the BBC that the Labour Party ‘don’t offer anything new, exciting or different’. Labour Party members felt that they ‘were just fodder’ for a central party machine not interested in them.

Looking back over the past half-century, we could choose any one of a number of examples of people saying extreme things and claim each as evidence that a peak of injustice had been reached. It would not have been. Attacks have been made on political parties for selling out their principles in every decade of the past 50 years.

No matter how much of a betrayal or provocation the latest government announcement may appear to be, why should we take any such claims today with anything other than a pinch of salt? Even as the articles and books began to be printed thick and fast suggesting that we really had got it all wrong by not fixing the roofs of our school and hospital buildings before they began to crumble, and the insulation and heating in our homes before the mould spread, let alone our broken society before it fractured, it began to become clear that we were no longer easily shocked.

When the new government was formed in July 2024 few people had great expectations, despite the opportunities there were. Taxes in the UK now amount to 37 per cent of national income: ‘the highest level seen in the UK since the 1940s’. Yet that is less than almost any other country in Europe secures – apart from Ireland and Switzerland, where the tax take looks low because so much money today passes very lightly taxed through those economies. The UK can no longer even excel at financial chicanery.

Meanwhile, despite these higher UK taxes, the roofs on a growing number of our school buildings were threatening to literally fall down on the heads of children, because the austerity government had not fixed them while the sun was shining, despite spending more on ‘defence’ than it had done for many decades and then promising in 2024 to increase such spending further. One right-wing Labour politician, talking about the war in Ukraine, tried to suggest that all these arms exports and military posturing were about ‘desiring goodness for all mankind’.

You might believe that there is no way we could have reached the peak of injustice when we were selling more of our weapons abroad, and as the chances of those weapons being used rose, as hunger increased at home, as more and more schools were shutting because they were unsafe, as once again more and more people were sleeping rough, and then, with an accelerating boost from the cost-of-living crisis, as the black mould spreading in increasing numbers of unheated homes made more people ill, sometimes fatally. Thus, when all this was occurring, and inflation remained high, we could clearly see that our situation could still get worse.

Things will cost still more next year (inflation is unlikely to become negative). So, you might well ask, how can we be at a peak of injustice now? My answer is that we have been at such peaks before. Reducing injustice does not mean that all suddenly becomes fine. It means that more victories are being won than defeats are occurring. But life can, and usually does, feel worse when you begin to come down from the peak of inequality, as it did in the UK in both the 1920s and the 1930s. Globally, there are also more victories now than defeats.

Extreme poverty is falling across most of the globe; but we do not know if we are at a peak of injustice worldwide. As Oxfam explained at the start of 2024 in regard to the global situation: ‘Extreme poverty leapt up during COVID-19, and whilst it began to fall again, it is nowhere near its pre-crisis trend, and the impact of the global food and cost of living crisis is likely to have a further negative impact.’

Infant mortality is definitely falling worldwide, while access to education, better housing and better healthcare are – on average – all still rising. We cannot now claim that each passing year is worse than the one before, as we could do when the pandemic hit in 2020, and even more so in 2021. We could do so when the wealth of billionaires was skyrocketing; it is plateauing now. We could do so when tens of thousands were dying in natural disasters for want of basic infrastructure, warnings and concern. We can’t say that now.

The situation could worsen. Dystopian predictions abound. Wars begin, new genocides are committed. Despots get away scot-free. Corporations still rule the world. The planet is certainly warming and the weather is becoming more erratic. And yet most years are now better than the year before, for most of us in the world. Pandemics that kill many people are becoming less, not more, prevalent, despite our huge populations.

Democracy is not collapsing worldwide. Greater rights for women continue to be won, with more victories each year than defeats. The 2022 overruling of (Roe v Wade) abortion rights in the US impacted upon only two per cent of the world’s people, the women of the USA.

Today, the British government is led by a man who, in 2020, ‘was running late for an appointment with his tailor’ when he struck a cyclist. The cyclist, said by eyewitnesses to have been a food delivery rider for Deliveroo, had to be taken to hospital. The reporter suggested that the new Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, was performing a U-turn when he hit the cyclist, who had shouted at Starmer, ‘How did you not see me?’

Not seeing is the problem.

In 1913, at the age of 32, The Oxford academic R. H. Tawney explained that what thoughtful rich people call the problem of poverty, thoughtful poor people call with equal justice a problem of riches … those of us who spend time in considering ‘what we can do for the poor,’ would be better occupied in reflecting what the poor ought to do with us. And in the late 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. quoted the solution proposed by a US official, the assistant director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Hyman Bookbinder: ‘the poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate’.

Facebook’s (now Meta’s) US co-founder, Chris Hughes, gladly tells people he has just been lucky, not talented: he happened to share a room with a geek who came up with the idea of writing a computer program to mimic an American university tradition, the ‘college face-book’. Of course, it was not just luck. It was also inherited wealth that put the two of them at Harvard, an ultra-elite and expensive university.

Mark Zuckerberg and Hughes even attended the same private prep school, so it was not exactly the craziest of coincidences for these two young men, who had led the same life as teenagers, to end up in the same room on campus. However, rising above his privilege, Chris later in life, along with eighteen other American multi-millionaires and billionaires, has called for the USA to have a substantial wealth tax so that the ‘fortunate’ rather than the less fortunate are those who mostly pay for state spending. Among the signatories to his wealth tax proposal were not only those like Hughes who had had the privilege – or luck – to network as students with fellow future tech entrepreneurs, but also those who had inherited enormous family businesses, such as Abigail Disney. There could easily be many more such enlightened and extremely affluent people in the future.

What would it take for Britain, to shift even marginally (at first) from so much extreme competition to more cooperation and compassion? Compassion comes through understanding people, not numbers. But without the numbers we would know so much less.

It was through the crushing of compassion, the evisceration of empathy, that enough of our children’s grandparents were tricked into believing that there was no such thing as society. Their children suffered. Their grandchildren live parallel lives as a result, making them the most divided children in Europe, and the most divided British children for almost a century.
No child in the UK should have to go without necessities. Every child should at the very least be able to enjoy a single week of annual holiday (not only staying with family or friends).

What our society needs, and our children need, is for you and me (and enough of the new British government) to care for them now, to care enough, to give a damn, to see that their lives – each one of them – are perfectly ordinary. It is the place and time they have been born into that is extraordinary. As yet, the new Labour government has proposed to introduce few measures that will increase fairness and reduce inequality for the children of the UK.

The text above is an edited extract from pages 13 to 21

of ‘Peak Injustice’ and pages 188 to 189 of ‘Seven Children’.

Those two books contain the references for all quotes and other claims made above.

See: https://www.dannydorling.org/books/sevenchildren

And For a PDF of this article and where it was originally published click…..>   here.