Category Archives: Inequality

Richest 1% have almost a quarter of UK wealth, study claims

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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.

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‘It has hit my dignity’: women fight for equal treatment from Indian army

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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.

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Cutting foreign aid will put girls at risk

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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.

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Housing association pays tenant £31,000 over neighbours’ racism

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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.

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Highlighting heroic work of tube cleaners | Letter

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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.

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The magnifying glass: how Covid revealed the truth about our world

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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?

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Economic cost of Covid crisis prompts call for one-off UK wealth tax

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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.

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Covid deepens south and north of England inequalities, study finds

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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.

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Reporting on wealth: ‘The virus isn’t a leveller. It has made the rich richer’

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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.

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Pandemic could lead to profound shift in parenting roles, say experts

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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.

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World poverty rising as rich nations call in debt amid Covid, warns Gordon Brown

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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.

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Oxford Dictionaries amends ‘sexist’ definitions of the word ‘woman’

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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.

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Revealed: Sheikh Khalifa’s £5bn London property empire

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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.

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‘We should not pretend everybody is suffering equally’: Covid hits Australia’s poor the hardest

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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.

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Should men-only private members’ clubs still exist?

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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?

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World’s richest 1% cause double CO2 emissions of poorest 50%, says Oxfam

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Charity says world’s fast-shrinking carbon budget should be used to improve lot of poorest

The wealthiest 1% of the world’s population were responsible for the emission of more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorer half of the world from 1990 to 2015, according to new research.

Carbon dioxide emissions rose by 60% over the 25-year period, but the increase in emissions from the richest 1% was three times greater than the increase in emissions from the poorest half.

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BAME Britons still lack protection from Covid, says doctors’ chief

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More than a third of coronavirus intensive care patients are from ethnic minorities

A third of coronavirus patients in intensive care are from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, prompting the head of the British Medical Association to warn that government inaction will be responsible for further disproportionate deaths.

Chaand Nagpaul, the BMA Council chair, was the first public figure to call for an inquiry into whether and why there was a disparity between BAME and white people in Britain in terms of how they were being affected by the pandemic, in April.

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Wealth of US billionaires rises by nearly a third during pandemic

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Report includes Jeff Bezos, whose personal fortune has risen by 65% since 18 March

The already vast fortunes of America’s 643 billionaires have soared by an average of 29% since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which has at the same time laid waste to tens of millions of jobs around the world.

The richest of the superrich have benefited by $845bn , according to a report by a US progressive thinktank, the Institute for Policy Studies.

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Covid risks making society more unequal than since early Victorian times | Gabriel Scally

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As life expectancy stalls and infant mortality rises, abolishing Public Health England will only make things worse

In the midst of Covid-19 it is easy to forget that the country is facing not just one, but two, very badly managed public health emergencies. The substantial and largely avoidable death toll in the current epidemic is undoubtedly due to a series of ill-informed and inept decisions about how the country should respond to its greatest public health crisis in more than a century. But the virus’s task was undoubtedly made easier by a serious deterioration in the health of the population over the past decade.

Since the beginning of the 20th century life expectancy in England has improved consistently. Until the last decade that is. As a result of government policies over the last 10 years improvement in life expectancy has stalled, and for women in the most deprived areas it has actually fallen. The widening gap between life expectancy in the best-off and worst-off areas is now almost 10 years for men and seven and a half years in women. Similarly, the infant mortality rate for England and Wales reached its lowest point in 2014 and has been consistently higher ever since. Across a whole range of other public health indicators, such as drug-related deaths, sexually transmitted diseases and childhood immunisations, the position has been deteriorating.

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New Zealand’s astounding wealth gap challenges our ‘fair go’ identity | Max Rashbrooke

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New data shows the richest 1% are worth 68 times more than a typical New Zealander

The extent of wealth inequality in supposedly egalitarian New Zealand has been laid bare by figures showing the wealthiest individuals have over NZ$140bn (US$93bn) stashed away in trusts – and overall have nearly 70 times more assets than the typical Kiwi.

The new data, drawn from the 2017-18 Household Economic Survey, are likely to underestimate true inequality, as the ultra-wealthy are generally reluctant to take part in such surveys.

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