Rethinking tomorrow for the next generation
In many ways in the UK, we are currently at a peak of injustice and we have to choose which way to turn. We could take the US route and following the United States of America up an even higher peak, or we could turn in another direction.
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, or even become the president of the United States. 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.
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 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 programme 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 188 to 189 of ‘Seven Children’.
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