Growing inequality
Is this a political issue? Should it be a public concern?Unequal Britain: richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest
A detailed and startling analysis of how unequal Britain has become offers a snapshot of an increasingly divided nation where the richest 10% of the population are more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10% of society...
The report, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK, scrutinises the degree to which the country has become more unequal over the past 30 years. Much of it will make uncomfortable reading for the Labour government, although the paper indicates that considerable responsibility lies with the Tories, who presided over the dramatic divisions of the 1980s and early 1990s...
It concludes that the government has failed to plug the gulf that existed between the poorest and richest in society in the 1980s...
Harriet Harman, minister for women and equality, said the issues raised meant the government needs to "sustain and step up" action introduced by government over the past 13 years, such as children's centres and tax credits. "It takes generations to make things more equal," she told Radio 4's Today programme.
Social mobility was "essential" for the economy, she said. "The government should take action to ensure everyone has a fair chance."
A central theme of the report is the profound, lifelong negative impact that being born poor, and into a disadvantaged social class, has on a child. These inequalities accumulate over the life cycle, the report concludes. Social class has a big impact on children's school readiness at the age of three, but continues to drag children back through school and beyond...
It echoes other recent research suggesting that social mobility has stagnated, and concludes that "people's occupational and economic destinations in early adulthood depend to an important degree on their origins". Achieving the "equality of opportunity" that all political parties aspire to is very hard when there are such wide differences between the resources that people have to help them fulfil their diverse potentials, the panel notes...
See also:
- Distribution of Family Income at the CIA World Factbook
- Human Development Reports from the UN
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Labels: cleavages, demographics, economics, politics, UK
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:11 AM
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