When inequality runs rampant, the unequal run riot as we have seen on the streets of English cities over the past four nights
Looking at the news about the spread of rioting outside London, I turned to the local paper in Derby to find out if there have been riots there. It turns out that some wheelie bins were set on fire and a car window smashed. Yet only last month 10,000 people turned out in a march to save jobs at the local Bombardier train factory.
Why do some people join together to fight injustice peacefully, while others burn down their local furniture store or rob Foot Locker? After all, both sets of people are pretty angry about events that affect them directly but seem to be way outside their control.
There is an even closer comparison. Last spring, tens of thousands marched in London against spending cuts. While it felt good to demonstrate in solidarity with so many others, probably almost no one there thought it would do any good. Then walking home along Oxford Street we were very aware of the tense atmosphere that a few minutes later turned into shop occupations, window smashing and looting. No one listened to those protesters either, but which side got most publicity?
There is a remarkable fact about today’s Britain of which hardly anyone seems to be aware: we have become a more unequal society than at any point in the last 70 years. We share this characteristic with the US. Both countries stand out in having rapidly widening gaps between the very rich and the rest, which have opened up since the 1980s.
As the book Winner Take All Politics shows, in the US practically all recent gains in earnings have been captured by the top one per cent of earners. Britain isn’t yet quite as a bad, but we’re heading that way.
How does the broad mass of workers whose incomes are hardly rising respond to this? They get into debt. Another remarkable statistic is that half the credit card debt in Europe is now owed by people in Britain.
It is a big step from putting stuff on your credit card to smashing the shop window and taking it, and most of us are rightly appalled that this is happening. But as both Colin Talbot on this blog and Steve Hilditch point out, when those at the top of a society seem to be above the law and to get massive rewards for activities that throw the world economy into turmoil and cause massive job losses and spending cuts, anger is bound to grow.
Most of us – if we take to the streets at all – will do so in a civilised way. In most places, and Derby must serve as the most recent, pertinent example, there is sufficient social cohesion that we will act collectively, responsibly and in the hope that those in power might still listen. And most of those who quietly join these protests probably still have jobs.
Yet we also know that time is running out and patience is running thin. No-one must be more alarmed at these trends than the people involved in developing their communities in Tottenham and elsewhere, seeing their neighbourhoods trashed.
They are at the sharp end of the cuts in services, the job losses and the lack of opportunities, which all affect young people most acutely. They represent the real communities behind those alarming graphs showing the widening disparities between the earnings, wealth and life chances of different parts of British society.
While the majority of Britons can more or less cling on to what they already have - perhaps by overusing their credit cards - jobless youths and truculent bankers represent the two extremes.
One group ignores the rules, avoids paying taxes if it possibly can and gets stinking rich while imposing enormous costs on the rest of us. If the bankers get away with all this, and are still treated with respectful attention by government, is it any surprise that some disaffected young people draw the appropriate lessons?
