The Hannah Mitchell Foundation

The Hannah Mitchell Foundation has been formed to campaign within the labour movement for a new approach to regionalism that learns the lessons from past struggles and moves forward with a radical agenda. Its steering group includes Labour Party members, Greens and non-aligned socialists.
We are becoming a forum for the development of a distinctive democratic socialism in the north, rooted in our ethical socialist traditions of mutuality, co-operation, community and internationalism. Our focus will be to build the case for directly-elected regional government for the north based on the principles of democracy and subsidiarity, social equity and justice, and sustainable development.
The foundation is named in memory of an outstanding northern socialist, feminist and co‑operator who was proud of her working class roots and had a cultural as well as political vision. Born in rural north Derbyshire in 1871, Hannah Mitchell was an activist in the fledgling Independent Labour Party and the women’s suffrage movement. Her socialism was of the ethical, humanistic kind, which became so popular across the north where the ILP was strongest.
This kind of politics, in her words, ‘attracted a type of socialist who was not satisfied with the stark materialism of the Marxist school, desiring warmth and colour in human lives: not just bread, but bread and roses too. Perhaps we were not quite sound on economics as our Marxian friends took care to remind us, but we realised the injustice and ugliness of the present system. We had enough imagination to visualise the greater possibility for beauty and culture in a more justly ordered state.’
www.hannahmitchell.org.uk

I joined the Green Party ten years ago as I believed that it had something new and radical to say in British politics. I was also a founder member of Green Left, which was formed in 2006, and I helped draft the Headcorn Declaration, the group’s mission statement. One of my aims in doing so was to ensure that there was a radical left faction in the party constantly pushing it in a progressive direction – and providing a counterbalance to those in the party for whom pragmatism and ‘lifestyle environmentalism’ were the driving forces.

As an Irish person with strong links with some of the founding members of the Irish Green Party, I watched in horror as pragmatism and party centralisation led to both the entry of that party into a right wing coalition government and the resignation of many of those radical members in disgust. I wrote a critical article about this in 2009 entitled ‘The Rise and Fall of the Irish Greens’, which also predicted their eventual drubbing at the hands of the Irish people in the general election of 2011.

Many in the Green Party of England & Wales (GPEW) watched the story of the Irish Greens with horror, but were also convinced that it would never happen here, because the GPEW was one of the most left wing Green parties in Europe. 

But there was always a strong group at the centre of the Green Party, and supported by many of its councillors, who regarded Green Left as too left wing and whose vision was to replace the Lib Dems as the main centre party. The entry of the Lib Dems into government in 2010 strengthened the hand of this group.

The battle lines became obvious over the issue of local government budgets and cuts at the GPEW conference in spring 2011. At that point the Greens had not yet taken control of Brighton, but it was clearly on the mind of the party leadership.

An amendment was put to an anti-cuts policy motion by Green Left and some of the Young Greens. It called for local Green councils to fight the cuts and to defy the government by setting an illegal ‘needs budget’. Councillors were dragooned by the leadership to speak against it and finally it was defeated by just 3 votes.

For many of us this was the writing on the wall and a sign that should the Greens take Brighton, they would implement the cuts. It led to a real fall in morale among many of us on the left of the party.

In May 2011, only three months after the conference, the Greens took Brighton. Almost immediately the debate about the cuts budget began. Green Left organised many internal discussions on the issue and agreed to send a delegation to Brighton to argue the point with the Brighton Green councillors – this was only a few weeks before the budget deadline.

For me it was too little and too late – although I supported the initiative. I was pessimistic about the outcome and was proved right. I drew parallels with the story of the Irish Greens and referred to this in a speech I gave at a meeting of the London regional party in January. I quoted the comments of the new Irish Green Party chair, Roderic O’Gorman, following the defeat of the party in 2011 and the loss of all its parliamentary seats: ‘We became part of the political consensus. Our voters did not want us to be part of that consensus.’

Painfully aware of the impact of any cuts budget in Brighton on the national party’s reputation and on its relationship with the wider anti-cuts movement, as well as the new political movements such as Occupy, I supported a motion calling for a last minute debate with a Green councillor from Brighton on the budget there. The motion fell and the majority abstained, prepared to accept any decision reached by the Brighton councillors.

It was now clear to me that the iceberg was fast approaching the SS Green Brighton, with its consequent impact on the reputation of the Green Party nationally. The collision happened when the cuts budget was passed at the end of February. However, the budget passed was even worse than predicted and was the Labour-Tory version, which the Greens swallowed whole in order to remain in office.

A few days later at the party’s national conference, despite vigorous objections from Green Left, the party voted to support the Brighton decision. Pragmatism had defeated principle, realpolitik triumphed over radicalism.

I resigned on the same day. I saw no indication that those of us opposed to the decision would be able to remain radical opponents of the cuts agenda while our own elected members had sold the pass. I was always determined not to end up as a member of a small internal opposition in a political party which had moved away from its core principles, as happened in the Labour Party post-Blair. Some Green Left members have remained in the party, while others have joined Socialist Resistance or Respect. I have remained as an independent anti-cuts and anti-war activist.

It is certainly true that it was not only the cuts agenda in Brighton which led to my resignation, although that was the major issue. I also found a lack of honesty and consistency in the way that those leading the party were treating both its employees and its activists. This came to a head in the autumn of last year at the party conference in Sheffield. A highly respected and hard working party member, who held the post of head of media relations, was treated appallingly by the party leadership.

This included disciplinary action taken against him while he was ill, no proper consultation with staff and members, and a complete ignoring the of the party’s radical policies on workers rights and trade union support – using the services of a human resources consultant to undermine his position. As a trade unionist and campaigner for workers rights and social justice, I found it intolerable. Myself and other members, many from the Green Party Trade Union Group and Green Left, put a motion to the conference condemning the actions of the executive. Every effort was made by the party leadership to force the motion off the agenda. But despite their efforts, the motion was passed by a significant majority and the executive censured.

This did not go down well with the party’s leadership. Comments were made about the party’s activists and we were referred to in pretty damning terms. The conference decision was also pretty much ignored and the staff member in question was made redundant and forced to sign an agreement (which I was advised was probably illegal) that he could not stand for any office in the party for one year, so worried was the leadership about his popularity and the possibility of him upsetting the apple cart. All of this indicated a worrying hubris at the head of the party and a willingness to ignore the concerns of activists and members.

I believe that the Brighton situation is further evidence of this, with many at the head of the party arguing hysterically at the recent conference for tribalist support for the councillors and condemning criticism as disloyalty.

It does have to be said here that Caroline Lucas did not support the Brighton budgetary decision and said so openly at a fringe meeting at the party conference. I am certain that this indicates her concern at the apparent contradiction between her support for Occupy and calls for a radical anti-cuts politics, and the decision of the council in her own backyard.

When I resigned from the party, one prominent Green told me that I had too many principles. The disconnect in modern British and European politics is rather that there are too few principles. The real battle now underway is whether we can give politics new life and new meaning and to reconnect the millions in this country who no longer vote, and have given up on electoral politics completely, with the political process.

The Greens presented themselves as a party to the left of Labour (not too difficult one would have thought). Their policies are radical and many are worth supporting. But as with the situation in Ireland, consistency and veracity are called for. It is not enough to parrot truisms about being unable to challenge the status quo, no matter how urgent it is to do so. How can the Greens seriously challenge the corporate sector, the global corporations, climate change in the Arctic and the prospect of resource wars and famines, if they fall down at the first puff of wind from Eric Pickles and the Department for Communities and Local Government?

Vision requires courage, and courage requires mounting a challenge. On both, the Greens have been found sadly wanting.

This article is partly a response to a debate on the decisions of the Green-led council in Brighton, published in the latest issue of Red Pepper.

While she did little to refute the case of those who call the Green Party’s understanding of capitalism ’wishy washy’, she did have some interesting things to say about housing and pay ratios.

Below you can listen to the interview in five bite-size sections and read our commentary and responses under each one:

The City, anti-capitalism and the Occupy movement

It’s fair to say that Jenny was a little evasive over how she might begin to change the relationship between the City and the rest of London. She did say that she wanted do away with the City of London’s ‘Corporation’ status (which make it a borough with its own separate rules), but she gave little detail of how this might be achieved. She also mentioned supporting loans to small businesses.

On the Greens as an anti-capitalist party she said ‘we are anti-capitalist because we believe in fair trade not free trade’. According to Jenny, when the Greens’ leader Caroline Lucas said the party is anti-capitalist, what she meant was that she ’just wants a fairer society’. This doesn’t necessarily suggest, in and of itself, that the Greens are in any sense anti-capitalist at all. Jenny admits that this sounds ‘wishy washy’. (Perhaps we should ask Caroline?)

She wants this fair society because in an unfair society, ‘even the rich aren’t happy because you have riots’.

When she talked about the Occupy movement, we asked how she reconciled the contradiction between being part of this non-hierarchical movement that has spoken out against political parties and being part of the Green Party.

Jenny argued that party politics is a different route to the real democracy which the Occupy movement believes is the problem, and added that ‘you can’t get more non-hierarchical than the Green Party’.

Police and protest

On the police force, her big concept was politeness (Excuse me, sir, do you mind if I arrest you, knee you in the chest, strangle you and racially abuse you?) She also said the police should have showed kindness to Mark Duggan’s family.

In her final analysis, the problems could be solved by more lefties joining the force. Hardly heavyweight.

Transport

This is the area where Jenny seemed strongest. A Green mayor would reduce bus and tube prices and keep any future increases below the level of inflation, she said. This, she added, would be funded by putting up the congestion charge, particularly for the most polluting vehicles, then after three years introducing a pay-as-you-drive system.

Boris cut the road safety budget and this has lead to more injuries. Ken Livingstone, meanwhile, has offered Jenny the job of promoting walking and cycling.

She added that air pollution is currently shocking in London and that it’s way over the EU limits. She would ask that fines be imposed by the EU to help combat the problem.

Housing

This was another strong suit. Jenny described the current housing system as dysfunctional and called the government’s council housing sell off ‘stupid’.

She believes social cleansing is ‘already happening’ and that the government is ‘making it worse’. To tackle the problems, she wants to build 15,000 affordable new homes every year – but these would only be affordable for those on around £23,000 a year.

Those at the lower end of the income spectrum, she says, would be helped by encouraging councils to build more social housing. She would also encourage the use of community land trusts, which Boris promised but did not deliver.

Greens in power

In this final part we talked about the Greens’ record in office here in the UK.

She admits that the Greens have the luxury of opposition almost everywhere – but where it’s possible to act like all other political parties, they’ve done just that. She admits this in as much as she argues that the only other option than following the mainstream agenda is to resign.

She says the difference is that only the Green Party has a philosophy, and that this ensures that they stick to manifesto promises when in power. But at the moment we’re seeing the results of the Tories’ neoliberal philosophy – and the Lib Dems’ Orange Book philosophy too.

Finally she addresses the Greens’ performance in Brighton. She said it was important as it demonstrated the Greens’ ability to take tough decisions. And she defended the council on their decision not to challenge the government over its cuts agenda, adding that challenging it through an illegal budget would have been ‘good for no-one’.

This left the question of how the Greens are different once in office largely unanswered. She was, however, categorical when she said that council tax levels in London would be kept at current levels on her watch.

Who is involved?
TUSC has the backing of the RMT national executive and in London it has the backing of the London region of the FBU. TUSC has been endorsed by three trade union general secretaries: Matt Wrack (FBU), Bob Crow (RMT) and Steve Gillan (POA). Alex Gordon, the president of the RMT, is heading our list in London and it includes union executive members from Unison, NUT, UCU and the FBU as well as rank and file activists. The Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party are both involved along with the Independent Socialist Network, which was set up for the many socialists who are not members of any organisation.
It also has the support of Ken Loach, Paul Laverty, solicitor Imran Khan, Mike Mansfield QC and ex-soldier Joe Glenton amongst others.

What does it stand for?
TUSC is opposed to all the cuts. We reject the argument that some cuts are necessary.
We are against privatisation and outsourcing. We want the repeal of the anti-union laws. In contrast with Labour, we are not embarrassed to support workers on strike.
We are unashamedly socialist. We call for democratic public ownership of the banks and major industries and the renationalisation of all the industries and services sold off in the past. We want a democratic socialist society run in the interests of the millions, not the millionaires, so that production and services can be planned to meet the needs of all and not just a rich few.

What does it hope to achieve?
This time, TUSC hopes to win a seat on the London assembly. We need just 5 per cent to do that. The result in Bradford West shows that Labour cannot take its working-class voters for granted any longer. We hope to cause an upset in London. Of course, we’d like to win council seats elsewhere but that’s much more difficult for a small party like ours with very little profile, when it’s first past the post.

How does TUSC differ from the Greens?
In lots of ways but, most importantly, TUSC opposes all cuts. The Greens say they’re against cuts but they’ve just voted for a cuts budget in Brighton where they run the council. That’s useless. There is no point saying you’re against cuts, and marching against them, if you then go into the council chamber and vote for them. That’s what puts so many people off politics. Voters want representatives who will do what they promise. TUSC promises to fight and puts forward an alternative.
Secondly, we argue that capitalism cannot solve the problems of the economy. You cannot have a ‘good capitalism’. We argue for a different, socialist society. While some individual Green members might agree with us, that isn’t the position of the Green Party.

Isn’t a vote for TUSC a wasted vote?
No. I think it’s important to vote for the party whose polities you support, not just for the least bad option. The old argument that you must vote Labour to keep out the Tories is wearing very thin.
Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have said they won’t reverse the Tory cuts, that they support the public sector pay freeze and they support privatisation.
Labour was in government for 13 years and continued privatising. The anti-union laws remained intact and the privatisation of the NHS and education began. How can anyone think that they will behave differently next time?
Those who believe we need something different have to start somewhere. We can’t guarantee that TUSC will win, any more than the pioneers of the Labour Party could. But you’ll never win unless you make a start.
There is a real chance under proportional representation that we can get 5 per cent across London and win at least one seat in the assembly on 3 May. That would make a huge difference to the political debate in Britain. By standing and arguing our case we are helping to pull the entire debate to the left.

What does the future hold?
Lots of hard work. At the moment TUSC is a coalition. I would like to see it develop into a new, united socialist party. But that won’t be easy. The left is fragmented. It’s been a great achievement to get this coalition up and running and it will take time to build it. I would like to see TUSC branches all over the country, carrying out activity all the time and not just at elections. I expect more trade unionists and activists to draw the conclusion that we need to build an alternative to Labour. There will be lots of discussions about how best to do that.
We need to build a mass socialist party, which argues and fights for a democratic, socialist society. That requires a party with millions of members and supporters. It won’t happen overnight. But what we’re doing at the moment can be a beginning.

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