No Right Turn on the NZ National/ACT government giving themselves a pay rise during a recession and refusing to justify it.
It’s much the same situation here in the UK. Politicians have a deep sense of entitlement and non-accountability when it comes to raising their income and expenses levels, but are quite happy to spend millions of taxpayer’s money on aggressive advertising campaigns demonising low-income beneficiaries as a bunch of fraudsters.
Then try following the debate propaganda war on health care reform in the U.S.
Daring Fireball has a couple of pearlers:
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Part One
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Part Two
Update: Stephen Hawking:
I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS,” he told us. “I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.
Two things stand out as New Labour’s legacy: war of aggression (the “supreme” war crime) and the worst inequality of incomes since records began (another supreme crime considering the damage it inflicts on everybody).
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and their conspirators are little more than wolves in sheep’s clothing and they’ve had much of the Labour Party and its supporters hoodwinked for all these years.
Polly Toynbee — one of the hoodwinked—may stamp her feet now but all she ends up doing is laying bare how dysfunctional Britain’s quasi-democracy is.
Because the UK is still stuck in the dark ages of plurality voting (and New Labour broke its manifesto pledge of electoral reform) control of Britain will simply pass from one wolf to another.
It’s been a long time coming but two people, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, have finally put the numbers together and conclusively shown that modern social problems are substantially worse in those societies with wider gaps between rich and poor.
Any cursory look at the world tells you this but these are the first people to show it scientifically. This, I would suggest, is going to be huge. The implications are profound.
Will Hutton, writing for The Guardian:
Income inequality, they show beyond any doubt, is not just bad for those at the bottom but for everyone. More unequal societies are socially dysfunctional across the board. There is more teenage pregnancy, mental illness, higher prison populations, more murders, higher obesity and less numeracy and literacy in more unequal societies. Even the rich report more mental ill health and have lower life expectancies than their peers in less unequal societies.
They have produced a book on their findings called The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. And they’ve also created website, equalitytrust.org, to make the evidence they set out better known.
As John Carey points out in his review of their book in the Times: “It might be said that The Spirit Level merely formulates what everyone has always felt.”
Now maybe we can get on with changing a few things around here.
External links:
I never used to like Jamie Oliver’s TV programs. I thought he was a pompous git. I warmed up to him, however, with his Jamie at Home series, with all its home cooking and gardening.
Then, Tuesday night, came his latest big idea, Jamie’s Ministry of Food. It was some of the most intriguing political documentary I’ve seen on British TV: a millionaire cook from London in his expensive Jeep bumping up against the grinding reality of British people in poverty and their diets.
It seems to have everybody talking. Unfortunately, from my discussions with people, the Thatcherite/Blairite idea that it’s all about choice is alive and kicking. Not only does this belie the hard facts and statistics about been born into poverty, but it’s also not even necessarily rational (make sure to read the whole piece):
Elizabeth Dowler, professor of food and social policy at Warwick University who was recently involved in the government’s Low Income Diet and Nutrition survey, says the class differences are stark but complicated. “If you live for more than six months on the minimum wage or on benefits there is growing evidence you cannot afford to buy the food you need for health. It is still to do with class but it’s complex to unpick. Food is the flexible area that you cut back on when you are on a low income. Unlike council tax or utility bills, no one fines you if you don’t spend on food and no one takes your children away, so that’s what you cut, and you have a fag because that takes the hunger away.”
When you are on a low income you buy the kind of food that fills you up most cheaply. What may seem ignorant choices to others are in fact quite rational. Lobstein has calculated the cost of 100 calories of food energy from different types of food. The cheapest way to get your 100 calories is to buy fats, processed starches and sugars. A hundred calories of broccoli costs 51p, but 100 calories of frozen chips only cost 2p. Good-quality sausages that are high in meat but low in fat cost 22p per 100 calories, but “value” fatty ones are only 4p per 100 calories. Poor quality-fish fingers are 12p per 100 calories compared with 29p for ones made with fish fillet that are higher in nutrients. Fresh orange juice costs 38p per 100 calories, while the same dose of energy from sugary orange squash costs 5p.
Something that’s fascinated me as I’ve earned increasingly more over the years is how it gets more and more difficult to remember what it’s like not to earn money. You start doing things you swore you’d never do, such as forget that some of those you’ve got out for dinner with don’t necessarily have the same budget as you.
It will interesting to see where this program goes. Will it turn into a nasty reality TV show or will Oliver continue his journey towards the understanding that it’s not simply about “choice.”
External links:
Update, 4 October 2008: External links added.