How laissez-unfair economics works

The cult of violence is just one expression of the wider cult of inequality.
  • Jump to comments ()

Most people agree that the growing gulf between rich and poor is dangerous for society. It pulls sections of the people so far apart that they seem to inhabit different cultures. The sense of shock expressed by the media at the shooting of an 11-year-old boy in Liverpool is an intensification of the increasing discomfort of a well-to-do majority with the existence of an "out of control" class in the derelict places on the social periphery.

Government has tried vainly to address the wealth gap, but its efforts are pitiful, compared with the extravagant rewards distributed upon its favourites by the free market. The metaphors used by official Britain - the rising tide that lift all boats, the level playing field - are euphemistic evasions of the deeper ideology. This determines that poverty can be healed only by the creation of much more wealth; that is, economic growth in perpetuity. But this model actually makes poverty incurable: when being poor is defined as having less than 60% of average income, it will robustly survive any amount of wealth-creation.

Concern has focused on the excluded, people taunted and tantalised constantly by goods, services and experiences available to those with money. How can their participation in the mainstream be engineered? How can they be integrated into a society from which they feel themselves in permanent exile? These have been been the troubling questions for policymakers, philanthropists and mitigators of poverty.

That this may be a mistaken approach does not occur to those who have elevated the creation of wealth into a kind of primal myth. This is the greatest obstacle, not to a solution to the issue of divided Britain but also to a definition of the problem, which nevertheless stares us in the face with the reproachful smile of children killed without reason.

The most destructive consequence of inequality is that the two cultures, those of the haves and have-nots, are both tainted. Inequality, permitted to grow and extend itself under the banner, hoisted once more, of laissez faire, gives us the worst of both worlds. We see not a people content in the prosperity that could be brought to all but one corroded by excess on the one hand and insufficiency on the other.

The triumphant achievement of capitalism - to produce a majority of beneficiaries in rich societies - is calculated to guarantee stability and continuity. Most people will continue to vote for the maintenance of a system that rewards them. (This is what makes parties "electable"). But under the influence of a permanently growing economy, no one ever feels quite rich enough. This feeds a "need" for yet more economic expansion. But this is the very mechanism that leaves millions of people stranded on the desolate margins.

And these also threaten the wellbeing of the mainstream: although the rich may live in separate areas and live in the enclosures of home, car, work and places of leisure, there are still intersections where the lives of the privileged are crossed by those they fear - the prowler in the subway, the attacker on the underground, the watcher in the dark on the brief walk from car to front door.

Fear of violence, mugging or personal attack is the other side of guilt: there is no necessity for people to exist in joyless and ugly environments of graffiti-scarred estates, shuttered shops, abandoned cars and streets swirling with rubbish; of used-up goods and discarded young people.

We are all products of the same culture of a savage individualism. Those who successfully gain the prizes congratulate themselves on their merit; the unmeritorious - the "losers" in the elegant argot of the age - are supposed to contemplate their absence of merit and to acquiesce in it fatalistically. But human beings invited constantly to consider their own expendability and lack of a function cannot be expected to yield without a struggle to this bleak evaluation by others of their lives.

The cult of violence is an aspect of a cult of inequality; the uneasy coexistence of people in a world over which people feel they have forfeited all control. What can you do about it? The problem is one of how to respond to excess - fabulous fortunes self-administered by fat cats or heaped upon people of modest talent and minimal achievement - as well as to drug wars and postcode gangs that resort to the knife and the gun to redress private grievances that are beyond social remedy.

The pitiful inadequacy of politicians in reaction to these developments is shown in the paltry "policies" they propose: curbing the sale of alcohol, control of guns, further criminalisation of the excluded, yet more restrictive legislation. The effects of their interventions are negligible. The politicians speak of "cultures", as though these were biddable and susceptible to their will. Cultures are dynamic and arise out of the existing relationships in society: they have their own momentum and their own rituals, some of them very bloody.

A radical interrogation of the sad events of recent months is disallowed, for the roots may prove damaging to the holy of holies: the economy, which has performed so well for the past 15 years; the economy, which we approach with reverence, and to which we look for meaning and deliverance. Governments that for the past generation have insisted upon deregulation and liberalisation have also disinterred from its shallow grave the ideology of laissez faire, in which the fate of the poor has become a kind of waste product in the universal generation of wealth.

That there is something deeply flawed with this version of human improvement ought to obvious. Prosperity waits to be salvaged from a wasteful consumerism, a sense of belonging from a degraded individualism, and disciplined restraint from self-indulgence. Lives can be ruined both by insufficiency and excess as humanity is pressed into the service not of a force of nature but of an economic order that showers its rewards with promiscuous disregard for where they may fall.

Violence, drive-by shootings, gang warfare, drugs, alcoholism, obesity: these obsessions and addictions cannot be "cured" by administrative measures, reforms, constant "modernisation", legislation, crackdowns or zero tolerance of this or that behaviour. The evil lies deeper. In the past year, the income of the richest fifth grew by 1.5%, while that of the poorest fifth fell by 0.4%: small figures, but given the existing abyss between them, a considerable contribution to our inexorable reversion to what Disraeli, over 150 years ago, called two nations, "between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy".

Latest posts

Today's best video

Today in pictures