Last month, Red Pepper and Keep our NHS Public joint sponsored an event on defending the NHS. We wanted to discuss different strategies that would be most successful in resisting the implementation of the Health and Social Care Act. It was filled with energy and expertise, with great contributions from local people. The work that Keep Our NHS Public is doing to rally opposition to this radical reorganisation is crucial and Red Pepper fully endorses its campaign.

We are keen to keep supporting KONP and the fantastic activism and campaign work that is happening around the country, and together we will continue to highlight the impact of the Health & Social Care Act whilst debating strategies for resistance.

As the next step, Red Pepper is supporting the Keep Our NHS Public ‘Reclaiming the NHS’ conference at Friends Meeting House on Saturday 23 June. It is sponsored by the TUC, Unison and the NHS Support Federation amongst others. This conference will discuss the crucial question: what can we do to protect our NHS?

There is an impressive line up of experts who will outline the changes and threats facing our health service. Along with information and workshops, the day will provide valuable space for networking among NHS supporters from across the country.

Speakers include:

Wendy Savage – Co-Chair of Keep Our NHS Public
Harry Keen – President of the NHS Support Federation
Jacky Davis – BMA council and Co-Chair of the NHS Consultants Association
Polly Toynbee – Guardian columnist and writer
David Babbs – Executive Director 38 Degrees
France O’Grady – TUC Deputy General Secretary

Among many more…

Red Pepper will have a stall at the event, and we are looking for volunteers to help us. All volunteers will have the opportunity to watch the speakers, meet new people and join in with the workshops.

If you can help on the Red Pepper stall please contact Tom Robinson at student@redpepper.org.uk
To find out more about the conference visit: http://www.keepournhspublic.com

This was a conference, however modest, that brought together experts from Defend Council Housing, Keep Our NHS Public and Coalition of Resistance, and was informative, accessible and certainly an experience to build further resistance on. Warm welcomes and teas aside, we were all invited to listen to these inspiring and insightful accounts of how this deprived borough of London will fall further victim to austerity imposed by our millionaire cabinet. But crucially, initiatives, and practical examples of how best to approach these challenges, were the goal. We broke into different workshops that throughout the day discussed jobs, benefits, pensions, NHS, council housing, and the fight against fascism. All action points and feedback were reported back at the end.

Defend Council Housing

The Defend Council Housing workshop was very informative. With over 5 million on the housing waiting list, it is clear that there is a real crisis in housing. We heard from local residents who could talk on behalf of neighbors with either severe housing needs, overcrowding, or who were being forced to pay extortionate rent in the private sector. There is no doubt that housing demands urgent attention. The meeting addressed government attacks on tenancy agreements and initiatives to ensure local people are aware of their rights as legal aid budgets diminish and Citizen Advice Bureaus start to buckle under the pressure of funding cuts.

The workshop gave an accessible breakdown of the housing jargon, combined with opportunity to share stories of the impact of the government’s attacks. It made it painstakingly clear that what the government defines as ‘affordable rents’ bare little reality to those in living in Barking. Stories were exchanged, including one woman describing neighbors who were thrown out, along with all of their belongings, as rents were not met and private landlords took matters into their own hands. A teacher highlighted the feelings of insecurity of many living on 6 month fixed contracts; unsure of the future. We heard further stories about the many families in Barking and Dagenham currently living in one room, and the impact this is having on the children growing up in the household.

The belief that councils should provide affordable, adequate council housing was unanimous. Government imposed rent controls and sufficient regulation to ensure basic standards of provision (i.e. heating, gas, water, free of damp, replace broken windows/furniture etc.) for private sector housing were among the articulated demands to meet local needs.

The workshop also covered the evolution of council housing, spanning from Thatcher’s Right to Buy (1980), to the abolition of rent controls. For Barking and Dagenham at least, these changes paved the way for New Labour to use private finance initiative (PFI) to build hospitals and homes, whilst draining the council of money. These contracts ensured further housing would be open to private landlords rather than desperately needed council housing, resulting in a national increase of evictions by private landlords, which are up by 17per cent since the 2007 crash – Barking far exceeds that with an increase of 30 per cent in the last year.

The conference focused on outreach, and organising local tenancy and housing associations to meet the shortfall in advice with leaflets and meetings, and working together to resist further evictions.

Job losses, pensions and workfare

The workshop on jobs, pensions and workfare was a useful session that clearly linked all three areas, and attendees shared experiences on how to resist the changes that are taking place. One man from Remploy, a leading provider of employment services that support disabled jobseekers, expressed concerns about his ability to pay rent if the local factory closes. There are plans to resist the closure, and save the factory that provides jobs to over 500 employees locally on 4 July, but with ‘no jobs out there’, the man felt himself and fellow employees were being ‘put on the scrapheap’. Plans to demand union support for the protest are underway. In addition, workers from Remploy, will be protesting outside the house of Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Ian Duncan Smith.

There were two additional workshops that covered multiculturalism and resisting fascism, and the NHS privatisation. Both are historically crucial topics for Barking and Dagenham, with the BNP having previously been the second-largest party, and one of the local hospitals being in dire financial straits.

However, it is clear that with modest but ambitious collectives like Barking and Dagenham Against the Cuts emerging, resistance to such pressures is not going to be muted. It was apparent from the start that sense of community, knowledge of local services and understanding of the impacts of the cuts, is what unites this group and gives them the tools to stand up to the politicians in Whitehall implementing and supporting these damaging initiatives.

For more information on Barking and Dagenham’s fight against the cuts, you can visit the group’s website:  www.bdagainstthecuts.wordpress.com

Tom  To introduce the report to someone who is unaware of what this stimulus would provide, what effectively is this report saying?

John  We focus on climate jobs not green jobs as a whole. The report explains how and why we urgently need climate jobs that will directly reduce CO₂ emissions and help solve the environmental and economic crisis. If there is investment in public transport (buses and trains), walking and cycling; that will create jobs. It will create jobs in the building of infrastructure; it will create jobs in the running of the public transport services. We estimate that if this was done in a serious way, it will double the amount of people working in public transport, in other words add another 300,000 public transport jobs. Public transport is a really good example of how investment will bring real social and environmental benefits as well put a lot of people back to work.

This can be repeated in insulating homes, and investment in renewables like offshore wind and wave power. The government initiative needs to be there, particularly for the high level of investment that will be required for something like wave power.

Tom  We hear that there is no alternative to cuts and the need for austerity. Your report, One Million Climate Jobs, helps to debunk some of these myths. Give us an introduction to the politics of austerity and the demands of your report for a fiscal stimulus to get the economy going again, but crucially, for a new kind of economy.

John  We think that the current austerity programmes that the government is trying to put through are self defeating. There is another way forward which helps solve the economic crisis we are in, and the environmental crisis we are in.  That is investment. Our report details with some very specific figures, the costings of a million jobs in climate friendly industries and the cutting of overall emissions for the UK by 80 per cent. This is a message of hope. If the current government claim to be the greenest government ever, (for which unfortunately there is not much competition) they have not been very strong. We need much more direct government action in order to create these one million climate jobs that will help both crises.

Tom  Your report is original in comparing the initiative to the National Health Service (NHS). Could you explain the difference between having the climate jobs as public sector employees instead of going down the more traditional route of tax breaks and subsides for market led growth?

John  I don’t think we would be saying there would be no room at all for subsidises and quantitative easing (QE), but we are not convinced that it in itself will work. We are not convinced because it is still relying very heavily on the private sector to come up with radical and significant change. The scale of the economic and climate crisis calls for government action.

Tom  This report is very much a top down initiative. What would you say to critics who might suggest that instead of local authorities and national governments; encourage local communities to organise and lead the way?

John  It certainly argues that governments need to take the initiative and lead the investment. But, what it is being careful not to say is that government needs to micro-manage. I think we saw during the last Labour government, there was a lot of micro management of the economy and I don’t think that works. There is a big difference between the government supplying the overall investment, but then trusting local authorities, local people to manage their own projects in as imaginative and creative way as possible, because what might be right for Cardiff in South Wales may be a different approach for a town like Bournemouth in the South Coast.

Tom  How could we encourage local communities the need for, say wind farms, whom may resist the implementation of such wind farms or renewable energy initiatives in their neighbourhood if they are not the most attractive things?

John  As we know there is strong local opposition to wind turbines. We have to work with the local community. I don’t think you can just railroad communities, forcing them to adopt them. This sort of approach is unacceptable and would be self defeating. Local authorities and national governments need to make the national, economic and environmental case for wind turbines, but when it comes to the sighting of wind turbines, it has to be done sensitively. While in principle they are a good thing; there are some genuine concerns amongst some local communities, particularly the noise, and we need to be very sensitive to that.

Tom  How do we popularise these arguments and go on to establish lasting communication and co-operation between environmentalists and trade unionists?

John  We communicate to the people, and in particular, people who are feeling in despair that they can’t get a job (particularly the younger generation). This is one of the reasons behind the Climate Jobs Caravan.

In a sense this is almost dramatising it. It can be street theatre. We will be going out to the main public squares, in towns and cities across the country with a van, with a message, with videos, with people, saying, actually there is another way! No need to be in despair; there is some hope.

But we are also hoping that campaigns and coalitions will emerge in the various towns and cities, and work together to put real concrete pressure on their local authorities to move in a direction of investing in climate jobs.

Tom  Could you explain what is happening and how people can get involved with the Climate Jobs Caravan?

John  We are covering over 25 towns and cities up and down the country in two parallel tours. It begins on the 12^th May and ends on the 25^th May. One is covering Scotland and the north of England, and one is covering the midlands, south of England and Wales. It depends on the town and city, as local people are heavily involved, as they should be, at the local events. The whole message will be is things can be different and don’t have to be as they are now.

One of the key things is the caravan has been jointly organised by environmental campaigners and trade unionists working together. We hope an alliance will come out of this to put joint pressure on local government and authorities.

We would be disappointed if the caravan was just a one off piece of street theatre. We want more than that. We want to have these lasting alliances working fairly effectively and practical ways together to influence local authorities, regional authorities and influence the climate opinion generally in people’s areas.

Tom  Now to talk about the transition period that would need to take place to move towards a low carbon economy. How would we guarantee that those who lose high carbon jobs, would be moved to sustainable, secure jobs in the low carbon economy? How do we protect these people?

John  This is where a government led initiative is critical. If too much of this is left to incentivising the private sector then we can’t get this sort of just transition. Government would be heavily involved in reskilling, retraining and educating the workers in the unsustainable industries; to ensure they are properly equipped to move into the more sustainable and climate friendly jobs. Now, that may happen with fiscal incentives, but the argument is that it will not guarantee them that switch.

Tom  Imagine we have moved into a low carbon economy. How do we prevent retailers and/or consumers/local communities from simply using those energy efficiencies to produce and consume more energy as opposed to reduce our demand for finite resources?

John  Once we are at this nirvana of having created a million climate jobs, how do we ensure that people don’t just use more energy? This is where fiscal measure have a role to play. We have got to look at the price of carbon. It has to be done fairly so poorer communities don’t lose out. We need a carbon tax, or some sort of equivalent fiscal measure, where the people who consume the most are paying the price of that consumption.

Tom  There is growing research highlighting the dangers of emerging bubbles in carbon offsetting and cutting. Are there any calls for more rigorous regulation in finance that complement the transition to a low carbon economy?

John  To forestall that happening, my own view, is that there needs to be much greater control and regulation of international finance.

The National Climate Service (NCS) is one initiative amongst many others. We are not isolating this as the world’s total answer to unemployment and climate change but it’s an answer amongst many others. To tackle the crises of our time, we will need several approaches.

There are many other great ideas put forward by the likes of the Green Party, which I think will sit very nicely alongside this initiative.

The task is to find a positive answer to the problems we face; and the creation of a million climate jobs is a great first step as part of that approach.

John Stewart is Chair of Campaign Against Climate Change, was a leading activist in the campaign to prevent the expansion of Third Runway at Heathrow and Chair of Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise (HACAN). He is currently on the organising committee for the Climate Caravan.

http://www.campaigncc.org/

http://www.hacan.org.uk/

Tom Robinson (Red Pepper): How would you describe the reaction to The Spirit Level in the three years since its publication?

Richard Wilkinson: What really amazes me is how it has been picked up in so many places. We have done 700 talks. We are turning them down all the time for more research for our next book. They come from every kind of organisation. We have talked to senior business people, we have talked to charities, we talked to religious groups, political parties, think tanks, civil servants, health service conferences, academics – every kind of group. I think what is most surprising how extraordinarily positive the reception always is all over many audiences.
The audience is self-selected, but there are quite a lot where that is not true – where you are part of some standard health service conference and all the people at some level have to come or something in the civil service. Yet still we find there is an overwhelmingly positive attitude.
I think that’s because of a load of components. One is the intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive has been alive for hundreds of years. The second is that almost all the outcomes are behavioural: things like violence and drugs and doing worse at school.
Those behavioural outcomes tended to be effects of inequality going through the mind. In a sense what it is telling us is that the effects of inequality are psycho-social affects. When New Labour started to think that inequality did not matter, I think what they were thinking was that maybe in the 1930s, when many people were living in awful hardship and squalor, it was wrong for some people to be living in great luxury in terms of material standards. Now that most people have cars, central heating, DVDs, and so on, well, they thought, inequality doesn’t matter anymore.
If I had been living in the 19th century and someone told me now most of the population have air conditioning, and enough food to eat and obesity would have reversed its social distribution, I would have thought we are living in some kind of utopian harmony.
But that’s why we are dealing with the psycho-social effects of inequality, not simply the individual material effects – it’s about where you are in relation to others, not simply if you have more bedrooms, more food to eat, the sanitary conditions or whatever.
I think psycho-social elements speak to people. For a long time there has been an underlying worry about the contrast between the material success of our societies and our many social failings. There is very good evidence that things like mental illness have been rising, levels of self harm amongst teenage girls – a whole host of things that worry people have been going wrong and nobody knows why. So I think in a way we have filled their explanatory vacuum.
Of course, economists talking about inequality or poverty are rather slow to cotton on to the psycho-social effects. Economics is based on the idea that the primary relationship is between people and material things. Our book in a way is saying the primary relationship is between people and people.
What people call ‘materialism’ is not some sign of natural acquisitiveness. It’s actually us trying to show who we are, improve our self-image to other people – a form of communication, social communication. I think this has caught on because we have shifted the debate in a direction that makes intuitive sense to many people, whereas much of the rest of the stuff on inequality and poverty still talked about it in material terms. Of course there are people who are homeless. But even for them, if you talk to them, it’s about a sense of failure, the hopelessness that their lives are going to like that forever, the lack of contacts, being regarded as inferior, feeling like failures. Even for them the psycho-social is really important.
Tom: This links in with the status frustration that has been mentioned earlier and by Owen Jones in his book on the demonisation of the working class – the alienation and spiral of social decay.
Richard: Yes, in our next book we are going to try and deal more with the individual psychological effects of inequality, to do with how we are seen and how we are judged. All the things to do with putting people down and admiring the people above us. These are not just big external societal class things, but between close friends, intermediate partners. Being treated as though you don’t know this, or are stupid. These things mess up even quite close relationships. In the family context, people who change class or marry across class differences always create awkwardness and tensions. And all those kinds of problems become more serious in more unequal societies.
This is where democracy in the workplace plays a crucial role. The more democratic companies have much smaller income differences between the top and bottom. The FTSE 100 average is something like a 1 to 300 ratio of the top salary to the bottom. To pay people of the bottom one third of one hundredth of what you pay yourself – there is no clearer way of saying ‘you people are near worthless’. And then the bizarre thing we say is, well, the problem with these people is they have low self-esteem! Its absolutely appalling.
Tom: It seems odd on the surface that you talk in your book of suicide rates being higher in Japan and Scandinavia, being two places with higher levels of equality?
Richard: Suicide looks like an exception in that it is, as you say, more common in more equal societies – significantly more common. But depression does not have that pattern. Suicide is higher in more equal societies. Depression is higher in more unequal ones. Although there is ill health, violence and depression at the top, all are more common at the bottom. In Britain, that has been true of suicide only since some time in the 1970s. In many countries that is still not true.
Violence is either against yourself or out against other people. If your partner goes off with someone else, or you get sacked from your job, you feel because you are so hopeless and useless. Do you take it out on the person your partner has run off with, or your boss? Do you feel more angry at them than yourself? Inequality changes the culture of those responses.
Tom: To what extent have the political classes been willing to accept The Spirit Level’s argument?
Politicians of all kinds are terrified of scaring off business. They still think that the rich are doing wonders for us all in some way. They believe that the economy will collapse if fewer millionaires come and live in London. They just haven’t thought it through, this idea that we still have to pay these people so much money. These people are not gold dust.
Any business leader worth their salt would be training up the next layer – vast numbers of people could do these jobs with the right training and expertise and that’s what it needs. We need more training. There are a vast number of people who would do all this for a tiny fraction of what these CEOs are getting.
I don’t think politicians will ever lead public opinion. One of the faults of political systems or institutions we have is that they select the people with ambition as their primary quality. You saw it so much with Blair, cowtowing to Bush and starting to walk in a macho style. That really told you what his psychology was about.
Where there have been expressions of anger at the bonus culture and so on, such as the Occupy movement, they [politicians] pay lip service or sometimes more than lip service to issues to do with equality. Lip service is a beginning. Thatcher did not pay any lip service to this kind of stuff.
But, of course even economists are beginning to turn their attention to these issues. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is looking at measures of wellbeing. There is the beginning of looking at these processes, even close to the establishment. There was a brief phase when people talked about the importance of social cohesion and social capital. Now it is happiness and wellbeing. I think that kind of awareness of the issue grows out of recognition.

Tom: How can we challenge the dominant way of thinking and argue that economic growth is not the ‘be-all-and-end-all’?

Richard: One thing is we need to make a clear distinction between economic growth and innovation. We need innovation very badly, partly to reach sustainability, like spin-offs from electronics and bioengineering and other stuff, which will have benefits. That is not the same as economic growth.
The government talks about economic growth because it is worried about profits going down. We need to distinguish between fluctuations in the economy, which are difficult, and changes in economic activity. We suffer from downturns but it is not the same as needing growth. We want stability of economic activity.
People see it as a choice of either higher unemployment or economic growth. Again, we must break that idea and show that there are other possibilities.
What we should be doing is improvements in productivity we can gain from. Instead of increased consumption and consumerism, we need increased leisure. The New Economics Foundation said we should be moving towards a 21-hour week.
It is not impossible to communicate these messages on a massive scale, because people are already aware that consumerism is shallow. It is something we are driven to. Consumerism is empty. Surveys show it would be better to have more leisure time with family and community.
In more unequal societies people work more hours, and spend more and save less, and get into debt more. Money is even more important because it says what you are worth. All those things to do with status competition are heightened in more unequal societies and we must find ways of communicating that to a wider public.
Even with economic growth, people wonder if it really does must good in the long term. Increasingly, you hear people rather romantically say we are almost as happy as children or in the 1950s or 60s. All the measures show happiness has been flat-lining and have been doing so for decades. The lie is that economic growth is the only thing that’s worthwhile.
Tom: Let’s look from an international perspective. What would you say towards initiatives to reduce global inequality? There is talk of ‘carbon debt’ – the idea that western industrial countries should dedicate 1 percent of their GDP to pay back the amount of carbon emissions they consume to developing nations, as a means to balance environmental needs and go some way to reducing inequality too.
Richard: The reasons why inequality within and between nations is important are quite different. Within societies we have an evolved sensitivity to a social hierarchy. We are really talking of a whether the social pyramid is a very steep pyramid or not so significant.
Internationally, there are very different things that make it important and make it clear that we should be doing all we can to further economic growth in poorer countries. It’s very clear where people do not have basic necessities, we need to raise material living standards, unlike in the rich societies, particularly over these carbon issues.
Greater equality is important for environmental reasons amongst others in the rich world, because inequality is one of the most primary drivers of consumerism. Consumerism is the big threat to any attempt to rein in carbon emissions in the rich, developed world.
Some countries have less than half our levels of carbon emissions and manage our kind of levels of life expectancy. You can draw similar graphs of infant mortality and carbon emissions and see just the same thing. So not having economic growth in the rich world does not mean sacrificing the really important gains in the quality of life that we enjoy.
I think it is really important to paint a picture of a world we can move towards – a world where we not only have greater equality and improve the nature of social relations and our social environment (problems of violence etc), but also a move towards sustainability and transforming the experience of work through co-ops and employee-owned companies. A move towards working for the community, where we get our sense of self-worth. There is a qualitatively better world for all of us.
At the moment dealing with carbon emissions is seen as sacrificing, but all these things are gains in the real quality of life for all of us. We have got to turn the tables on the way that debate has come over. They are not sacrifices – we will be moving towards something better.
Tom: What practical alternatives could help us begin to re-organise our economy?
Ultimately, I think we must be aiming to get changes in control of industry – workplace democracy. The bonus culture is an example of a complete lack of democracy. It’s people not thinking they are accountable to anyone; that they can do just what they like. The way of dealing with that is make them answerable to employees.
We as consumers should be taking our custom to employee-owned companies, co-operatives and mutuals. As well as getting the government to give tax breaks to those companies, put up funding through loans to help employee buyouts.
I think some of these schemes to give employees shares are an attempt to co-opt co-operation with employees rather than shift power. But where you have a significant number of shares owned by employees it makes it a bit easier to move towards 100 percent employee ownership.
We also need community representation. Ideally, one would combine some mix of employee co-operatives and consumer co-operatives. Get them both involved. What I think it valuable about it is you can move towards structures within the market economy. But I think it as it grew, it could also transform the market economy.
I think the other benefits of moving towards greater economic democracy are not simply strengthening our community in residual areas between neighbours, but at work too. It is at work we have most to do with each other. People say that employee ownership can turn a company from a piece of property into a community.
I don’t mean we shouldn’t also be using taxes and benefits to reduce inequality – we need to do it both ways. Economic democracy is a more fundamental way and has many lasting benefits.
Tom: How would you respond to critics who object that you are exaggerating the causal role of inequality in creating social effects in so many spheres of life?
Some people look at our graphs and they say: ‘very odd that so many problems are affected by one conditioning factor’. How can so many things be affected? All the problems we look at are problems of social gradients. Our book is not, as some people call it, a theory of everything. It is a theory of social gradients.
I think people look at those social gradients and think that it is because the resilient move up and the vulnerable move down, it’s just sorting people. The fact we show some problems are anything from twice as common to 10 times as common in societies with bigger income differences mean they are substantial responses to social status differentiation itself.
In a way, what we are saying is that problems we know are related to social status get worse if you increase the status differences. The idea that if you have bigger material differences between people then you have bigger social distances is crucial.
Social class, in status differentiation, imprints itself on people from the earliest stages in life, affecting endless things to do with how we perform and our self-presentation. We are marked by our class. All those affects become more powerful where there is more inequality.
People accept most of that picture – they just won’t bring it to bear on the kind of evidence we have given. So, we do get people who start worrying about causality in this obtuse way.
It is worth pointing out what we are showing is very easy to understand, and is what you would expect in a sense.
Tom: How can we popularise these arguments and help to build a consensus around a more democratic, equitable and sustainable path?
Richard: I feel that one of the advantages I have had of speaking about it so often is one learns to use the right words. I think part of what has held the left together has been an identity thing. You want to show that you are not part of that nasty capitalist world and so you use jargon that distinguishes you from them. I think there is also a lot of intellectual snobbishness on the left – it was there in the idea of the intelligentsia a generation ago.
We need to find ways of not using our politics simply to serve our identity, which means we use phrases and words and vocabulary which separates us from other people. We must find the words that relate it to popular intuition. Make the simple links.
I do think there is a basis in intuitions people already have which we could give expression to. I think people in the past, if you think of socialists in the 1930s and 40s, didn’t commit themselves to that socialist project with the idea that a few tweaks to the tax and benefits system was what was going to make the world better. They committed themselves to that, as a very distant project often, for making the world a qualitatively better world for all of us – not just helping the poor out by asking the middle class to be more altruistic.
We need to be communicating as simply as possible an empirically based picture of a better world we should be moving towards – a world capable of inspiring people. The experience of work is going to be transformed by workplace democracy. The social environment, the quality of social relations, the strength of community, how much we trust each other – all improved by greater equality.
We also mention in our book that digitisation is another element with really exciting possibilities. Huge swathes of human creativity, art, music, computer games, software, films, can be reproduced almost without cost, perfectly.
So it moves a great sphere of human creativity from a private good, allocated according to incomes, to a public good that we all can share as part of our citizenship. We all ought to be able to read all the journals all the academic research for free. I am not saying we shouldn’t be paying all the people who produce all this stuff, but we shouldn’t be paying them in a way that restricts access to the value that they have created.
And so to bring the evidence to a wider public we will be launching a fundraising campaign for a documentary film. The idea is much like an inequality equivalent of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
We must work to make people feel a better quality of life is available to all of us. We’ve got to lay out the groundwork that makes us confident that another world is possible.
To donate to the Spirit Level Documentary or find out more about how you can help, go to www.thespiritleveldocumentary.com
The Equality Trust is at www.equalitytrust.org.uk