A savage reversal of aid is happening at the very moment people need our help most. MPs must join together to stop it
Nothing shames our country more than Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, paying the bills for Covid off the backs of the poor – at home and abroad.
He has recently been pushed off his plan to cut £20 a week from the already low universal credit paid to 6 million of Britain’s poorest families.
Continue reading...Male writer’s comments on Carey Mulligan’s looks said to highlight ‘double standards’ in industry
Film criticism is facing renewed condemnation over a lack of diversity after a review deemed by many – including its subject – to be alarmingly sexist.
“I just couldn’t believe it,” said Carey Mulligan, who was judged by the veteran Variety reviewer Dennis Harvey to be insufficiently attractive to convince in her latest role.
Continue reading...Philipp Wilhelm knows local people rely on forum’s revenue – but still thinks world must change
In his youth, Philipp Wilhelm was at the forefront of protests against the World Economic Forum’s annual “extreme capitalism” gathering of the business and political elite in Davos, the Swiss mountain resort where he grew up.
Now, however, Wilhelm is the mayor of the town and his central mission is to ensure the return of the WEF jamboree, which had been scheduled to start next week but was cancelled this year due to the pandemic.
Continue reading...The US is riven with stark inequalities, rising white supremacist terror and large numbers who believe the election was stolen. The new administration faces a truly daunting challenge
In another age, Joe Biden’s promise to heal the nation might have been regarded as the kind of blandishment expected from any new leader taking power after the divisive cut and thrust of an American election.
Related: Biden must find words for a wounded nation in inauguration like no other
Continue reading...Vast gap in earnings described as ‘unfair’ and ‘repugnant’ by trade union leaders
Bosses of top British companies will have made more money by teatime on Wednesday than the average UK worker will earn in the entire year, according to an independent analysis of the vast gap in pay between chief executives and everyone else.
The chief executives of FTSE 100 companies are paid a median average of £3.6m a year, which works out at 115 times the £31,461 collected by full-time UK workers on average, according to research by the High Pay Centre thinktank.
Continue reading...Official figures have missed £800bn of private assets, says thinktank, amid calls for wealth tax to fund Covid recovery
Almost a quarter of all household wealth in the UK is held by the richest 1% of the population, according to alarming new research that reveals a historic underestimation of inequality in the country.
The study found that the top 1% had almost £800bn more wealth than suggested by official statistics, meaning that inequality has been far higher than previously thought. Researchers said the extra billions was a conservative estimate and could well be more.
Continue reading...Despite court battles, female officers face limited career opportunities and inferior pension rights to male counterparts
Nidhi Rao* has 13 years’ experience serving in the communications wing of the Indian army. Now she is looking for work online and doesn’t know where to start. “I am jobless in the middle of a pandemic, with no financial security.”
When Rao joined the army, female officers were contracted for five years, after which time they might get an extension of five more years. Unlike men, they were not offered a permanent job. Later, the initial commission period was changed to 10 years, which could be extended a further four years.
Continue reading...Now, mid-pandemic, would be the worst time to abandon our commitment to the world’s poorest countries
“The great strategic prize of the 21st century is the full economic, political and social empowerment of women,” said William Hague, when he was foreign secretary. “There are still large parts of the world who are undervaluing, under-utilising, under-developing half their population.” That was five years ago, and there is still a long way to go. I am speaking out now, because we are about to go into reverse.
Parliament’s women and equalities committee, which I chair, isn’t afraid to take the prime minister to task when his policies fall short in providing for the marginalised and under-represented. We’ve held the government’s feet to the fire on the domestic abuse bill, the role of women in the response to Covid-19 and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on BAME communities. But the need to level up society doesn’t stop at our borders, and many of the world’s poorest countries are also the most unequal.
Continue reading...Court found L&Q had misled black woman who was harassed by family and had to flee her home
A leading housing association has been condemned by a court for failing to support a tenant made homeless after a racist campaign by neighbours.
London & Quadrant (L&Q), which accommodates 250,000 people across London and the south-east, ignored a code of practice on protecting tenants from racial harassment and was guilty of defensiveness and insensitivity, according to a county court judgment issued last week.
Continue reading...London Underground cleaning staff are on the frontline of the fight against the coronavirus, but are among the lowest paid workers, writes Mike Cash, RMT general secretary
Sean Smith has done a great service to your readers by bringing into the daylight the hidden labour of those who have worked every day to keep the London underground clean through the pandemic (‘Unsung heroes’: cleaners keeping London’s transport Covid-safe – photo essay, 10 December).
He is right to spot that they are among the lowest-paid workers. London underground cleaning is outsourced to a company called ABM. The cleaners do not receive the same pension provision as their Transport for London counterparts and they are not entitled to free travel on the network they clean. Their workloads have soared as the company has cut back their numbers every year since the contract began, leaving them desperately overstretched during the pandemic.
Continue reading...The pandemic has illuminated deprivation, inequalities and political unrest, while reminding us of the power and beauty of nature and humanity
What might be the enduring symbol of the coronavirus that turned our world upside down in 2020? Might it be those Thursday evenings of spring and summer when, at the stroke of 8pm, Britons overcame the national traits of embarrassment and reserve and ventured out on to the doorstep to applaud doctors, nurses and key workers, banging saucepans and nodding to neighbours in a synchronised “clap for carers”? Or might it be the first sign that trouble was coming this way, that footage of Italians singing to each other from their balconies in a ritual that seemed as exotic, distant and unlikely then as the very notion of a “lockdown”, back before that dramatically punitive word lost its sting?
A chequerboard computer screen of faces as Zoom became the prime means of face-to-face contact with those who didn’t live under one roof? The smaller, quieter sight of families visiting grandparents but getting no further than the garden path, toddlers waving through the glass at elderly relatives?
Continue reading...Tax experts and economists outline ‘fairest, most efficient’ way to repair public finances and quickly raise £260bn
The government has been urged to launch a one-off wealth tax on millionaire households to raise up to £260bn in response to the coronavirus pandemic, as the crisis damages Britain’s public finances and exacerbates inequality.
The Wealth Tax Commission – a group of leading tax experts and economists brought together by the London School of Economics and Warwick University to examine the case for a levy on assets – said targeting the richest in society would be the fairest and most efficient way to raise taxes in response to the pandemic.
Continue reading...IPPR North report reveals few signs of government’s levelling up agenda becoming reality
Covid-19 has deepened inequalities between the north and south of England, with little sign of the government’s “levelling up” agenda becoming a reality, a thinktank has warned, in an urgent “wake-up call” to Boris Johnson.
The north is experiencing levels of unemployment not seen since 1994, with areas put under the strictest tier 3 restrictions among the worst affected, IPPR North said in its annual health-check of the economy of the north of England.
Continue reading...Four years in to the newly created role of wealth correspondent, Rupert Neate explains how the lives of millionaires affect us all
In my reporting, I’ve been interested in how the hobbies and lifestyles of the super-rich affect everyone who isn’t well-off. I wrote an investigative piece on superyachts, and how their billionaire owners often spend £200m or more on what is essentially a floating palace on the ocean, but staffed by people who are entirely unsupported, working up to 24 hours a day.
Continue reading...Men are spending more time with their children and businesses are seeing economic benefits of flexible working
The year 2020 has been transformative for how society sees fatherhood, and could produce the most profound shift in caring responsibilities since the second world war, according to researchers, business leaders and campaigners.
Research has shown that while women bore the brunt of extra childcare during the initial coronavirus lockdown and are being disproportionately impacted by the economic fallout, there has been also a huge surge in the number of hours men are spending with their children.
Continue reading...Child mortality crisis is looming as nations struggle to make payments to west and China, says former prime minister
It is being called the “great reversal”. After decades of progress, the international goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 is in jeopardy, Gordon Brown has warned, as developing countries battling the coronavirus sacrifice their health and education systems to pay western and Chinese creditors.
“We need a comprehensive new plan that recognises the need for some countries to restructure and reduce debt,” Brown told the Observer. Ahead of a key G20 meeting next weekend, the former prime minister is calling for a global solution if an imminent child mortality crisis is to be averted.
Continue reading...Publisher labels ‘bitch’ as offensive but fails to satisfy some equality campaigners
Oxford University Press has updated its dictionaries’ definitions of the word “woman” following an extensive review triggered by equality campaigners.
Among the updates to Oxford Dictionaries’ definitions is the acknowledgement that a woman can be “a person’s wife, girlfriend, or female lover”, rather than only a man’s.
Continue reading...Documents reveal UAE president owns multibillion-pound property portfolio spanning London’s most expensive neighbourhoods
The row of 1960s-built houses with untidy gardens on a quiet cul-de-sac near Richmond upon Thames appears to have little in common with Ecuador’s red-brick embassy in Knightsbridge, where Julian Assange spent seven years in hiding, just across the road from Harrods.
Continue reading...Disadvantaged areas already ravaged by the virus will be devastated when government subsidies are cut
If the slogan of 2020 is “We’re all in this together”, perhaps it should come with an asterisk: *except for those with less, who are hurting more.
Covid-19 hasn’t torn through Australia as it has the United States, Brazil, India and much of Europe, but the economic impact has exposed gaping inequities in almost every facet of our lives.
Continue reading...The Garrick Club was founded in 1831 – a place where ‘actors and men of refinement and education might meet on equal terms’. Women were not allowed to be members and, almost 200 years on, that is still the case. Emily Bendell on why she is taking legal action against the Garrick and Amy Milne-Smith on the history of London’s clubland
Last year, businesswoman Emily Bendell was looking for a private members’ club where she could meet people after work and was surprised to discover that a number of clubs in central London still exclude women. She tells Mythili Rao why she has launched legal action against one of London’s last remaining gentlemen’s clubs, the Garrick, arguing that its men-only membership rules are a breach of equality legislation.
Mythili also talks to historian Amy Milne-Smith, author of London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in late-Victorian Britain, about how these clubs first came into existence. She looks at the type of men who wanted to be members and why there has been a resurgence in popularity of these clubs. Is it escapism and nostalgia that is driving this?
Continue reading...