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The Richer, The Poorer charts the rollercoaster history of both rich and poor and the mechanisms that link wealth and impoverishment. This landmark book shows how, for 200 years, Britain’s most powerful elites have enriched themselves at the expense of surging inequality, mass poverty and weakened social resilience.
Stewart Lansley reveals how Britain’s model of ‘extractive capitalism’ – with a small elite securing an excessive slice of the economic cake – has created a two-century-long ‘high-inequality, high-poverty’ cycle, one broken for only a brief period after the Second World War. Why, he asks, are rich and poor citizens judged by very different standards? Why has social progress been so narrowly shared? With growing calls for a fairer post-COVID-19 society, what needs to be done to break Britain’s destructive poverty/inequality cycle?
Since the ‘migration crisis’ of 2016, long-simmering tensions between the Western members of the European Union and its ‘new’ Eastern members – Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary – have proven to be fertile ground for rebellion against liberal values and policies.
In this startling and original book Ivan Kalmar argues that Central Europe illiberalism is a misguided response to the devastating effects of global neoliberalism which arose from the area’s brutal transition to capitalism in the 1990s.
Kalmar argues that dismissive attitudes towards ‘Eastern Europeans’ in the EU as incapable of real democracy are a form of racism, and connected to recent racist attacks on migrants from the area to the West.
He explores the close relation between racism towards Central Europeans and racism by Central Europeans: a people white, but not quite.
to an independent tribunal were successful. 20 Among those most affected by the new rules were those claiming the new Employment and Support Allowance introduced for people with disabilities under Labour’s earlier ‘welfare-to-work’ push. This group, the most likely to be on long-term benefit, had to undergo new, computerised work-capability assessments. 21 These tighter conditions were in part about getting more claimants into work, but with a sharp rise in the number receiving disability benefits over time, were also about cost. The We Are Spartacus network of
early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits.” 25 Such repeated shaming, as in earlier decades, added to a wider process of ‘othering’ in which those on low incomes are treated as inferior to the rest of society. Old distinctions were dressed up in new language: ‘workers and strivers’ against ‘shirkers and skivers’, while the new hostility began to be extended to groups previously excluded from the ‘othering’ process. The unemployed were at fault for lacking a job, and those with disabilities for not
. Statistical darkness Although Labour fell well short of the radicalism of its manifesto, there were other improvements in social protection. As in 1965, one of the earliest acts of the first 1974 government was to honour a commitment to raise pension rates well above the increase in prices and earnings. There was also the introduction of statutory maternity leave and new benefits for those with disabilities. Labour also tried to remedy the inadequacy of the flat-rate state pension by introducing the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS), an update of a 1960s
for a variety of community perspectives to feed into decision making, with an emphasis on the participation of groups that are vulnerable to both climate impacts and to the impacts of climate policies themselves. This will require, as a minimum, vulnerability, and risk assessments to be conducted for communities across the city to assess the projected impacts, feeding in the lived experiences of individuals from these groups. Civil society groups in Bristol, including the Black and Green Ambassadors and the Bristol Disability Equality Forum, are already working to
, Cambridge : Open Book Publishers . Lankester , E.R. ( 1880 ) Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism , London : Macmillan . Marttinen , T.L. ( 2022 ) Eugenics, admixture, and multiculturalism in Twentieth-century northern Sweden: contesting disability and Sámi genocide , Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies , 1 ( 2 ): 233 – 61 . doi: 10.5070/C81258341 McLaren , A. ( 1990 ) Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885–1945 , Oxford : Oxford University Press . Merivirta , R. , Koivunen , L. and Särkkä , T. (eds) ( 2021 ) Finnish Colonial
