Inequality

Children or a pension? The true cost to women who put their financial needs on hold

More women than ever face old age in poverty after a report this week revealed that they were sacrificing their pensions to accommodate the rising cost of childcare. The Fawcett Society, which campaigns against gender inequality, found that women were significantly under-saving and worryingly, many were relying on their male counterparts to make up for the shortfall. The charity said women were taking a significant hit to their pension when they had children, but many were unaware of the long-term financial consequences of taking on full responsibility for childcare costs. The concern is fuelled by the fact that women also live longer and are still victims of income inequality as

Tax me more, but don’t touch my dishwasher

There was a big fuss a year or so ago about a book by a French chap called Piketty about wealth inequality. He suggested capitalism, aside from an anomalous period between 1930 and 1979, inexorably concentrated wealth at the top. One interesting defence of inequality is that the rich, by adopting technologies early, redistribute far more of their wealth than we realise by funding R&D and innovation. The first people to pay top dollar for a flat-screen TV or a dishwasher are unwittingly subsidising their wider adoption. As Hayek observed of early adopters of technology: ‘We depend on them, for they finance the invention and reinvention of products whose cost

Social inequality is a problem, but universities can’t solve it alone

In 1962 I made the leap of a lifetime – from a severely cash-limited working-class household in Hackney (my father had been a packer in a Whitechapel warehouse) to Oxford University. No obstacles were put in my way. Educated at an LCC secondary school, I spent a week at Lincoln College, taking exams for admission to the BA (Hons) in Modern History, and answering questions at a series of intellectually punishing academic interviews. No concessions were made to my socio-economic background. Nor, incidentally, did I benefit from any private tuition, which my parents could never have afforded. I was awarded an Exhibition (a form of scholarship) on merit. Had the college

The cruellest month

In six months’ time, my son is due to attend an assessment day for a nursery. The details on the nursery’s website are deliberately sketchy — presumably to avoid parents coaching their children — but it seems to involve my son being observed while he plays and graded on the results of his burbling: it sounds very much like an interview. He is going to be two and a half. It is easy to be satirical about a child going for an interview at the age of two and a half — his PowerPoint skills are not up to it; we haven’t arranged a single internship for him; he doesn’t

Monster of misrule

Mao Zedong, once the Helmsman, Great Teacher and Red Red Sun in Our Hearts, and still the Chairman, died in 1976. Even today his giant portrait gazes down over Tiananmen Square, where in 1989 his successors massacred hundreds of students and workers. After so many years and books and articles, can anything new be said about him? Although Andrew Walder, a Stanford sociologist and leading China scholar, writes that his comprehensive and deadly analysis is primarily for non-specialists, he has made me think. President Xi Jinping, who will make a state visit to London in October, speaks highly of Mao. Such praise, concludes Walder, requires ‘highly selective historical memory and

Barometer | 30 July 2015

Safe house Lord Sewel is unique in leaving the House of Lords in disgrace. Until the House of Lords Reform Act 2014, only a treason conviction earned you expulsion from the House of Lords, and that only since 1870. At least two peers have been executed for treason, Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, and William Maxwell, 5th Earl Nithsdale, but both well before this date. — Thanks to the 2014 Act it is now possible to have your Lords membership terminated on two grounds: being jailed for a criminal offence with a sentence of more than one year, or failing to turn up for a whole session. But you cannot

Official: income inequality has fallen under David Cameron.  

“Inequality has gotten much worse in the United Kingdom,” declared the Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz when he was on Andrew Marr’s Start the Week last month (clip below). It’s one of those things that ‘everyone knows’ which is (to put it politely) not supported by the data. The latest inequality data came out today, taking us up to 2013/14. There are various measurements, but you get the overall picture (above). As David Cameron said in Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, inequality is lower than the levels inherited under Labour. There has been a lot of talk about surging economic inequality recently, and lot of books about the problem. But not much evidence.

Ed Miliband returns to the Commons as Osborne announces £3bn of more cuts

Ed Miliband has wasted little time in returning to speaking duties in the House of Commons. George Osborne came to the Chamber to announce £4.5bn of savings – made up of £3bn from non-protected departmental Budgets and £1.5bn from asset sales, including the disposal of the government’s remaining 30 per cent stake in the Royal Mail – and Miliband was in place to hear him. Once Osborne’s duel with the new shadow chancellor Chris Leslie was over, Miliband rose to speak. Unlike when he was leader of the opposition, Miliband was heard in respectful silence — Tory backbenchers, perhaps, took their cue from Osborne who declared that Miliband had earned

Unequal struggle

‘How do you feel when you go back to Gary?’ I ask Joe Stiglitz. ‘Well, frankly, I get depressed,’ he replies. ‘The American middle class was created in places like my home town and is now struggling badly — which makes me sad.’ Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning economist and the closest thing the left has to an intellectual superstar, grew up in Gary, Indiana, during the 1950s, when it was the heart of the booming US steel industry. His father sold insurance and his mother was a teacher. ‘We had a modest detached brick house, with a lawn all around — it was safe and secure,’ he recalls. ‘Back then,

Letters | 23 April 2015

Enemies within Sir: I thought Matthew Parris was typically incisive in his last column, but perhaps not quite as much as the person who wrote its online headline, ‘Scotland knows the power of a common enemy. We English don’t’ (18 April). It is true that ‘the wish to be the underdog’ is a defining urge of our age, even in relatively prosperous polities such as Scotland and Catalonia. But Parris is wrong when he claims that the closest the English come to the ‘Braveheart feeling’ is in their collective memory of the second world war. If only that were true. Would any other country make so little of its crucial

Cautious Miliband doesn’t want to talk about borrowing

Labour is proposing to balance the current not the overall budget. This is presumably because they think that borrowing to spend money on capital projects is a sensible policy. But you wouldn’t have known that from watching Ed Miliband on BBC1 just now. In response to questions from Evan Davis, Miliband was determined not to say that Labour would borrow to invest. In a highly disciplined performance, Miliband would also not engage with Davis’ questions about inequality and whether it was a good thing if everyone got richer even if the gap between rich and poor widened. Indeed, Miliband was so cautious that you began to wonder if he’s started

Lefty myths about inequality

As a Tory, I’ve been thinking a lot about inequality recently. Has it really increased in the past five years? Or is that just scaremongering on the part of the left? By most measures, there’s not much evidence that the United Kingdom became more unequal in the last parliament. Take the UK’s ‘Gini co-efficient’, which measures income inequality. In 2009/10, it was higher than it was at any point during the subsequent three years. Indeed, in 2011/12 it fell to its lowest level since 1986. Data isn’t available for the last two years, but there’s no reason to think it has exceeded what it was when Labour left office. George

When Rome’s 99 per cent stood up

In the UK the richest 1 per cent — 300,000 — of the working population control 23 per cent of the nation’s total wealth. Austerity and cuts loom. Oxfam says there are 13 million ‘relatively’ poor in the country. But the poor seem rather relaxed about it. The ancients, however, knew the poor could not be ignored. In the Athenian radical democracy, the poor were in fact the bosses, having total control of Athens’ courts and sovereign assembly. They could have voted themselves pensions for life had they so wished, or stripped the rich of everything they owned. They did not. Instead the rich were taxed in times of war and made

The real problem with our MPs: they’re obsessed with the super-rich

Had the public been asked, before Monday morning, to identify two MPs who stood for honesty and decency, the names Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind would have been prominent among their replies. Both have served as foreign secretary, Straw also as home secretary and justice secretary. Neither seemed unduly driven by personal ambition, nor were they the worst offenders in the expenses scandal. Both are probably right in saying that they have not broken any rules when discussing work opportunities with employees of a Chinese company who turned out to be undercover Daily Telegraph reporters. But it is astonishing that both seemed to believe this sufficient to let them

Boris is right – Britain does need rich people. And plenty of them

Boris Johnson is about the only politician in Britain to stand up for the rich, pointing out that while they may be annoying, they tend to create jobs and prosperity and having plenty of that is no bad thing. The Mayor was interviewed for the latest Freakonomics podcast, boasting that: “London is attracting huge amounts of international investment… London is to billionaires what the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan. It is their natural habitat.”   Here it is the podcast – Boris is at the start:- “I’m sure you like your poor people too,” replied the presenter – which is an odd question. Does welcoming wealth imply being sniffy

Despite its problems, the United States of America is still the best. Thing. Ever

There are not that many things I find more irritating than Europeans getting on their high horses about America and the subject of race, violence and inequality. Everyone seems to have an opinion about the shooting of Michael Brown, most of which contradict what the actual witnesses and forensic evidence showed in the grand jury hearing; among these are a French government minister, who felt able to distract herself from her own country’s miseries, and Paris’s increasing resemblance to a toilet at a third division football ground. It’s partly America’s fault that it has told its own narrative to the world so well, including its racial struggle, and that this

How the Rich Get Richer – my Channel 4 documentary

(Update: you can now watch the documentary online here) Inequality is rising up the political agenda right now, but the debate usually descends into clichés about wealth, bankers and tax. On Monday, I try to look at the subject more broadly in a Dispatches documentary for Channel 4 entitled How the Rich Get Richer (clip above). I write about it in the Sunday Telegraph today. Inequality UK, a documentary presented by Fraser Nelson from Fraser Nelson on Vimeo. First, the problem is not (as Ed Miliband would have you believe) rich people paying zero tax. For the documentary, I submitted a Freedom of Information request asking after the top 0.01

Revealed: the marriage gap between Britain’s rich and poor

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_Nov_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson and Julie Bindel debate the inequality of marriage” startat=1048] Listen [/audioplayer]In the digital era, those looking for soulmates can be brutally clear about who need not apply. There are websites like Blues Match, for alumni of Oxbridge and Ivy League universities only. Then come the smartphone apps: Tinder, for straightforward dating, and ‘BeautifulPeople’, where members are kicked out if deemed too ugly. The latest arrival is Luxy, an app for those who don’t want to date anyone who needs to split a bill. Or, to use its own description, ‘Tinder without the poor people.’ Luxy has been deplored for its overt snobbery but it is, in

Martin Vander Weyer

Why I’m glad there’s no British Las Vegas

I didn’t realise that the Rialto Bridge has a moving walkway and muzak, that the gondolas beneath it float on a clear blue pool, and that the school of Tiepolo had so many apprentices available to paint hotel ceilings. ‘Still in Venice, Martin?’ you’re thinking. ‘Surely that was last month?’ Well no, your intrepid columnist has moved from the old world to the new, and reports this week from the desert frontier where unfettered capitalism meets the lowest human urges: Las Vegas. It’s an overwhelming experience, so forgive me if my grip on what’s happening at home — reactions to David Cameron’s CBI conference speech, for example, and the rejected

Overpaid, underworked, ineffectual – the myth of the NHS doctor

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_15082013.m4a” title=”Andrew Haldenby and Sean Worth join Sebastian Payne to discuss NHS reforms.”] Listen [/audioplayer] GPs enjoy the salary of bankers, regularly pulling in £100,000 for a five-day week, with no on-call or weekend duties and a lovely taxpayer-funded holiday every year. I know this because it says so in the papers, so it must be true. Stories of GP largesse are far from accurate, and bear testament only to the media’s desire for sensationalism. GPs are the true medical heroes of the NHS, the soldiers in the trenches, too loyal to the metaphorical army to revolt, protest or express opinions, lest such opinions serve as an indirect abrogation