Independent Working Class Association | ukwatch.net

Society is Indeed Broken

Ellie Keen — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:42:29 +0000

...and we all know who broke it

When submerged under a veritable deluge of ideologically-driven ‘reforms’, it takes something especially imbecilic to provoke a double-take. Louise Casey, the mouthy former head of the Government’s ‘Respect task force’, is set to spearhead the latest New Labour gimmick on law ’n order. Among the 20 proposals that fade from the merely banal to the truly asinine here are three that provoke a modicum of analysis.

Anonymous evidence

Elderly and disabled crime victims – as well as people at risk of reprisals— should be allowed to give evidence in court from behind screens. Ministers are sympathetic to the idea, which already happens routinely in cases involving sex offences and gangs.

Fine, in one way, except that ‘anonymous evidence’ does not allow the defence to cross-examine witnessess or indeed raise questions as to any previous relationship the accused might have had with the accuser that might have lead them to offer evidence (not to mention the possibility of witnesses being coerced as a result of a police vendetta) against the accused in the first place.

Internet crime maps

Online maps with crimes plotted on them to be published every month so people can see how dangerous their area is and how well the police are doing. Gordon Brown has backed the move in principle, but areas could be stigmatised if the maps are street-by-street.

The truth is many working class areas are already operationally stigmatised. ‘Control and contain’, whereby crime in one area is ignored by the police the better to protect a ‘nicer’ middle class area nearby, is commonplace. Online maps would merely give what is custom and practice an air of routine formality.

Youth clubs

Friday-night youth clubs to be set up in 50 of the most deprived areas.

Youth clubs for the the 50 most deprived areas? There are a number of delirious aspects involved in the proposition. Ever notice how New Labour ministers and the media are happy to talk blithely about ‘deprived communities’ without any mention to how they came to be ‘deprived’ in the first place? In the absence of any such analysis it takes a remarkable level of political remove to imagine that thirty years of the deliberate stripping out of the grassroots infrastructure in working class neighbourhoods can be remedied by organising ‘a youth club on Friday nights’. What about the other nights? Or ‘deprived area’ number 51? Or indeed 151?

The media who should be asking the serious questions don’t do so. The Independent’s response, for example, was almost unbelievable. ‘Funding for youth services is already being boosted with poorer communities targeted. But should high-crime areas be rewarded?’ it asks. It is true that poorer communties are indeed being targeted and not in the benign way The Independent likes to pretend. But more than that, as even government statistics demonstrate, it is self-evidently working class people in the high crime areas that are most likely to be the victims of crime. Why punish the community further? But as far as The Independent is concerned—Why not?

Former Tory leader Ian Duncan-Smith blathers on about ‘a broken society’ in a similar way. But rival parties never ever challenge him on who broke it. That is because the beginnings of a solution are staring them all in the face. But why bother going to the root of the problem (the callous and systematic destruction of a youth club infrastructure and the selling-off of school playing fields, and so on) when under existing neo-liberal orthodoxy the unthinking dribblings in the Casey formula work just as well?

New Labour plc?

Ellie Keen — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:47:28 +0000

Recently support for New Labour registered at 23% nationally, the lowest since opinion polling began back in 1938. The party has lost 53% of its membership between 1997 and 2006 and will undoubtedly have lost considerably more since. It is struggling to pay off loans which with interest amounts to an estimate of between £24 to 28 million. Annual running costs amount to £25 million and private donors are understandably refusing to step up to the plate. And why would they? It’s not as if New Labour will do something for them that the Tories won’t.

As for the unions, calls to hold a vote on whether to disaffiliate are becoming more frequent. The GMB have threatened to withdraw funding from 30 Labour MP’s. Stephen Ladyman, vice-chairman of the party described the move as “tokenistic and hard-left”. That the kind of response is not likely to help mend bridges. Meanwhile senior officials in the Labour party, including Gordon Brown, could become personally liable for millions of pounds in debt unless new donors can be found within weeks. Almost unbelievably the New Labour response is to consider changing its status to a company – so that it would limited liability! Which is apt as they are set on privatising everything else.

The party has four weeks to find £7.45m to pay off loans to banks and wealthy donors recruited by Lord Levy, Tony Blair’s former chief fundraiser, or become insolvent. A further £6.2m will have to be repaid by Christmas – making £13.65m in all. The sum amounts to two-thirds of the party’s annual income from donations.

The figures are a conservative estimate as they do not include interest that will also have to be paid. A Labour source said that although the total debt was listed as £17.8m on the Electoral Commission website, the true level, with interest, was nearer to £24m.

The possibility that party officials and members of its national executive committee could become liable is being taken seriously by union leaders, and has been underlined by the decision of equity fund chairman David Pitt-Watson not to accept the post as Labour’s general secretary.

Though he was Brown’s candidate for the post, he declined the offer after receiving independent legal advice that he would be personally liable for repaying the loans and could be bankrupted if Labour’s finances collapsed.

The advice from City solicitors Slaughter and May said unequivocally that leading party officials and members of the NEC would be ” jointly and severally” responsible for the party’s debt.

The reason is that the Labour party constitution is framed like a local club or society, and has no provisionfor limiting the liability of its officials or managers.

A Labour source said: “The party’s constitution is like a five-a-side football club, or the local cricket club. The big difference is that the most club officials and managers could expect to have to fork out is an unpaid bill for hiring the pitch. In Labour’s case, it’s tens of millions of pounds.”

The advice was the sole reason why Pitt-Watson, a committed Labour supporter and former Westminster City councillor, turned down the job this month.

But the reverberations inside the party have been enormous. Earlier this month the GMB union’s executive decided to indemnify its two members on the NEC – Debbie Coulter, the union’s deputy general secretary and a former Labour party conference chairwoman, and Mary Turner, GMB’s president – to protect their homes and savings. A GMB spokesman told the Guardian: “They told the executive they would not continue to sit on the NEC unless they were indemnified. It’s too much a risk for them.”

As leader of the party and a member of the NEC, Brown is also potentially vulnerable. Other prominent members of the committee are Harriet Harman, the deputy leader; her husband, Jack Dromey, the party treasurer; Pat McFadden, minister of state at the department for business; Angela Eagle, exchequer secretary at the Treasury; Dawn Primarolo, public health minister; and former ministers Keith Vaz and Janet Anderson.

Anderson said last night: “I am very concerned and we should look into the situation immediately. If this is the case, I can’t see how anyone, unless they are very wealthy or are indemnified, like in the case of the GMB, can serve on the NEC. I can’t see who would want to be general secretary following this advice.”

The party’s financial plight can be shown by the current negotiations taking place with banks and donors.

The Co-operative bank, whose £2.61m loan is due to be repaid on June 30, has told the party it wants its money back, even though it is getting 7% interest. The bank has asked the unions to offer loans to Labour so the party can pay its debt, but some are refusing to do this. Paul Kenny, the GMB’s general secretary, has told the Co-operative bank it will refuse to help unless the bank withdraws its de-recognition of the union, which represents staff at Co-operative Funeral Services.

Three other loans are due to be repaid on June 30 and July 1. They are a £1.54m loan from Unity Trust bank, also at 7%; a £1m loan at 6.75% from Nigel Morris, founder of the Capital One financial group, and £2.3m from Sir David Garrard, a property developer. He had already extended the loan by 15 months from April 2007.

Labour is hoping that the donors can be persuaded to extend the loan period. Sir Richard Caring, owner of the Ivy and Caprice restaurants, has agreed an indefinite extension of his £2m loan, due to be repaid last March. He has agreed to give 180 days notice if he wants it repaid.
The party’s financial crisis could be compounded this autumn. Three of the biggest unions, Unison, the Communications Workers Union and the GMB have tabled motions at their annual conferences this month calling for members to disaffiliate from Labour. If this goes ahead, Labour would lose £4m of its £19m a year in donations.

The Labour party is said to be investigating whether it can change its status to a limited liability company to protect its officials and NEC members – but such a move could be open to legal challenge until it clears its debts.

The Soul of Man under Neo-Liberalism

Ellie Keen — Sat, 24 May 2008 15:27:20 +0000

In 2007, 27 teenagers were murdered in London, a record. 2008 is well on course to beat that: just over a third of the way through the year, 13 teenagers have been killed already, with the summer still to come. What is responsible for this upsurge? Why are children killing each other—and others – in these kind of numbers?

Looking at the press coverage of the most recent tragedies, these questions and considerations are conspicuous by their absence: there hasn’t been an avalanche of outrage in the right-wing press pointing the finger at the corrosive influence of 50 Cent or Grand Theft Auto; the most the liberal press has come up with is some remarks by Enver Soloman of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies in the Guardian, who noted that 2% of London wards have been responsible for 10% of all violent crimes involving teenagers, and pointed out that: ‘You have to look at the social drivers. Why do young boys slip into the illegal drugs economy? It’s not a positive choice, but for some of them it seems to be the only choice. You have to use a range of policy levers to tackle this problem.’

While it is certainly true that options and life chances for working class kids are low and falling—social mobility in the UK fell markedly during the Thatcher era to levels similar to the US and significantly below the Scandinavian countries and Canada (Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America, April 2005 and Social mobility in Britain: low and falling, 2005)—there is one key factor that hasn’t been addressed, which is curious as it is increasingly well-documented in academia. The epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson specialises in looking at how economic inequality is related to population health. He has found that among the developed countries it is the level of equality, rather than the level of wealth, that has the greatest influence on life expectancy: more egalitarian societies have better population health than comparably wealthy societies that are less egalitarian.

Conflict or co-operation

However, it is not just health outcomes that Wilkinson has found to be related to inequality: ‘In societies where income differences between rich and poor are smaller, the statistics show not only that community life is stronger and people are much more likely to trust each other, but also that there is less violence—including substantially lower homicide rates, that health is better, life expectancy is several years longer, prison populations are smaller, birth rates among teenagers are lower, levels of educational attainment among school children tend to be higher, and lastly, there is more social mobility [emphasis added]. In all these fields, where income differences are narrower, outcomes are better,’ (The Impact of Inequality: empirical evidence, 2006). For Wilkinson, the distribution of wealth and resources is an indicator of how either conflictual or co-operative a society is: ‘Because more unequal places are marked by a more conflictual character of social relationships—so that they suffer not only more homicide, but also more violent crime, less trust, less involvement in community life, and more racist—we should see them all as part of a single continuum affecting the nature of social relations throughout a society. Inequality seems to shift the whole distribution of social relationships away from the most affectionate end toward the more conflictual end’[1].

The relevance of this to the present is obvious: for most of the twentieth century the trend in this country was toward increasing equality, but from the late 1970s—with the triumph of neo-liberalism—inequality began to increase, a process which continues to this day (Poverty and inequality in the UK: 2007, p19). The distribution of wealth has become increasingly polarised, and with it our society has moved ‘away from the most affectionate end toward the more conflictual end’. Or as the LSE criminologist Robert Reiner has summarised it: ‘Economic laissez-faire engendered moral laissez-faire. There is copious evidence demonstrating that inequality produces crime and violence. This is not primarily because of social exclusion or poverty. It is relative deprivation that counts most. Contrary to Blair’s many quips on the topic, the rich are a major part of the problem,’ (‘Be tough on a crucial cause of crime – neoliberalism’, The Guardian, 24 November 2005).

One of Thatcher’s most famous mantras was that ‘there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families’ (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Thatcherism was, rhetorically at least, supposed to liberate the individual from the overbearing strictures of the state and collectivism, freeing the sovereign individual to pursue his or her interests, like every other sovereign individual, on the level, meritocratic playing field of the free market. Utter nonsense: it is a picture of the world which pretends the distinction between labour and capital doesn’t exist; it pretends that the equality of opportunity does exist; and it pretends that ‘the free market’ has ever really existed to any significant degree, while the truth is that practically every industrialised economy on Earth got there through state protection of infant industry. And this goes through to the present day, where biotechnology and the Internet only exist thanks to state stewardship. Even the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, has recently conceded: Remember Friday March 14 2008: it was the day the dream of global free-market capitalism died. For three decades we have moved towards market-driven financial systems. By its decision to rescue Bear Stearns, the Federal Reserve, the institution responsible for monetary policy in the US, chief protagonist of free-market capitalism, declared this era over. It showed in deeds its agreement with the remark by Joseph Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, that “I no longer believe in the market’s self-healing power”. Deregulation has reached its limits,’ (‘The rescue of Bear Stearns marks liberailsation’s limit’, Financial Times, 25 March 2008). The freedom and individualism of Thatcherism, like the free market, is an illusion. In reality, labour has been atomised, but capital has not: it is still as collective as ever, as assisted by the state as ever, and more heavily concentrated and more dominant over the individual than ever. The idea of attaining democratic, co-operative control over capital and ending coercive wage labour has gone: the individualism of our time extends no further than the egocentric satisfaction of selfish, largely created, consumer wants.

‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul’

The sociologists Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert have written about what they call ‘the new individualism’. It is worth quoting them at length: ‘individualism today is intrinsically connected, we argue, with the growth of privatized worlds. Such privatized worlds propel individuals into shutting others and the wider world out of their emotional lives (…) As market forces penetrate ever more deeply into the tissue of social life, what we see taking place today is a shift from a politicized culture to a privatized culture. People, increasingly, seek personal solutions to social problems in the hope of shutting out the risks, terrors and persecutions that dominate our lives in the global age (…). The classically free individual as the man who removes himself from the masses is necessarily a way of life possible only to people of means, to those able to attain and maintain a bourgeois life (…). Privatization (…) concerns the spread of neo-liberal economic doctrines into the tissue of our social practice itself. This process expands market deregulation into personal and intimate life, producing in turn isolating, deadening, calculating forms of life (…). What we are suggesting is that people today increasingly suffer from an emotionally pathologizing version of neo-liberalism (…) the individual self—in extending its imperial sway over the social environment—liquidates the solidity and substance of the world into a privatized terrain of needs and desires (…). “Privatized” could here be roughly translated as the imperative: “Don’t rely on anyone for long, and avoid support or help from others, as survival depends on going it alone, constantly changing partners and networks, and always looking out for Number One”. Fear of dependence, in turn, places a further strain on the intrinsically lonely parameters of privatized life, as individuals head off manically in search of all sorts of illusory substitutes to fill in for what is missing in their private and public lives”’[2].

This ‘emotionally pathologizing version of neo-liberalism’ isolates the individual and sets all against all. It recalls the homo economicus of neo-classical free-market economics, and its counterpart, public choice political theory: the purely selfish model individual whose only drive is the maximisation of personal utility. Neo-classical economics claims to be the modern day descendant of the work of Adam Smith, but Smith’s view of human nature was fundamentally different: where homo economicus is motivated solely by rational self-interest, Smith saw human nature as being comprised of two drives, namely self love and sympathy for others. Smith recognised the human need for community, solidarity, co-operation, trust and togetherness, a need that neo-liberalism denies at the philosophical level. One reason behind the resurgence of religion and ethnic/nationalist politics is that they do offer something beyond the illusory and isolating individualism of our time. There is such a thing as society—if a bank needs assistance from the state, it gets it—but neo-liberalism is increasingly turning it into a society of sociopaths, a society of Patrick Batemans where surface is everything and other people are merely means, not ends.

Margaret Thatcher memorably said in 1981: ‘What’s irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it’s always been towards the collectivist society. People have forgotten about the personal society. And they say: do I count, do I matter? To which the short answer is, yes. And therefore, it isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul [emphasis added]’ (). And of course, she succeeded. The young—the age group currently killing each other, and adults, in record numbers, usually over nothing—have never known anything else other than this ‘emotionally pathologizing version of neo-liberalism’. We see the effect of ‘changing the heart and soul’ every time a teenager kills or is killed.

[1] Richard Wilkinson (2005), The Impact of Inequality (London: Routledge), p55-6

[2] Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert (2006), The New Individualism: the emotional costs of globalization (London: Routledge), p9, 10, 40, 41

Brown's Folly

Ellie Keen — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 23:00:55 +0000

Satirist Rory Bremner put it best. Describing Gordon Brown he said; “It’s like having an uncle who’s been building something in the shed at the bottom of the garden for the past ten years. You look through the window and there’s nothing there.”

Former MP and minister Brian Wilson compares him to Donald Crowhurst. Crowhurst was the yachtsman who was so desperate to win the round-the-world yacht race in 1969 that he reported false positions and faked his log book while sailing around the Atlantic. It was only when it looked like he was going to win that the extent of the deception was exposed. Brown’s problem is slightly different.

It has only been since it began to look like he might not win that the serious scrutiny has begun. Inevitably there is confusion and muddle. What does he stand for? Will the real Gordon Brown stand up? and so forth. To a large extent the fog is a creation of his inquisitors.

When his coronation looked imminent there was a vested interest, on both left and right, to have Brown packaged as a loyal son of Old Labour, more true to the party’s traditions than Blair. Cameron was happy enough to go along with the pretence out of self interest, and it proved equally valuable in soothing the brows of the liberal middle class left.

All eye-wash of course. Brown was, after all, one of the principal architects of New Labour. Increasingly the New Labour project is being widely accepted for what it was from the outset: an aggresively right-wing, neo-liberal undertaking. And, equally important, there is no philosophic or economic alternative on offer from either the Tories or Lib Dems.

Nevertheless many, more in sorrow than anger, continue to claim that it is ‘the disjunction between values and actions that is so damaging for Brown’. But that can hardly be the case, as New Labour is arguably the most consistent of governments in terms of policy. At all levels there is disillusionment and disaffection with the Brown goverment.

But his critics are hardly any more coherent. One Labour minister quoted in the Guardian claims; “We’ve created an ideological vacuum. All major political parties have abandoned ideology. The Tories have done the same; they’ve abandoned tax cuts. Then, when Brown came in and talked about his moral compass, you thought ideology might be coming back. But it wasn’t. His actions don’t fit his words – inheritance tax, ending the 10p rate. So you can’t argue, this is what we stand for.”

But of course there is no ideological vacuum. What we have instead is ideological convergence. An entirely different beast altogether. Nor is it true that expressing concern about inheritance tax and at the same time doubling the 10p income tax rate ‘cannot be argued for’. It can, in the City or the Tory shires. How it goes down in the former Labour heartlands is another matter.

Brown presided over a boom based on cheap credit and mega City bonuses, while inflicting the giant mortgage on the nation that is the private finance initiative (PFI). His final budget snatched money from the working poor purely in order to score a quick hit against the Tories, but he never countenanced bringing in higher taxes at the top.

His government found billions to bail out Northern Rock, but refused to find the £40m to refund the struggling families who had saved for Christmas clubs through Farepak. In addition he is pushing ID cards and detention without trial, while his government has given councils and 318 other bodies unprecedented powers to spy on citizens suspected of the most minor offences.

Even his introduction of tax credits to help working families has been disingenuous, because the process of claiming them has deliberately been made so bureaucratic, punitive, intrusive and censorious that many of those otherwise entitled refuse to jump the hoops. Those who do go through it often end up in debt, and dealing with an autocratic and vexatious Revenue and Customs.

Recently it has emerged that 160,000 repayment demands made between 2003 and 2005 may have been illegal and will have either to be abandoned or, where the money has already been clawed back, repaid. Another 90,000 more recent cases are also to be reviewed.

According to a whistleblower, Revenue & Customs have been routinely breaking Section 18 of the Tax Credit Act 2002 by reopening tax credit awards without notification, even though there is no evidence of fraud. Almost laughably, it is here, of course, the 5 million workers damaged by the ending of the 10p rate are recommended to go, cap in hand, by New Labour.

Which goes to the heart of the whole affair. If Brown as Chancellor really wanted to help the seriously low paid in the first place, the simplest way would be to rid them of the obligation of paying tax altogether. But that wouldn’t do as it would be seen to bestow on them a civic right (who knows what they might feel entitled to as a follow-up?).

Far better to accept the bouquets from a credulous liberal left at the same time as making sure that those applying for tax credits understand that as far as the government and its snooty agents are concerned, it’s nothing more than a handout, akin to leaving a basket of leftovers on the back porch for the help after the feast. Tax credits carry all the hallmarks of a privilege granted. And as with all such gifts, if it can be given, it can also be – as millions will soon find to their dismay – taken away.

Like any neo-liberal government, New Labour is determined to end – only for those beneath a certain income, needless to say – the so-called ‘something for nothing society’. So after their new dentistry contract, not only have millions been left without access to an NHS dentist, but dentists are paid a regulation amount regardless of the level of repair the patient might require. Could the sign ‘Go Private’ be more heavily flagged?

It is the same mindset that forces people into giant GP surgeries, while at the same time openly wondering whether doctors ought not to be signing their patients as fit for work rather than signing them off. A proposal that would subvert the essential element of trust between doctor and patient at a stroke.

Is there a sliver of doubt that when Housing Minister Caroline Flint, a Brown appointee, questions the appropriateness of tenancies for life and whether council or housing tenancies ought to be conditional on the tenant having a job, that such thinking it is not reflective of the same obsession? This kind of kite flying suggests New Labour is only too eager to open up another front in its attack on working class sense of place and security.

During the week, the government will be trying to push through 42-day detention for terror suspects, and combating a rebellion over the doubling of the 10p income tax rate. No one, not even MI5, believes that 42 days are operationally necessary, but Brown opted for it in the expectation that it would leave the Tories open to the charge that they were ‘soft on terror.’

Equally the looming mutiny over the tax hike for the low paid, introduced by Brown himself last year, was to allow him to cut the standard rate of income tax by 2p in the pound and so again steal a march on the Tories. The doubling of inheritance tax thresholds was part of the same, as Brown saw it, astute positioning. But how clever does it look now?

Where Brown has tripped himself up is not actually as a result of the failure of long-term strategy, the flaw lies in the smaller detail – short-term electoral tactics.

As his biographer Tom Bower explained, having the ability to ‘wrong foot’ your opponent is what Brown considers to be the real essence of contemporary politics, particularly in a situation where near everyone that matters agrees on the fundamentals.

And as the agenda is irrevocably to the right, the skill is in always and on almost every issues being a step to the right ahead of your opponent. Horrendous though it all might be, of idelogical muddle there is not a scintilla of evidence. On the contrary: the solid Tory poll leads are because New Labour has been thoroughly true to neo-liberal type.

But “Labour’s not in power to make the poor poorer” bewails one Labour MP. Oh yeah? Since when? This is Brown’s real folly. After more than a decade of double-talk, obsfuscation and spin, the New Labour message to its erstwhile suppporters is now irrevocable and unmistakeable. ‘You’re on your own’.

More Like Arbitrary Execution

Ellie Keen — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:40:37 +0000

During the period 1972-6, the gap in life expectancy between social classes I and V was 5.4 years for men and 4.8 years for women. By the time New Labour succeeded the Tories in government, these gaps had risen to 9.4 years and 6.3 years respectively. See tables 1 and 3 in:
‘Life expectancy by social class’, UK Government Statistics.

One of New Labour’s purported aims in office was to reduce these inequalities. Health Secretary Frank Dobson stated that “Inequality in health is the worst inequality of all.

There is no more serious inequality than knowing that you’ll die sooner because you’re badly off”; while Tony Blair himself wrote: “Our society remains scarred by inequalities. Whole communities remain cut off from the greater wealth and opportunities that others take for granted. This, in turn, fuels avoidable health inequalities. The statistics are shocking enough. Families in these communities die at a younger age and are likely to spend far more of their lives with ill-health. Behind these figures are thousands of individual stories of pain, wasted talent and potential. The costs to individuals, communities and the nation are huge. Social justice demands action”.

The interim research indicates that Labour have utterly failed in this aim. Examining Labour’s record, the British Medical Journal reported in 2005 that “inequalities in life expectancy have continued to widen” and that “When individual local authority districts are compared, the difference between the one with the lowest life expectancy (Glasgow City) and the one with the highest (East Dorset) has risen to 11 years. Since Victorian times, such inequalities have never been as high” ( ‘Health inequalities and New Labour: how the promises compare with real progress’,British Medical Journal,2005).

This week saw the publication of the third and final edition of ‘Tackling Health Inequalities’, the Department of Health’s own verdict on Labour’s efforts: ( ‘Tackling health inequalities: 2007 Status Report on the Programme for Action’,Department for Health).

It found that “The latest data for 2004–06 show that the relative gap in life expectancy between England as a whole and the fifth of areas with the worst health and deprivation indicators was wider than at the baseline (1995–97) for both males and females… For males, the relative gap is 2% wider than at the baseline (the same as 2003–05) and for females it is 11% wider than at the baseline (compared with 8 % wider in 2003–05)”.

The report also found that among babies born to families in “routine and manual” occupations, the infant mortality rate “was 17% higher than for the total population in 2004–06, compared with 18% higher in 2003–05 and 19% higher in 2002–04. It was 13% higher in the baseline period of 1997–99”. So far from eliminating health inequalities, Labour has in fact succeeded in increasing them.

Inequality, not poverty

Why is this? After all, there has been record investment in the NHS under Labour’s watch. However, as the World Health Organisation’s figures show, the US spends more on health care per capita per annum than any other country in the world ($6096 at 2004 prices), yet life expectancy is only six months greater than Cuba ($229) and five years lower than Japan ($2823), so large-scale expenditure is not in itself enough, particularly if the distribution of that spending is highly skewed.

Much of Labour’s so-called ‘investment’ has in fact simply been a transfer of public funds into private hands, via PFI and other various privatisation initiatives. However, this alone does not explain Labour’s failures.

Current research in the field of epidemiology, centred around Richard Wilkinson and Sir Michael Marmot (a New Labour adviser and author of the preface for the Tackling Health Inequalities report) is increasingly finding that it is inequality, rather than poverty, which is the key determinant of health outcomes once a certain minimum level of income has been passed (Wilkinson postulated around $5000 at 1992 prices: ( ‘Income distribution and life expectancy’,British Medical Journal,1992).

As Marmot puts it: “Autonomy –how much control you have over your life- and the opportunities you have for full social engagement and participation are crucial for health, well- being and longevity. It is inequality in these that plays a big part in producing the social gradient in health… the lower in the hierarchy you are, the less likely it is that you will have full control over your life and opportunities for full social participation. Autonomy and social participation are so important for health that their lack leads to deterioration in health”.

As the Tories redistributed wealth in favour of the rich, so health inequalities increased. Health inequalities are increasing under Labour because this process of redistribution has not reversed, and is, if anything, increasing.

(Gini coefficient, the standard statistical measure of inequality in Britain, 1979 to 2005/6. Source: http://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn73.pdf, p19.)

The consequences of this are not trivial. According to the winter 2007 Office of National Statistics figures, Kensington and Chelsea has the highest life expectancy of any local authority in Britain by a distance (83.1 years for men, 87.2 years for women).

By way of comparison, in the lowest ranked London borough, Islington (399th out of 432), life expectancy is 8.2 years lower for men and 7.2 years lower for women; for Birmingham those figures are 7.9 years and 6.7 years respectively; for Newcastle 7.9 years and 6.9 years; for Liverpool 9.3 years and 8.9 years; for Manchester 10.1 years and 8.6 years; and for the lowest ranked local authority, Glasgow City, 12.6 years and 10.2 years (‘Life expectancy at birth & age 65 by local area in the UK, 2004-06’).

Away with excess enemy, but no less value to property

On an even more localised level, within the London borough of Camden, life expectancy in the wards of Kentish Town, and St Pancras & Somers Town is 7.9 years lower than in Belsize ward; within Kensington and Chelsea, life expectancy in St Charles –north of the Westway- is 11.4 years lower than in Courtfield between the Fulham and Cromwell Roads ( Office for National Statistics).

Michael Marmot states in the 2005 textbook Social Determinants of Health that within Glasgow life expectancy in the poorest districts is twelve years lower than in the wealthiest.

It is Richard Wilkinson who best articulates the scale and significance of these phenomena: “We are used to feeling indignation at the human rights abuses in countries where people are imprisoned without trial, or simply disappear, but health inequalities exact a much greater toll. What would we think of a ruthless government that arbitrarily imprisoned all less well-off people for a number of years equal to the average shortening of life suffered by the less privileged in our own societies?

“Given that higher death rates are more like arbitrary execution than imprisonment, perhaps we should liken the injustice of health inequalities to that of a government that executed a significant proportion of its population each year without cause”.