The hardback version of Injustice was widely reviewed in the UK because the publication of the book happened to coincide with the final few weeks of the 2010 General Election contest and because issues of fairness rose to the fore immediately after the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties formed their Coalition government. This was a coalition which included a large majority who appeared to prefer to see the injustices outlined in this book maintained; a majority who showed compassion for the ‘deserving’ poor, but who thought that group comprised a very small set of people.
Many New Labour MPs had seemed to care and showed respect for the poor in general. Few in that party could ever be imagined cheering on cuts as their Chancellor announced them (as did many Coalition MPs sitting behind their Chancellor). The election of the new government suddenly provided a clear set of examples of how the beliefs of many in power maintain injustice. For UK readers, this book, however, is about what was going wrong before it became so easy to work out on which side of the political battle line you should be (if you were not a millionaire or dependent in some way on their fortunes). This book should serve as a reminder that the UK was in a great mess before the Coalition came to power.
I have read several of the reviews of this book. Reviews are great to read: for how they tell you to write more clearly in future; for revealing when you are wrong; for explaining how some can misunderstand what you think is clear; and, in a few cases, for demonstrating how some people choose to misrepresent your work when they fundamentally disagree with you but do not want to say so (perhaps for fear of revealing their prejudices). Reviews are also very occasionally flattering to read because they describe the book you have written as being much better than it actually is.
I wish I could be more succinct and arrange my arguments better. In many cases I was modifying what I believed as I wrote the first draft of this book. I am constantly reconsidering what I believe. I also wish I could have written a shorter book. However, one reviewer kindly suggested that on the subject of rising selfishness I was:
… crystal clear in believing that this came about because the powerful were anxious about losing their privileges in a more equal society. Implicitly and explicitly, the powerful recognised that the elevation of the market to be the arbiter of good policy was likely to consolidate their hold on power. So instead of actions being for the public good, they had only to be for the market’s good. Over the next 50 years the huntsmen of the apocalypse regrouped, added a fifth steed, and came galloping into our society in the guise of elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed, and despair.1
I wish I could have been as clear as that about such things, and you (having just finished the text above) may think the same, but I still don’t credit the powerful with being so well organised. I have sat opposite enough witless ‘business leaders’ talking about how their increased wealth would trickle down (if only they were allowed to be more selfish) to have come to realise that many of these people came to believe this nonsense in the same way that hundreds of thousands came to believe that Elvis lives and millions have faith in the existence of alien life forms who frequently visit this planet.
I don’t want to upset anyone waiting for the second coming of Elvis, or for the mother-ship to descend, and I have to admit that I don’t have much evidence that you are wrong if you are hoping for these occurrences (just no evidence that you are right), but when it comes to ‘trickle-down Tories’ we now have decades of proof of the fallacy of the claims of the very affluent who say that by being so rich they somehow benefit others.
Many of the early reviews of Injustice described the book using terms such as ‘powerful and passionate’,2 expressing ‘righteous anger’,3 or even ‘… fuming with barely suppressed anger’.4 These comments are what most took me aback: there are things I am very angry about, but I didn’t think I had mentioned them much in this book. I had thought that the draft I wrote originally was quite bland. Furthermore, the very diligent copy editor deleted everything from that draft that sounded even slightly angry to me.
It sounds angry if you write about injustices and inequalities as they are. I am used to injustice: this is how we live, this is as it is, and of course there has to be a mechanism whereby unjust inequalities are maintained in affluent countries, otherwise our efforts to reduce them would have far more effect.
One day, when I am much older,5 I hope to write a book about what really upsets and angers me. This, honestly, is not that book. Injustices are wrong, but I have become acclimatised to these wrongs just like everyone else. In fact, they are the source of my livelihood, what I teach about, what I am paid to write about. I don’t think it is possible to write about something which is wrong without sounding at least a little angry – unless you do not have normal human emotions – but the injustices described in the pages above are simply the world view I gain from studying inequalities.
On the book’s overall approach, reviewers ranged between saying that the book was ‘unashamedly partisan … preaching (albeit convincingly) to the converted …’6 to saying that the work was ‘no ivory tower exhorter to revolution. … not allow[ing] us the comfort blanket of just blaming the rich, or some powerful world elite’.7 One reviewer’s ‘preaching’ is another’s ‘authoritative description’. One’s complaint that the text is too ‘strident’8 is compensated for by a reviewer of an opposing political persuasion saying the same text is too ‘downbeat’.9 These reviewers are not being inconsistent; they are simply as divided as the distinct readerships of the publications they write for are in their beliefs. Although we read to learn, we hold an arrow picture of how the world is, which we tend to dislike having upended. Instead we most enjoy having our prejudices confirmed. Let me confirm and enhance what will probably be a few of your prejudices (if they were not you would have probably not read this far).
So, what has happened in the year since the hardback version of the book was published to change what we might say about the persistence of inequalities and injustice? In many ways the worldwide story is still of the prevalence of William Beveridge’s five social evils of ignorance, want, idleness, squalor and disease; as most people in the world do not live in affluent countries.
Worldwide, ignorance continued to fall as access to the internet spread and more children learnt to read than could read last year. In contrast, want rose in many places as food prices spiked again to their highest ever levels, and absolute misery threatened billions by the start of 2011.10
Increases in mass idleness, and the poverty and boredom that result from human labour being discarded in the name of efficiency by those seeking to maximise profit, resulted in increased rioting, not just in affluent nations, where it received most attention, but in many poorer countries. From December 2009, when Greek police shot a 16-year-old dead for throwing a stone, through to the rioting in Tunisia that caused the president to flee the country in protests over joblessness in January 2011, and around much of the globe in between, idleness has been rising and rioting is one response. By February the president of Egypt had been forced to resign and the Americans were again reconciled to watching regime change take place that was not of their making.
Similarly, although there is much talk of economic growth continuing around the Pacific and in India and Brazil, squalor is unlikely to abate much worldwide as wealth inequalities continue to soar. In those countries where housing construction has almost halted, there will clearly be more overcrowding and homelessness to come. Even in affluent Britain, house building, which had already slumped to a record low by the end of 2008,11 saw the annual total numbers of homes built continue to decline through 2009 and 2010.12
Worldwide, rising disease and despair was an inevitable consequence where poverty rose. Across India an epidemic of suicides among the poor was reported by the end of 2010, which a BBC correspondent suggested was a direct result of the financial crisis that began in the richest of Western banks in summer 2007.13 It took 30 months for the wrong financial decisions by traders in the City and on Wall Street to result in poison being swallowed in so many back streets in villages in Andhra Pradesh.
It would not be impossible to produce a list of hopeful stories at this point, bringing together a few of the positive signs that people are learning from the collective errors of our society. Such stories are vital to keep hopes high and to show that change is possible. However, this is a book on injustice, and 2010 was a terrible year for injustice, not just worldwide but also in the country that this book is mostly concerned with: the UK.
In the UK, although fragments of the old social evils remained, it was their even clearer new forms which became most recognisable by the end of 2010. Elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair were on the rise, but the year did not begin with depressing news, and there was no inevitability that it had to end as it did. If you are a great optimist it is even possible to imagine that, unlike business as usual (where the election of a new government does not alter the trajectories of social trends14), had a few hundred thousand people voted differently in May 2010, then the story of last year could have been very different, not just in that Mr Cameron would not be Prime Minister, but that a sea-change in attitudes to bankers, profit and sleaze could have spread and those Members of Parliament not in psychological hock to the supposed wonders of the finance industry could have come to the fore.
It is possible to imagine many alternative scenarios. At the heart of the negotiation process that formed the Coalition, if just a single key Liberal Democrat MP had wavered, we might now have a different coalition. Had civil servants not frightened the parties so much into forming a government so quickly, new splinter groups might have emerged from what had previously appeared rock-solid parties.
In January 2010 the New Year began with good news; it was announced that for the first time in British history a majority of additional university places had been awarded to young adults from working-class areas.15 Elitists cannot tolerate this expansion, what they see as the ‘dilution’ of the ‘value’ of a university education. In October the Browne Review on university funding16 recommended limitless ‘market’ fees for higher education, which was used as an excuse by ministers to announce the tripling of annual fees to as much £9,000 a year (or higher if financed using a loan which had to be paid back with interest).
Higher education in Britain is to become the most expensive and hence most elitist in Europe. Only a quarter of the state funding for university teaching in 2010 will remain by 2012. The Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Clegg, likes to talk of the government in 2012 still spending £2 billion a year on higher education, while never mentioning the amount that was spent before he came to office. The teaching of the social sciences is to be fully privatised with no government ‘subsidy’. The Coalition also abolished the Educational Maintenance Allowance, which will dissuade some poor younger people from staying on at school and will further impoverish many others who do stay on.
Reflecting a few months after the shock of these announcements, Al Aynsley Green, the former Children’s Commissioner for England, said: ‘The Coalition’s “savage” cuts risk robbing a generation of the chance to improve their lives and risk crushing social mobility.’17 Some suggested keeping fees low if a youngster went to a local university, but they might as well have been whistling in the wind.18
Government ministers became boring as they claimed there was ‘no alternative’; they refused to address the possibilities of saving money by cutting those expensive activities we engage in which are shameful, such as conducting overseas wars and buying American nuclear weapons. Neither would they recognise that, when bailing out the banks that had created a great national debt, the group to look to first for payments should not be the poor, but those who hold most of the national wealth; they should be suggesting solutions such as introducing the kind of land value tax which already exists in many states of the US: if it is possible there, why not in the UK?
George Osborne, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, would probably consider as evil the taxing of his affluent family, and especially the taxing of their inherited land holdings. He would try to move away from the subject, but if pressed would claim there had been increased taxation of rich families such as the one he was born into. However, since elections became open to all, no British government has had so many millionaires in Cabinet so effectively representing the interests of such a tiny proportion of society. Three of the five Liberal Democrat MPs appointed to the new 2010 Cabinet were drawn from among that party’s tiny number of millionaires (Clegg, Hulme and Laws). It is not just the voters who have been conned into letting millionaires rule them. The majority of less affluent MPs (in the governing parties but not in government) have also been duped by their much richer brethren.
The first (Labour) budget of 2010 was progressive, but George Osborne’s May budget was highly regressive, and then his June statement on taking away money from local authorities showed that it was Labour authorities which would lose the most. But it was the Comprehensive Spending Review of October 2010 which revealed the clear intentions of the new UK government ministers. It was the most wide-ranging attack on the livelihoods and well-being of poor people and those on average incomes that I can recall in my lifetime. Even Thatcher in her darkest hour was less cruel.19
The language of Orwell’s 198420 was vital for introducing new injustices. Cuts are presented as ‘gains’, and increased elitism as ‘more opportunity for the poor’. Charity for a few became ‘bursaries for the deserving’. And just as a pretence was made that many working-class students were still welcome in universities, so too did the government pretend they were not driving the poor from those cities where jobs could still be more easily found. Even Boris Johnson, Conservative Mayor of London, said his party had gone too far in what he termed their ‘Kosovo-style social cleansing’ of the poor from cities.21 One Conservative minister admitted in the Telegraph newspaper that they were planning the equivalent of the Highland Clearances, but now in central London.22
Around the time of the autumn 2010 spending review I went on a tour of different schools, universities and colleges telling the stories of this book and gathering reactions. The impression I gained from the students’ differing questions to me was that we teach young people in separate institutions, which helps them to fit into an unjust society. The reactions I got from the students suggested that those most likely to get to the top are the ones most likely to think it fair that they get there.23 I was reminded of the more precocious of those students when I had to listen to the men appointed to ‘advise’ the new government.
Frank Field was appointed in June 2010 to lead an independent review on child poverty. He welcomed the announcement of his position by casting aspersions on the European-wide definition of child poverty, by suggesting he would try ‘redefine away’ rather than solve the problem.24 He announced it was impossible for there to be no children living in households with below 60% of median income. This meant either he did not understand the concept of median or he was being disingenuous.25
On prejudice, Will Hutton was appointed to lead an ‘independent’ review of the pay divide and – in essence – he recommended maintaining the status quo (the 20:1 average inequality ratio in public sector pay). He ignored more progressive suggestions, such as that the public sector should include in their prospective contracts with private sector firms a clause excluding as ineligible those who break that 20:1 income ratio. Such threats would be an extension of the policies whereby local government in London refuses to subcontract to private sector companies that pay some workers below the living wage.26 Meanwhile, while millions remain very lowly paid and millions more are unemployed (because it would be too expensive both to employ them and pay others excessive salaries), we find that youth unemployment is climbing to unprecedented levels and a fifth of recent graduates are out of work. Even in boom times nearly a million young adults were not in employment, education or training.27
With regard to greed, the super-rich saw their greatest ever annual gains in wealth being reported in early 2010. The Sunday Times revealed that the wealth of the super-rich in Britain had risen by 29.9% in the year to 2010, to stand at £335.5 billion between the best-off 1,000 people combined (or £335.5 million each if shared out evenly among them).28 By December 2010 it was Bob Diamond of Barclay’s Capital who had become most closely associated with the unacceptable face of capitalism.29
On despair, Professor Sir Michael Marmot, the president of the British Medical Association, delivered the review which carried his name in February 2010. While his report and the efforts of hundreds who contributed provided a series of useful reviews of the evidence, it failed to deal adequately with the new evidence of the urgent need to reduce inequality, of the need to focus on excesses at the top end of the social hierarchy, and not simply concentrate on the harm of material deprivation at the bottom.30
I suspect it would not be hard each year to award an injustice prize to the report or initiative most closely associated with apparent action on one of the five tenets of injustice that might in fact, intentionally or not, also help to maintain inequalities. The Browne (elitism) and Marmot (despair) Reviews were instigated under New Labour. Frank Field (exclusion) and Will Hutton (prejudice) were associated with the Left but took commissions from the Coalition government. Bob Diamond (greed) made his fortune under the previous regime and bolstered it further under the new. In many ways, the Coalition government was New Labour continued, just as we slowly learnt that much of New Labour had been Thatcherism continued.31
When you start to write, there is, at first, just you – and an individual cannot know that much. Then others clean up the typescript before it is printed so it reads far more clearly. Others again take what you have written and use parts of it for better things, ignoring the majority of what you typed. What is most interesting is what unsettles:
In making it clear that they aren’t offering solutions Dorling and Judt are staying true to the intuitively attractive Australian Aboriginal saying, ‘Traveller, there is no path, paths are made by walking.’ But surely we now know enough to put an occasional signpost in the sand? Our collective inability to act on the good information that we have, made reading these books unsettling.32
Similarly, when this book was reviewed in a leading social science journal the main criticism was the lack of what could be termed a messiah moment in its conclusion. I have proved unable to take that tiny fraction of all that is known that I managed to read and produce a new testament. Many people want a new testament. In response to my final line: ‘So what matters most is how we think’, came one reply:
This is rather like the pacifist’s pledge, that wars will stop when men refuse to fight. It is clearly true that beliefs lie in the mind, but it doesn’t quite identify what will change beliefs sufficiently to change practice in substantial and long-lasting ways.33
My view is that no one can truly know what will be sufficient to change beliefs. Over time a few have deluded themselves that they did have the answer, and many others have wished to follow those few (even more have wished to find something to follow). There is even an elegant argument that there is a need for occasional mad leaders to get us out of social ruts.34 As to the way forward, perhaps we are stuck ever-wishing for all the answers?
People on both left and right construct their stories, testaments, and beliefs as to the way to behave. On the right, what is key is survival of the fittest (the most selfish?) and apparent market efficiency (blindness?), not being held back by the weakest (the feckless?), not believing that humans are capable of organising themselves (leave it to the ‘price mechanism’?). On the left there is perhaps too much faith in the ability of all of us to see sense and to rationally organise ourselves, too much faith that the majority will succumb to good argument when they hear it.
The left still underestimates the extent to which the minds of many in power have been closeted by upbringing, and the huge disadvantage caused by each generation having to learn the world anew.35 But there are a few certainties. One which we can be quite sure of is that the near future really will be very different, because, for at least the last six human generations, the near future has changed radically with each single generation.36 Don’t despair that there won’t be change. Don’t assume it will be for the better, nor necessarily for the worse. The very least we can do is describe clearly the crux of our present predicament – that much that is currently wrong is widely seen as either inevitable or justifiable.