Tuesday 13 January 2009

Labour's Best Idea For Eleven Years?

Polly Toynbee thinks so.

Well, Harriet Harman herself should resign, then.

While the party hijacked by her and the other old student Marxists (and we note the return of Alan "Haze of Dope" Milburn) has been busy removing hereditary peers, banning foxhunting, forcibly closing down Catholic adoption agencies, and all the rest of it, this country has acquired its widest gap between rich and poor since records began.

14 comments:

  1. "this country has acquired its widest gap between rich and poor since records began."

    Wow! Is that really true?

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  2. Oh, yes.

    Of course, it might have been even wider in the distant past. But no one was measuring it, so we'll never know.

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  3. Sure, but the widest since records began! Wow indeed! How is this measured, and do you have a link that gives the evidence? I'd love to use it in a paper I'm writing.

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  4. Check out Polly Toynbee's own archive, for a start.

    She's good on wealth inequality. But she has an inexplicable soft spot for Harriet Harman.

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  5. I'd like to use this statistic too and it would be helpful if you could link to your source.

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  6. Mela, I don't know where David's figures come from, but they're defensible - it all depends how you measure it. If we assume that the wealth of the very richest is greater than it's ever been, and the wealth of the very poorest is and has always been, more or less, zero, then the gap is indeed greater than it's ever been before. The fact that this tells us nothing useful about whether anyone is actually worse off is just one of those things, I'm afraid.

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  7. Romper, why do I bother? For many years, this country did not have people with "more or less zero", just as it did have enormous social mobility. But no more. Funny, that.

    Edgar, I'm told that Toynbee herself responds promptly and helpfully to emails on this matter. Why not give it a go?

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  8. David, of course "more or less zero" is an exaggeration. But the wider point, that incomes for the poorest have risen more or less in line with inflation while incomes for the richest have increased way, way faster than that, is obviously true, and means that there would be no inconsistency in principle in saying that inequality has increased while everyone has become better off.

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  9. "Edgar, I'm told that Toynbee herself responds promptly and helpfully to emails on this matter. Why not give it a go?"

    Well, it it's true she's to be lauded for it. People who make claims and then respond promptly and helpfully to requests for evidence are all too rare in modern journalism and politics.

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  10. "David, of course "more or less zero" is an exaggeration."

    Not any more, it isn't.

    "incomes for the poorest have risen more or less in line with inflation"

    You haven't the first idea what you are talking about. Like all the New Labourites of all parties, you cannot see the poor, just as the American pioneers could not see the Red Indians, or the early Zionists could not see the Palestinians.

    Far from having grown richer since 1979, Britons have in fact grown vastly poorer: only a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today.

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  11. "only a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today"

    Can you tell us a bit more about the quality of life available a generation ago to families on a single manual wage?

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  12. A house (from the council and thus with security of tenure plus subsidised rent), three square meals per day, free childcare because the mother could afford to stay at home, an annual holiday (in this country, but all the better for that), several further awaydays through the year, cheap fuel and power, all sorts.

    And I'm not talking about the Ark. Practically everyone had a television, not very many (if any) fewer households than today had cars, and so on.

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  13. Yes, the early 1980s were a golden age.

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  14. I'm talking about before that, obviously.

    Not long before that, though. Not really very long ago at all, in fact.

    The decline has been so rapid that people cannot believe that it has happened. But it has. And it is still going on.

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