Yes, we know all the Daily Mail style arguments about ‘relative poverty’ - that real poverty is only found in India and the like - but this old Tory chestnut no longer stands up to scrutiny.
Current research in the field of epidemiology is increasingly finding that once a minimal threshold of material wealth has been passed, inequality and distribution of income wield a more significant effect on population health than absolute living standards; that for a given level of national income, life expectancy will be maximised by an egalitarian distribution of wealth; that inequality leads not just to worse health outcomes, but increased violence and lower levels of trust and social cohesion. See previous IWCA research on this subject: (IWCA, August 2006)
Even the Times reported in July 2006 that “social class determines how quickly the body ages, irrespective of factors such as health, diet and bad habits, research suggests. A groundbreaking study of twins led by British scientists has shown that people of lower socioeconomic standing, whether because of the job they do or the person they marry, age seven years more quickly than their more fortunate peers… the effect could not be explained adequately by low income, poor education or health risk factors known to afflict lower socioeconomic groups most, such as smoking, obesity, lack of exercise and bad diet… People from lower social backgrounds are more likely to feel insecure, especially at work, and suffer low self-esteem and a sense of lacking control over their lives… The stress this causes is thought to inflict damage at a cellular level that accelerates aging” ('How stress of working-class life puts lines on your face', The Times, 20 July 2006)
This puts the Peter Mandelson remark that ‘we have no problem with people getting filthy rich’ in its proper context. Preceding these twin embarrassments, an even bigger, if less heralded body blow to all adherents of the so-called ‘trickle down affect’ has recently been delivered.
Remember how in the early ‘80’s Thatcher spoke dreamily of ‘a share owning democracy’ whereby monolithic publicly owned assets would be broken up and auctioned off to allow the little people to share in the wealth? For a brief period is seemed to be working - bricklayers could be found discussing the price of stocks and shares while they worked on the scaffold. ‘Loadsamoney’, the Harry Enfield character, may well have been the personification of the working class Tory lout made good. But that was then: this is now.
The latest figures show that private share ownership is at an all time low. Among the top FTSE 100 companies the proportion owned by small shareholders sits at 12.8 per cent. It has never been lower. And would be worse still was it not for the privatisations and the demutualisations of building societies in the 1980’s. The latest 13 per cent headline figure is sharp contrast to 1963 when more than half the UK stock market was controlled by individual shareholders. On top of that, an estimate of the number of people with a holding in more than one company, and who own share portfolios with a value of say £50,000 to £100,000 is put at no more 100,000 to 200,000 people.
If that’s not sufficiently damning for the neo-liberal experiment that has governed us for the last 30 years, worse may yet be in store. Two-fifths of UK-quoted shares are now owned by foreign entities with a total value of £742bn at the end of 2006. Back in 1981 just 3.6 per cent of UK shares, were foreign owned. Far from being a victory for popular capitalism, the privatisation of the UK economy has led to a centralisation of ownership in the hands of the foreign sector, fund managers, insurance companies and pension funds.
As Massimo Florio has put it, “the direct beneficiaries of the initial underpricing of shares of privatized firms are a thin minority of the British population and a group of large financial institutions, both national and international”. The trends show that the decline in private ownership and the rise of formerly publicly owned utilities being owned by foreign companies are related. If this transfer makes the new owners even fractionally less accountable – as surely it must – ‘there will’ in the long term, as the old song goes, ‘be trouble ahead.’
Hard on the heels of the news that Metronet (the only visible beneficiary of the Gordon Brown backed PPP scheme for the London Underground) was likely to go into administration, came the Joseph Rowntree report ('New poverty and wealth maps of Britain reveal inequality to be at 40-year high', Joseph Rowntree Foundation 17 July 2007) which found the division between the super wealthy and the working majority is the highest for 40 years.
Yes, we know all the Daily Mail style arguments about ‘relative poverty’ - that real poverty is only found in India and the like - but this old Tory chestnut no longer stands up to scrutiny.
Current research in the field of epidemiology is increasingly finding that once a minimal threshold of material wealth has been passed, inequality and distribution of income wield a more significant effect on population health than absolute living standards; that for a given level of national income, life expectancy will be maximised by an egalitarian distribution of wealth; that inequality leads not just to worse health outcomes, but increased violence and lower levels of trust and social cohesion. See previous IWCA research on this subject: (IWCA, August 2006)
Even the Times reported in July 2006 that “social class determines how quickly the body ages, irrespective of factors such as health, diet and bad habits, research suggests. A groundbreaking study of twins led by British scientists has shown that people of lower socioeconomic standing, whether because of the job they do or the person they marry, age seven years more quickly than their more fortunate peers… the effect could not be explained adequately by low income, poor education or health risk factors known to afflict lower socioeconomic groups most, such as smoking, obesity, lack of exercise and bad diet… People from lower social backgrounds are more likely to feel insecure, especially at work, and suffer low self-esteem and a sense of lacking control over their lives… The stress this causes is thought to inflict damage at a cellular level that accelerates aging” ('How stress of working-class life puts lines on your face', The Times, 20 July 2006)
This puts the Peter Mandelson remark that ‘we have no problem with people getting filthy rich’ in its proper context. Preceding these twin embarrassments, an even bigger, if less heralded body blow to all adherents of the so-called ‘trickle down affect’ has recently been delivered.
Remember how in the early ‘80’s Thatcher spoke dreamily of ‘a share owning democracy’ whereby monolithic publicly owned assets would be broken up and auctioned off to allow the little people to share in the wealth? For a brief period is seemed to be working - bricklayers could be found discussing the price of stocks and shares while they worked on the scaffold. ‘Loadsamoney’, the Harry Enfield character, may well have been the personification of the working class Tory lout made good. But that was then: this is now.
The latest figures show that private share ownership is at an all time low. Among the top FTSE 100 companies the proportion owned by small shareholders sits at 12.8 per cent. It has never been lower. And would be worse still was it not for the privatisations and the demutualisations of building societies in the 1980’s. The latest 13 per cent headline figure is sharp contrast to 1963 when more than half the UK stock market was controlled by individual shareholders. On top of that, an estimate of the number of people with a holding in more than one company, and who own share portfolios with a value of say £50,000 to £100,000 is put at no more 100,000 to 200,000 people.
If that’s not sufficiently damning for the neo-liberal experiment that has governed us for the last 30 years, worse may yet be in store. Two-fifths of UK-quoted shares are now owned by foreign entities with a total value of £742bn at the end of 2006. Back in 1981 just 3.6 per cent of UK shares, were foreign owned. Far from being a victory for popular capitalism, the privatisation of the UK economy has led to a centralisation of ownership in the hands of the foreign sector, fund managers, insurance companies and pension funds.
As Massimo Florio has put it, “the direct beneficiaries of the initial underpricing of shares of privatized firms are a thin minority of the British population and a group of large financial institutions, both national and international”. The trends show that the decline in private ownership and the rise of formerly publicly owned utilities being owned by foreign companies are related. If this transfer makes the new owners even fractionally less accountable – as surely it must – ‘there will’ in the long term, as the old song goes, ‘be trouble ahead.’