The Real Corbyn Speech: "The Hope That Lives In All of Us"

Jeremy Corbyn delivered his first speech as Labour Party leader today. It was passionate though reasonable, showing him as an authentic person, caring and decent. On a Sky TV survey designed to pick holes in him, 53% of those watching reported that they could see him as Prime Minister, while an ITN News online survey chalked up an 89% approval rate at one point.

Needless to say, the media were quick to ignore these figures. Instead, the BBC's Danny Savage spent the afternoon in a pub in Leeds where he found a man who said the liked Corbyn but he "is far too decent." Shocking.Clearly he prefers to be ruled by men capable of gross indecency, perhaps committed while joining a millionaires' mutual appreciation society at university.

Similarly, Sky decided to wheel on a PR "specialist" to look at some photos of Corbyn in his office. Breathtakingly, she managed to invent all sorts of meanings into meaninglessness - his white shirt apparently was to show voters he was organised, while a fruit bowl on his table was supposedly planned to portray him as hard working (eating on the go, no lunch!). To be fair, she did concede that maybe in fact it was all just genuine stuff, especially when she looked at his red socks and sandals, before she toddled off, perhaps for her own expensive lunch.

But while his speech today, importantly dwelling on his values, was a good start, perhaps the speech he made in the video below during his barnstorming leadership campaign is The Speech that sums up what Corbyn is about, and what all of us in the anti-austerity, pro-equality movement are about. Passionate, angry at times, dissecting the gross inequality of the betrayed democracy we live in, and the desperate world around us, this is his Political Testimony, a cri de coeur which powerfully expounds on what is wrong and what could replace it.

Watch it, share it, then go and work for it, "the hope that lives in all of us."

Taking the Trickle

Yeh, this is right! It's on the interweb! Don't you know? Huh! Losers!

I know since the story broke in the USA about the white woman who claimed to be black there has been a global debate about societal categorisation and the limits to self-designation. To what extent can you declare yourself to be something others may not believe is valid?

Well, whatever the merits or demerits of the US cases, I've decided to try it for myself here in the UK.

So, from next month, I am self-designating as a multi-millionaire.

I'm not, as such, a multi-millionaire, but why should that matter - don't judge me!

My new tax adviser? What do you think?

So time for me to enjoy the opportunity to:

(a) not pay my taxes

(b) get away with not paying my taxes

(c) be thanked for not paying my taxes

(d) be encouraged to not pay tax in the future

(e) continue to receive the same, or even better, public services as the "little people" who pay tax (c) Leona Helmsley 1989

 

Wow, what a great look I'll have!

(f) be given a wadge of taxpayers' money if I run out of my own cash (even though at that point I'm technically not a millionaire)

No matter my skills, or lack of them, or crass stupidity, I can expect to be fawned upon, listened to, offered stuff and excused for all sorts of anti-social behaviour and callousness.




Breakfast will be brilliant!

My breakfast!

And I won't need to rush out to work afterwards - because other people will be doing that for me! My people!

I'll also not have to carry cash or pay for services from people who should be glad to merely imagine I am trickling down upon them.

I'll certainly be taking the trickle.

As for the rest of you... tighten your belts and stay at home on Saturday.

You ain't see this!

1905 Again

"Well, we don't need to...it's all over..."

Ruling classes:  faces change but the song remains the same

The Tory Party speaker on the Scottish referendum programme, sometime in the wee small hours of Friday 19th September, could not have been more brazen as he dismissed off hand a question about how soon the "devomax" powers promised by the Westminster leaders would be delivered following the NO vote. Subsequently, his colleagues from the Lib Dems, Labour and his own party stumbled to correct him, assuring people that of course the incredibly tight timescale would indeed be honoured.

But already it hasn't been, nor will it be. Because it was, from the start, a cynical lie. Nothing has been brought forward as promised. Each of the three parties has come up with at least one, in some cases more, sets of differing proposals, while understandably some English MPs have begun to question even more the already existing imbalance in the so called West Lothian question - whereby Scottish MPs can vote on matters affecting England when English MPs have no equivalent say on Scottish matters devolved to the Scottish Parliament. The whole thing is gridlocked and, as many including this blog had predicted, it is almost certain to disappear as fast as snow in summer as the political crisis moves to UKIP and the future careers of David Cameron and Ed Milband.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, the SNP has seen its membership rocket to over 60,000, so that  it is now the third largest UK party. The Scottish Greens, in less than a fortnight, saw their membership more than treble to over 6,000, while hundreds of others joined the Scottish Socialists. At the same time, the cultural movements Radical Independence, the National Collective and Common Weal continue to grow and promote a social collectivism that has become a political awakening at the grassroots unprecedented since the rise of the trade unions a hundred years ago.

Across the rest of the UK, there are similar if as yet less precipitate progressive advances - the Greens have grown by nearly 50% in the last year to over 20,000 members, while campaign groups like 38 degrees, the 999 March for the NHS and Global Justice Now mobilise thousands of people to oppose the privatisation of public health and the corporate coup d'etat promised by the TransAtlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP). Building on previous campaigns by Occupy and UKuncut, these extra-parliamentary groups are starting to shine some light on the hollow heart of our rotten, so-called democracy. Many are set to join trade unions on the TUC Day of Action on 18th October - Britain Needs A Payrise - which offers a signficant chance to put social justice back on the political agenda.

Getting equality, or inequality, back on the political agenda is key to campaigning for transition to a fairer, more sustainable society and, crucially, an economics that works for people and planet. For, just as Labour talks about squeezing public services only a tad less harshly than the Tories, and the Tories promise to cut benefits for the poorest and taxes for the richest, Britain is firmly set to move from its already appalling second to an eye-wateringly shameful first place in terms of being the most unequal society in the so-called developed world. Never has our country been wealthier; but never, possibly not even in the Middle Ages, has that wealth been more obscenely and destructively skewed into the hands of a tiny, tiny number of super-rich people.

In the latter days of the Roman Empire and the Royal Court of Versailles, the elite excluded themselves from more and more taxes while imposing ever greater burdens on the rest of society, pillaging the state for ever more destructive privileges. Now, in this century, we see the very people who offshore their accounts and avoid taxes on billions of profits from state-private contracts rewarded with garish medallions and ludicrously outdated Imperial titles, or with seats in the unelected House of Lords. (And still one of them complains their £300 a day allowance is not enough to satisfy her needs).

The corollary of this isn't about the politics of envy - although why should we not be angry about such revoltingly unequal outcomes? - but about its destructive effect on our social fabric and ordinary people's lives. As Hobbes explained four centuries ago in Leviathan and as The Spirit Level demonstrated so conclusively just 5 years ago, more unequal societies have greater violence, crime, ill health and unhappiness than those with a fairer distribution of wealth. From this, people in a poorer but more equal country like Cuba live longer and happier lives than those living in the superficially more prosperous but far more inegalitarian USA. The only response to poverty in this paradigm is seeking ever more economic growth, regardless of the often irreversible damage done to the environment and without addressing the need for fairer distribution - left unchallenged, the utter conceit of "trickledown" economics will only end when it eats itself, and all of us, in the process.

Thomas Hobbes - he "got it" back in 1651

But it seems our leaders don't get this. Referendum over, forget the crowds and forget the promises. The conventional wisdom likewise for three upcoming English by-elections, where the dangerously populist UKIP is challenging, is that protesting voters will dutifully revert to type at the General Election next May.

Our intellectually sclerotic, emotionally barren Masters may be disappointed. They may like to think that they can smuggly mouth a few platitudes like the "no more business as usual" mantra so beloved but long forgotten by errant bankers from 2009, but it seems people are listening less and less.

Possibly sensing this, their response is to look not to democracy, but to repression - with the Tories talking about powers to imprison people deemed to be anti-democratic while simultaneously proposing to abolish human rights legislation. The irony is of course lost on the dourly unimaginative Theresa May, but given that the existing Domestic Extremists register already includes thousands of people such as a Green Party Peer with no criminal record whatsoever and an 87 year old pensioner put under surveillance for going on public marches, the Establishment's definition of anti-democratic may well be very different to the common understanding of the word. Like similar American legislation, it is more likely to be used in defence of big business than any real threat to the illusion that increasingly passes for British democracy.

In 1905, facing an existential threat to his regime from the St Petersburg Soviet, a spontaneously created body of workers and soldiers, Czar Nicholas II conceded a Duma, an elected legislative parliament with near universal suffrage. The liberal parties, such as the Kadets and Octobrists, rushed to sign up, cutting the ground from under the feet of the more radical parties like the Social Revolutionaries that warned it was a ploy to buy time. The Soviet, latterly chaired by Leon Trotsky (at that time not a Bolshevik), was surrounded by Czarist troops and its leaders arrested, tried and imprisoned or exiled. Meanwhile, after reluctantly tolerating but taming the Duma for a few years, the Czar replaced it with an essentially consultative body and returned to business as usual.

We know how that turned out.

1909 Russian revolutionary view of contemporary society. Plus ca change...?

Greed Ain't Good - for the Bankers

Social media is a wonderful route to expose and explore stories that are perhaps not brushed under the carpet as such, but certainly not highlighted by the mass (owned) media.

Rumbling along on a number of progressive and leftwing forums of late has been the rise in suicides among traders in the finance world, where traders in particular are nearly 40% more likely to kill themselves than the average. Thirteen men and women have killed themselves in almost as many months, often with no clear reason or warning. Three have been from JP Morgan, but others have been unconnected, their ages have ranged widely from 28 to 58, and so the cause behind this self-destructive trend seems elusive.

And yet...

Imagine being at heart maybe a relatively decent human. Imagine being pushed by parents or peers, or simply attracted to the idea of doing well, and entering their world with its twisted morality, its total competitiveness, its aggression... And the ingrained sense of total personal failure if you drop out... It's not a big step from there to standing in front of a speeding train.

In "The Spirit Level", Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, set out a convincing range of evidence that more equal societies are happier ones - not only for the poor, but for the better off as well. And not just because in a less desperate society there is less crime or ill health, but because it is also more co-operative and community-oriented. With less pressure to relentlessly compete and with traits like aggression generally disapproved of in the workplace and elsewhere, people from all walks of life can feel a little more at ease with each other and, crucially, with themselves.

Contrast that with the world of banking and high finance: with fortunes and record-breaking bonuses to be had at the rapid click of the mouse, buying and selling relentlessly, building up and tearing down financial empires regardless of the impact on real people and their livelihoods, facing pressure to achieve, to produce "results", any human would ultimately begin to struggle. Except perhaps for the psychopaths who happily inhabit such worlds, amplify them and thrive on a culture of dog-eat-dog.

And indeed, using the psychopath tests developed by Babiak and Hare, these traits are often confused with the traditional traits of "good" workplace leadership - aggression is equated to decisiveness; manipulative game-playing to interpersonal skills; lack of empathy to being able to make difficult decisions; disregarding social and legal norms becomes imaginatively go-getting, and so on. Consequently, among management roles, the incidence of psychopathy increases from the normal 1% of the population to 3%. A risk-taking, rule-breaking, high materially-rewarding sector like finance and trading especially is almost like wonderland for someone of such ilk.

Does this, then, explain the rash of suicides? It is impossible to say. But what is certain is this: even if 3%, or even 6%, of traders or their managers are psychopaths, that still means that over 90% are not. But if the culture is one favouring and shaped and reinforced by psychopathic traits, it might be little wonder if others might eventually struggle and wilt. Failure to compete, to meet targets - their wealth doubtless insulates them, but on a psychological level only to a degree.

Get out then, we might tell them - if they are not psychopaths, they should know better; and certainly given the soaring bonuses paid out to so many of them, it is a far easier option than for people in most other occupations to do. But if someone has been become inured to such a way of life, accustomed to it so that they cannot imagine alternatives, the prospect of leaving may well be overwhelming. And, at the end of the day, they are simply flesh and blood themselves.

In The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the protagonist, Owen, reflects on the excesses of the rich, but does not condemn them - they are, he concludes, simply playing out their part in capitalism. In this sense, capitalist society can destroy a banker almost as dispassionately as it destroys an unemployed or disabled person, though, of course, in far fewer numbers and with much more coverage than someone driven to take their lives by the prospect of not being able to repay a loan shark. In this twisted world, by turns forcing and encouraging people to compromise with their humanity and deal with the devil, no one, ultimately, is secure or able to be entirely content. Money can buy you happiness, except, of course, that it can't.

And yet, with bankers and benefits claimants alike taking their lives rather than continue living in the capitalist world we are told is the only choice, Wilkinson and Pickett's thesis seems confirmed. It may be difficult to feel much sympathy for greedy bankers struggling to cope with the culture they are steeped in. But a more equal society, a less acquisitive world, one where co-operation is prized over competition, or where, as the late Bob Crow succinctly put it, need replaces greed as the main societal driver - this would indeed be to the benefit of all.

Apart of course for the psychopaths. But we don't listen to them. Do we?

)

On The Big Red Bus to Oblivion

Two stories and images have struck home more this week than any sleazy Lib Dem shenanigans, UKIP weather forecasts or Putin lectures on sexual tolerance.

One was the report of a near riot outside a 99p shop in Wrexham in the Welsh borderlands, where police had to be called when an "everything 50p" sale came to a premature end, to the anger of a number of customers. Some wags have sought to make light of it, but there is nothing funny here - we live in a consumer society and we are measured by our possessions. How tragic and desperate that some people in what is still the fourth richest society in the world are reduced to tears of rage when the cheap items sold by these outlets go up by 49p. But what the would-be jokers miss is that these reductions likely represented to some cash-strapped victims of bankers' austerity a brief chance to be able to buy something and own it, perhaps to feel a little more like some of their more affluent fellow citizens.

Fellow citizens, if that's what they still are, like Steve Smith, founder of Poundland, a chain of similar shops, selling off everything at £1 per item. All these little brass coins gradually added up for Steve, who sold off his empire for £50 millions and at 51 has retired to a 13 bedroom mansion with its own swimming pool and in-house pub. Citing his own poor roots and determined hard-working, Steve epitomises the capitalist dream, the handful of genuine rags-to-riches stories used to sell the system to everyone else. If only everyone had his acumen, energy and luck (the latter random event is bizarrely praised as a virtue in this fairytale narrative), well by this time next year, we would all be millionaires, to coin a phrase. Except, of course, there are neither the pound coins, nor the indoor swimming pools, to go round.

Running on empty - the double-decker of privilege

But Steve Smith is small beer compared to the people represented by the other image that has jarred this week. This was of a bus - a red, double-decker London routemaster with enough seating to hold 85 people. A big bus?  Perhaps, until it was explained that it was being used to represent the findings of research by Oxfam that demonstrate that a mere 85 people own more wealth than the poorest half of the human race combined.

Yes, that's right: 85 people own more than the poorest 3,650,000,000 (or so) humans on the Earth COMBINED. That big number includes the billion or so people who go to bed hungry each night - as well as the 85 children who die from hunger every 15 minutes.

This is in a world where there is enough food, right now, to feed not just the actual global population of 7.3 billion, but rather one of over ten billion people more than adequately. However, a socio-economic system based on mind-bogglingly skewed inequality, unaccountable private ownership and full-on profit-seeking will never be efficient enough nor sufficiently humane to put the needs of ordinary humans first. If there were any doubts about that, they were fully and finally laid to rest when we saw in recent years speculation by international traders in so-called food futures drive the price of basic food staples up and their supply down in several poor countries, leading to real hunger and bloody riots.

This is a world now where everything is a commodity - from Nestle seeking to patent natural plants like fennel to the ongoing war of attrition by the biotech industry to copyright even naturally occurring human DNA. If corporations want to own our genetic blueprint and the natural patterns of our food, how on earth can we ever sanely view their intent through any sort of benevolent prism? Or believe any half-hearted claims of corporate social responsibility for the common good to be anything but expired, self-serving marketing ploys?

It is not tenable - as with the banking crisis, the peak oil squeeze and the mounting tidal wave of personal debt, the current state of affairs is an economic system incrementally spiraling out of control - whether over a few years or a decade or two is perhaps the only real question. Like some great oil tanker stuck on auto-pilot and headed for ever-nearer reefs, the owners and officers are jumping ship. Strikingly akin to the off-worlders in the film Elysium, they are leaping into their sanitised, hermetically sealed bubbles of privilege, whether in countryside mansions or on hubristic artificial world-shaped islands off Dubai, perhaps hoping to it sit out when the crash comes, insulated from the mess they have made.

So let them board their big red bus. It's running on empty and headed to oblivion.

But we don't need to go along too. Because we really, really don't need them. We can do better. Let's wave them off, and start again. Like we meant to all along.

Move along please - nothing to laugh at here.

The "Deserving Rich" - A Confederacy of Dunces

Many years ago, I witnessed an evangelical church service which culminated in the pastor asking the congregation to thank God for blessing one of their number with a business so successful that he had now taken delivery of his second Daimler motor vehicle. It might seem an indulgence to have not one but two such cars, he explained, but by providing in this way, The Lord ensured that there would be more comfortable seats for this Chosen One (and his similarly blessed spouse) to drive elderly congregants to the Sunday Service.

The rich run the world. It has been this way for generations. Once upon a time, religion was used (as it often still is) to sanctify the status quo with Divine Approval, or even Divine Inevitability. To challenge your Lord was to challenge The Lord - Church and State, Indivisible, as Emperor Constantine appreciated when he adopted monotheism at the height of a bloody six-sided Roman civil war back in the fourth century.

Religion has declined somewhat since then in its ability to reinforce the established social order and indeed at times religious people have led the charge against it. So now, in 21st century, the defenders of the beleaguered, de-regulated market capitalism which our entire planet is relentlessly subjected to have to come up with some other means of validating their bloated share of its resources. God won't cut it - and even the Pope is signalling some measure of distaste for the sheer scale of the skew of wealth on an increasingly resource-scarce planet. While one billion people exist in permanent hunger, just one thousand corporations and their shareholders dominate the world: the top 10% of the world's population own nearly 90% of the world's assets; the bottom half - nearly three billion people, share 1% - just one per cent - between them. And within the 10% richest, the skew is even more marked - the 1% at the very top own nearly half of everything. These figures are from 2000 - in the last ten years, things have got even worse.

Advocates of this inequality have, of course, long argued that it is the only workable way of doing things; that it harnesses the allegedly innate greed and competitiveness in human nature and, somehow, the agglomeration of lots of individuals pursuing their own selfish desires to better themselves over their rivals somehow benefits the common good. The rich would generously "trickle down" their wealth to the rest of us (somehow that sounds marginally better than "the masters would throw scraps from their tables").

To oil this process, everything becomes fair game - a potential commodity. Anything remotely scarce can be priced and bought and sold - and, as we see in a world where food and water are coming under increasing pressure in terms of supply, even the absolute essentials of life are now mercilessly viewed as items for speculation and profit. Water is not a human right, says the former CEO of Nestle as his company wipes out rivers in India for their bottling plants; while Monsanto owns 93% of India's cotton seed against a backdrop of a silent Armageddon - nearly a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995; one farmer every thirty minutes. Indeed, a tidal wave of mental health problems and rise in suicides has been increasingly a hallmark of global capitalism in country after country. iPhone users will be relieved to know that Apple have at least installed "suicide nets" on some of their buildings to stop their staff throwing themselves out of top storeys.

So much for the common good.

Yet with the banking crisis perhaps not quite overthrowing the system but shocking it so severely and at such a direct cost to hundreds of millions of taxpayers around the world, the proponents of free market capitalism may well be beginning to feel a little anxious. Not only it the system coming under growing strain, but more and more people are openly questioning its sustainability and, even, its morality. Rich individuals' ability to avoid tax is well attested, while fewer and fewer companies pay corporation taxes via perfectly legal methods such as off shoring and using tax havens. Moreover, within companies, we no longer exist in a world where CEOs might earn 10, 20 or even 50 times the lowest paid in their company - the figures now reel off in the hundreds; or, in the case of Wal Mart, the CEO, the appropriately named Mr Duke, earns 1,034 times the median salary of his company workers: the lowest paid rate is not on record.

For a long time, the orthodox view was, of course, that we had to put up with these excesses; that without such captains of industry well rewarded for their efforts steering the means of wealth creation forward, we would all be the poorer and whole industries, even nations, would be ruined. But 2008/9 and the rank inefficiencies and corrupt practices exposed across the world in boardroom after boardroom put paid to that myth. Stretching back to the origins of capitalism, the job creating, risk taking entrepreneur was prized as the person who would create employment and prosperity for others. In essence, this was always a myth, though a powerful one - Robert Tressell in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists written in 1911 illustrated repeatedly how deeply held this belief was even among the starving poor.

But it became a transparent lie when the risks being taken were clearly with other people's money, often the pensions and savings of individuals or the debts of the very poorest, and the people taking the risks were seen to be little but talentless, self-regarding gamblers. That most of them have endured and continue to pay themselves large bonuses and are currently busy inventing ways to bypass new EU rules on bonus caps, shows the tenacity of the system.

And yet, with the myths exposed, if the system is to remain validated, a new talisman or fetish needs to be established to excuse and sanctify the status quo.

Enter Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, earlier this week. His case was that IQ, or intelligence quotient, the measure of an individual's ability to understand concepts and problem solve, means that inequality is inevitable. With 16% of "our species" with low IQ measures and 2% with super-high ones, it is apparently inevitable that "if you shake the cornflake packet, some of the cornflakes will reach the top." It was an odd proposition - as far as I am aware, IQ tests , which are rather debatable measures in themselves, are not used to appoint CEOs and senior staff of big corporations; which is not to say that the occasional (but very different) psychometric test isn't thrown a little wildly into the mix from time to time. And of course, EQ, or emotional intelligence, the ability to empathise with other humans, is an ever more remote requirement for such positions: in fact, quite the opposite traits are often prized, as demonstrated in Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work, by Babiak and Hare. But, whatever we live in, it is not a meritocracy and does nothing to explain or excuse inequality of outcomes in the workplace or wider society.

After this supposedly clever, even allegedly intelligent, analogy, Johnson followed up with an argument echoing the "greed is good" speech of the fictitious villain Gordon Gekko character in the movie Wall Street. Although he did issue a sop to the need for wealth to be voluntarily shared more than in the past, Johnson went on to argue, as Gekko's character did, that greed is the driver of humanity.

Quite aside from the unsustainability of a world filled with billions of relentlessly self-interested, greedy humans, this argument, repeated so many times by the wealthy over the last three centuries since the emergence of a market economy, is contradicted completely by the realities of human experience down throw tens of thousands of years of existence. Archaeology and other human science research has shown pretty conclusively that the most inherent tendency among both humans and other primates is to co-operate and empathise with each other. Without this, society would never have come into existence - we might at the very best have hoped to still roam the Savannah in small groups of bickering sociopaths. But more likely, we would have died out from eating each other many aeons ago.

Our planet has sustained capitalism for barely three centuries, a blink in the eye of both its existence and humanity's. It is not our natural way of doing things, nor is it sustainable - although severe damage has been done to our world, with fairer distribution of resources, one billion people would not need to go to bed hungry, and we would not be driven to rape our world of its diminishing natural resources. Greater equality, pooling and sharing resources and nurturing our inherent sympathy and empathy for other people need to be at the heart of both our social and economic cultures. None of these can be achieved through an economic system centred on maximising private profit.

The rich both now and in the past argue that a fairer society is not practicable - but then, of course, they would, wouldn't they? A bit like the guilt-ridden Church at the start of this piece, they know deep down that what they are doing is wrong, is not working. But, seduced by their own greed, they project the same motives to everyone else, dismissing any calls for change, for redistribution, as mere cries of envy, rather than pleas for justice. Let them eat cake, indeed. Or go to food banks - except now some of Johnson's bloated colleagues are even suggesting these encourage poor people to be feckless.

The result is a society twisted into unnatural conflict and self-harm. Although we have never had more wealth in Britain, for example, we are told we cannot afford community - young people must pay for their own education, old people are a burden and social services of all kinds, from care homes to libraries, must be cut or tendered out to profit-seekers. There is no such thing as society - only individuals, competing and coveting each other.

For three hundred years, we have been told again and again that we cannot manage without this system and the people who run it and who benefit wildly disproportionately by all measures, whether on the basis of ability, contribution or need.

But in the world we face now, with diminishing resources and environmental degradation, with food and water under pressure and our seas acidifying at a truly terrifying rate, the Earth will not sustain capitalism for another three centuries - even three decades seems increasingly unlikely.

The plain, simple truth is that we can no longer afford it.

Elysium Now: One Planet, Two Worlds

So it is Hollywood not arthouse, but the movie "Elysium", from the Director of the powerful "District 9" provides a thought-provoking as well as action-packed story, in the best traditions of science fiction. Similarly, as with all good sci fi, it is as much about today as it is about any future.

The premise is that by 2154, the world has become so overpopulated and over polluted and, by implication, so dangerously unequal, that the richest have literally fled the Earth to a gigantic orbital space station known as Elysium (the name of heaven in Greek mythology). Now we know what the bankers mean when they say they will go somewhere else if we make them pay their taxes.

There, in a santised world of great mansions and green gardens, the wealthy truly live in a bubble, their every need met by the resources sucked up from the poor on Terra Firma below. It's a sort of Stepford in Space, or maybe an off world Kensington, populated by smug people  who can live in ignorance of the unwashed below - on a rare visit to a factory on the surface, the Elysium-dwelling owner rebukes his foreman for not covering his mouth when he speaks to him. This revolting elite is able to live for a highly extended lifespan thanks to medical technology that they only allow to be available to themselves - a simple scan can wipe out cancer and apparently even exploded skulls can be mended in a few minutes. In sharp contrast, down on Earth, queues form at rare public health centres where the simplest medical treatment is rationed and staff have to work shifts lasting several days at a time.

The parallels are strikingly and clearly deliberate - in our current austerity driven western societies, at the very time scientific advances are creating all sorts of terrifyingly amazing possibilities for medical advance (including huge expansion of life expectancy), the economics of inequality are ensuring that even basic medical treatment is gradually becoming less readily available to many, even in the wealthiest societies on Earth. And it is medical need that drives the film's main protagonist, Max da Costa, played by Matt Damon. After a work accident caused by punishing schedules and faulty equipment, he is dying of radiation poisoning, while his former girlfriend's daughter is in the final stages of leukaemia. On Elysium, technology could save them in moments, but on the surface of the Earth, living in a planet-wide slum, their only prospect is death.

And so the adventure begins: with a strong performance from Damon and an all too brief role for Jody Foster as the pugnacious Defence Chief of Elysium, a struggle commences for control of the celestial Pleasuredome. The scripting is elegant and amusing by turns and the characterisation strong - and the denouement, without spoiling anything, will make you believe again in the great potential of humanity.

Keeping true to original American film tradition, there are themes around insurrection and injustice, but perhaps one unsurprising fault is the almost inevitable central premise that just one person can make all the difference - though to be fair Matt does get a bit of help from his friends.

But then it wouldn't be Hollywood if, instead of the hero's dash into space, there had to be a committee meeting followed by a card vote and an impartial selection process for a balanced team of co-insurrectionists.

Nor would it be half as enjoyable to watch.

Choking on the Crumbs: Breadline Britain

Britain's jobless fell by 5,000 this week. In our recession hit country, a mere two and a half million souls are officially out of work. The BBC trumpeted the Coalition spin that, as public sector jobs have fallen to their lowest number in over a decade, new jobs have been created in the private sector. "The Government's prediction that the private sector will compensate for the public cuts is coming true," said the gushing economics correspondent on the News channel.

Is it really? Not likely.

For not only are we not comparing like jobs, we are not comparing like terms either. Most of the public sector jobs cut have been full-time; most of the new private sector are part-time, temporary and often lower paid. Office of National Statistics figures show that at the end of 2012, full-time employment was 378,000 lower than in April to June 2008, the first quarter of the 2008/09 recession. Part-time employment was 572,000 higher comparing the same period.

Factor on top of this the findings published today that, on average, British workers are more than six per cent worse off in real terms than six years ago due to several years of pay freezes and lower than cost-of-living increases and it is little wonder that we remain in recession. This is unprecedented and in the same week that the Chief Executive of RBS, Stephen Hester, has resigned with a package of £5.6 million as a payoff for his failure in post - a situation he admits even his mother finds distasteful, but he's not listening to her never mind the rest of us.

A further squeeze has come from the Government, determined to cut a benefits bill which is constantly misrepresented as having increased because of some mysterious surge of disability and worklessness. In truth, while pensioners continue to cost over 50% of the £160 billions social security costs, less than 15% goes to disabled people and less than 5% is paid to unemployed people. Among non-pensioners, the biggest costs are things like housing benefit and child support for working families, their living costs squeezed between low wages and deregulated rents. In-work poverty has increased significantly since 2008. In a report published yesterday, Department of Work & Pensions' own statistics demonstrated that nearly one million more people fell into poverty in the Coalition's first full year in office - and of the 300,000 children living in families that fell into poverty in that time, all of them - every single one - was a working household.

There are two steps the Government could take tomorrow that would save the taxpayers billions and release money into the economy to get Britain working again.

The first would be to increase the national minimum wage to the living wage level - this is currently £7.45 per hour outside London and £8.55 inside the capital as opposed to the NMW's £6.19 (less if you are under 22 years of age). It is calculated on the basis of what most families need their breadwinners to earn to free them from poverty. It would significantly reduce the need for the State to pay benefits (effectively subsidising greedy employers) and improve the spending power and lives of millions of the poorest in our society. The deficit would be reduced - winners all round. Just as the introduction of the NMW did not lead to the increased unemployment that some right-wingers predicted before its introduction, the living wage would similarly challenge only the scale of currently massive profits and dividends, not employment levels.

Source: Guardian Newspaper

The second step would be to reintroduce controls on rents, which were abolished by the last Conservative regime, and outlaw buy-to-rent mortgages (which only became permissible in the late 1990s). The combination of cheap buy-to-let loans and no controls over the rents charged led to landlords expanding their property portfolios and pushing their rent levels up and up knowing that they would be covered by housing benefit from the state in millions of cases. With fewer people able to afford to buy houses, the numbers renting have increased by over one fifth in the last decade, many of them needing support with their costs as rents increased. Consequently the cost of housing benefit has risen substantially, reaching over £16 billions last year.

However, in response, the current Government, rather than capping rents, has capped the support net of housing benefit, which has simply caused disruption and misery for hundreds of thousands of low paid workers and their families, who have been left with a choice of somehow finding the cash to make up the gap between their housing benefit and rent, or moving to cheaper, inferior accommodation. Many of the poorest in London have been moved out of the city altogether to depressed areas like Newcastle where rents are lower, but jobs are even scarcer. It is a wicked policy that destroys lives and hope, even driving people out of work.

A final step would of course to be to make companies pay their fair share of corporation tax - although the HMRC says it has recouped over £20 billions of unpaid tax by challenging major corporations over the last three years, this makes for an average of £7 billions per annum - on some estimates, as highlighted by Green MP Caroline Lucas, barely one twentieth of the tax that is dodged each year.

But, of course, much of the austerity agenda is not about financial necessity at all - rather it is politically driven, a red herring to provide the excuse the Tories and their allies want to dismantle what is left of the welfare state and entrench the power and privilege of the rich elite which sponsors them and which has in effect bought up our democracy, our country and our planet.

Austerity Britain - still full of wealth, but in fewer and fewer hands. Growth will not solve the economic crisis - as our whole world moves towards increasing resource crises and challenges to economic sustainability, the traditional process of "trickledown" economics, with just enough crumbs falling from the tables of the rich to almost satisfy the less well off, will no longer work. Only a shift in the economic paradigm, a decisive move to a society of communal ownership of resources and a fair distribution of wealth will, in the long run, solve this deepest and most intractable of economic crises for many decades.

"We Ain't Burglars. We're Hungry" - the Genius of Charlie Chaplin

Plus ca change et plus la meme...

"Modern Times" was written and directed by Charlie Chaplin and released in 1936; but true to its title, it is as relevant now as then and stands as a testament to the genius of a man stereotyped in the popular imagination as the clown Tramp, ducking swinging ladders and falling into water troughs. Even more than later great offerings, this film shows just how deeply thoughtful and humane his work was, taking huge risks to bring to the commercial screen a story that partly through its comedic nature but also because of its very serious undertones, powerfully decried the injustice that so affected his view of the world.

It was Chaplin's final silent movie and co-starred his then-partner, Paulette Goddard. Inspired by a combination of a tour of Depression-era Europe and a long conversation on industrialisation with Mahatma Gandhi, it was also his first and decidedly most overtly political film, and part of the case against him when Senator Eugene McCarthy hounded him out of the USA nearly twenty years later. A deeply humane film, combining slapstick comedy with powerful political commentary, Modern Times tells the story of the iconic Tramp character struggling with life in an increasingly frenetic, competitive and commodified world. He is a cog in a giant machine - literally, in one memorable sequence in the steel mill he works in at the beginning.

Modern Times was filmed not only at the height of the Depression, which ruined so many lives and ultimately provoked global conflict; it was also crafted not long after the advent of Taylorism, which in the name of efficiency reduced the human input in manufacturing to the simplest and fewest individual steps possible. F W Taylor, lauded by modernists from Henry Ford to Vladimir Lenin, advocated a world where there was little creativity or individual realisation: a worker would perform repetitive tasks ad nauseam in order to obtain mass efficiencies of scale for their employer. Divorced from the ultimate product of their labour, deskilled from any craft or profession, and completely and rapidly replaceable, the Taylorite worker would be docile, obedient and cheap. Ford adapted this theory only in as far as paying high enough wages that he could create and sustain a market for what was produced - a useful and now largely forgotten concept, but one that nevertheless remained in essence as exploitative and debilitating as Taylor's more fundamentalist approach.

And so, after an initial sequence where a herd of sheep is juxtaposed with a crowd of people heading to work, we see Chaplin's character driven to distraction as he repeatedly tightens bolts on an assembly line while the factory owner does jigsaw puzzles in his luxurious office. The workers' toilet breaks are monitored by video (a strikingly futuristic concept for the time) and the employer is keen to try out the "Bellows Feeding Machine" on Chaplin. This automatic device promises to feed the workforce without them needing either a lunch break or even the need to breathe: eliminate the lunch hour and stay ahead of your competitors! the sales pitch proposes. The trial needless to say provides a platform for some amusing slapstick comedy which leaves Chaplin appearing like Hitler on acid, but the more serious point is made and The Tramp is sacked after having a nervous breakdown.

An accidental Communist

Out of work, he is accidentally mistaken for a Communist, a crime in the supposed Land of the Free, and incarcerated, only to be released when he equally accidentally stymies a jail break while under the influence of (again accidentally ingested) cocaine - an extremely daring move for the time, when the film code banned depiction of drug use from films.

This is perhaps the most poignant part of the film - for the Tramp prefers the security of prison to the vicissitudes of the outside world, with its unfairness and uncertainties. He repeatedly tries to get himself re-imprisoned, even offering to take the fall for Goddard's character, with whom he falls in love and tries to find so-called honest work to provide for.

Goddard is a young "gamine", in Hollywood parlance a sort of mischievous young woman living on the edge of society, a grown up street urchin. Like others in the film, she steals not from badness but in order to survive - she and her family are ecstatic when she manages to thieve six bananas from a boat. Likewise, when he is the nightwatchman of a store, Chaplin's character lets some former workmates steal food because they are starving.

In sharp contrast, others thrive in these modern times - and both the Gamine and the Tramp have to entertain and serve them in the climax of the film where they work in a restaurant, she as a dancer and he as a singing waiter. This leads to some telling moments as drunken, boorish bourgeoisie cavort around the hardworking staff. The centre-piece is a scene of sheer ingenuity, seemingly taken in a single, continuous shot, showing Chaplin taking a roast duck to a customer across a crowded dance floor in a tour de force imitated hundreds of times since but never yet equalled.

The US Library of Congress declared Modern Times as "culturally significant" in 1989, leading to it being given official protection for preservation for future generations and leading to special screenings at a recent Cannes Film Festival. But it is more than a record of its epoch - its portrayal of an exploitative world where people struggle hard to simply survive and where many are denied what others in the same country, same city, even the same street take for granted, has never been so pertinent.

While the factories Chaplin lampooned in the USA and Europe are now frequently silent and empty, the goods we consume all too often continue to be made by marginalised workers on dehumanised production lines, where breaks are minimalised luxuries if they even exist. Consider the computer giant Apple Corporation's allegedly prison-like conditions in their oriental factories where the pseudo-virtuous Steve Jobs creamed off so much of his personal fortune from people so desperate that their employer places nets outside windows to prevent frequently made suicide attempts.

Chaplin went on to make other films, such as The Great Dictator, which were political in their content, but perhaps not as controversial or challenging to the society he lived and worked in as Modern Times. His exile from America, dreadful though it was, was proof enough of how he was a giant and just how small minded McCarthy and the anti-communists were when they proclaimed liberty as they snuffed it out.

In a world where the skew of wealth between rich and poor is far, far worse than it was in 1936, where laws not even contemplated in the Depression era give the police in supposedly democratic states unparallelled powers of arrest over trade unionists and other social activists, and where US citizens are eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist, Modern Times may be over 80 years old, but remains as fresh and relevant as ever.

Ultimately, Chaplin was an optimist - when Goddard's character asks him, "What's the use of trying?", the Tramp grins as the strains of Smile, composed by Chaplin, begin to play. He replies confidently, "Buck up - never say die! We'll get along."

It is the optimism of a better, fairer tomorrow, a tomorrow of humanity and equality. It is a cry from a passionate heart and one that, though made in silence, deserves to be heard as loudly as ever.

The American Dream Turned Nightmare

The USA sells itself, literally, as the paragon of capitalist opportunity. Its homespun myth is that with enough effort and a bit of savvy, anyone can make it big. And on this basis, its has not only eschewed socialism, but even legislated against it and banned those who advocate it periodically, tainting them as pathologically unAmerican (ironically simply inverting the old Soviet method of stigmatising dissidents as mentally ill).

What little regulation tempered US capitalism after its collapse in the 1930s Depression was largely done away with by Reagan and his successors and, in spite of Republicans' vituperative demonising of Barak Obama as some communistic demon, the growth of inequality in the USA has now reached breathtaking proportions: for example, the average worker has to work for a month to earn what the average Chief Executive earns in one hour; and the average Chief Executive is still miles off the levels of wealth enjoyed by the richest one per cent.

The video below speaks for itself. Now, it is up to the rest of us throughout the world to speak up for ourselves and for real change to a more equal society. Look and listen and behold the lie that is the American, and the Capitalist, Dream....

Thieving Gid...eon: Obsorne the Fare-dodger

So, rather than sit with the Plebs in Standard class, it emerges that Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Gideon Osborne, multi-millionaire (and  allegedly highly "tax efficient" with it) sneaked into First Class on the Wilmslow to London train earlier today - without paying the proper fare. Unfortunately for him, the ticket inspector refused to recognise the "natural order of things" and made him cough up £160 to stay seated in the First Class carriage after an argument with the Chancellor's aide, who argued that he should be allowed to sit there with just a standard ticket.

The Good Old Days...

But even more unfortunately, the whole event was witnesses by an ITN reporter, Rachel Townsend, who provided a blow by blow account of Osborne and his official's argument with the rail official about why he should not have to pay full fare. The farrago is now running the rounds on social media, complete with photo. (Twitter -  #classgate )

The current Tories are beyond belief and their behaviour is often far beyond even causing any surprise at all - their coarse disdain for the rules when it comes to themselves and their wealthy friends, while crushing down on the slightest transgression by the poor and vulnerable (and, indeed, by a combination of welfare cuts and black propaganda, turning the very fact of being poor and vulnerable into a transgression itself), is more than evident. They are without doubt smugly supreme in their self-proclaimed superiority over their social lessers, their view on the need to comply with the rules applying only to one half of society is redolent of the Georgian and Victorian hypocrisy that saw violence, corruption and promiscuity rife among the upper classes while public morality kept the lower classes in check by ostracizing and even imprisoning those who did not comply with the strictures of religion and social deference.

And so we have Gideon, hot on the heels of Andrew Mitchell, whose tirade of f-words and "pleb" taunts at police simply doing their job came from the man who was meant to ensure good order and appropriate behaviour among Tory MPs. It recalls too the Tory Cabinet Minister of the Thatcher era who wouldn't travel on the Underground because it was "full of ordinary people" - and Thatcher herself is rumoured to have only gone on a train once in her life; so to be fair Gideon is a positive man of the people by comparison.

These attitudes are de rigeur among our ruling class - a deeply ingrained sense of entitlement that sets them above the rules, above the norms of society. Little wonder so many Cabinet members were schooled at Eton and then reached political maturity (if that's the right word) under the rabid individualism of the Thatcher era, a trait barely reined in by New Labour under Blair - Peter Mandelson of course was intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich. Filthy and rich indeed, and in more ways than one.

All in it together? Of course not - some of us are riding it out on the comfy chairs in first class...

World Food Day

Today is World Food Day, founded in honour of the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organisation, which was set up to develop food security for the people of our planet. Yet, while securing some advances in its 67 years if existence, its objectives are as far from being fulfilled as ever. And the outlook is not good.

2012 has seen yet more terrifying changes to our global climate – the entire Greenland ice sheet melting, to wildfires across Europe, floods in Asia and the worst drought in the central USA since the 1930’s “Dustbowl”. It is this last event that may, for now, be the one with the greatest impact – the Obama Administration expects that production of wheat, maize and soybeans will be the lowest for decades. With the USA the largest producer in the world of these staples, this environmental disaster is set to drive global food prices sharply upwards. In the last two months alone, cereal wholesale prices have risen by 60% and the FAO has warned of a return to the shortages of 2008, when the cost of US staples rose by over 120% on 2005 prices.

The effect in 2008 was a 12.8% increase in UK food prices and lurid speculation in the gutter press about hoarding tins and buying a shotgun, but in many poor countries, with food costs already far higher in real terms, scores of people were killed when riots ensued. Burkina Faso saw food prices rise by 65%, while impoverished Haiti saw a 50% increase. Worldwide, several hundred millions went hungry for the first time.

Climate was one of several causes: but other factors included the impact of “food futures” speculation by the international City traders, whose betting on higher future food prices led to many physical food traders hoarding stocks in anticipation of a price hike. This was a self-fulfilling process and one which no action at all has been taken to curb. Speculation has also led to a modern land grab in Africa and Latin America, where the Chinese and Arab governments compete with the likes of Richard Branson and Nicola Horlick in snapping up millions of acres of prime agricultural land, anticipating food shortages as the gold rush of tomorrow. And so, with the next 12 months likely to see more malnourishment and starvation, the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe may shed crocodile tears at best as children’s development is stunted and the corpses of the starved are committed to the dust.

Few deny that with increasing competition for dwindling resources, the coming decades will see a perfect storm which will seriously disrupt and even destroy the Earth’s ability to feed humanity. Yet food supply projects, current among them work by the Government BIS and the Chatham House think-tank, still predicate the solution on elusive and likely counter-productive technological fixes such as genetic modification. Moreover, they specifically exclude fostering national self-sufficiency in food supply, quixotically clinging to the alleged virtues of a globalised food chain. Needless to say, land ownership is not even contemplated as an issue.

In “The Enigma of Capital”, David Harvey has characterised the impact of humans on the environment as “creative destruction”, which has hastened exponentially under capitalist industrialisation with irreversible damage to our biosphere. But he warns, “The Revenge of Nature signals the existence of a stubborn, recalcitrant and unpredictable physical and ecological world that, like the weather, constitutes the environment in which we have our being.”

Our species is sleepwalking towards disaster – yet the coming food crisis could serve as a wake up call. In a world where so many are chemically addicted to superficially cheap “food“ peddled by McDonalds, KFC and our grasping supermarket chains, ecosocialists will have to work hard and loud to expose the vested interests at the root of the problem. But our message of self-sufficiency is one with which many people may increasingly identify. If we can demonstrate the multiple benefits of local, sustainable food production and just distribution, we can show that a better world is still possible.

This bulk of this article originally appeared in the Green Left "Watermelon" Autumn Green Party Conference print edition.

The Socio-Economics of Del Boy: Myth & Reality in the Court of the Cleggeron

The last three years since the banking crisis began in earnest have seen a transformation of popular views about wealth and its deeply inequal distribution in Britain and globally. For the first time in two decades, many more people have challenged the huge payments made to senior executives across a wide range of industries, including the private sector.

This has been against a background where, while bosses and owners have frequently called for pay restraint from their frequently non-unionised workforces, they have carried on paying out huge increases to themselves - even in recessionary 2010/11,  Chief Executive pay in the FTSE100 top companies rose by 43%, with other senior executives doing even better on 49%. At the same time, average pay for everyone else fell by over £2,600 p.a.  And this is part of a long established pattern - in 2010, before much of this last year's huge hike, the ratio of top to lowest paid in the top 100 FTSE companies was an utterly obscene 232:1. 

It is no surprise that, as recession bites and ordinary people find their living standards squeezed and services cut, we see both rising political protest and the crime wave of the summer riots. As Wilkinson and Pickett demonstrated so powerfully, highly unequal societies are more personally unhappy, physically and psychologically unhealthy, socially disrupted and prone to higher levels of crime than societies - even poorer ones like Cuba - where the disparity in wealth is much lower.

And so today Nick Clegg, hapless Deputy PM, has announced with great flourish his anger at the wealthiest being rewarded so highly and that he has decided that it is time to do something about it! Unfortunately, he has been typically vague as the different components of our dysfunctional Coalition Government try to respond to the wave of public discontent. Neither Government party is in any way instinctively egalitarian and both are unashamedly pro-capitalist. So we needn't hold our breaths in the hope of any concrete action.

From what we can see, the proposals are likely to amount to little more than requiring the publication of the ratio of the top paid person in a company with the pay, not of the lowest, but of either the average or, conceivably even worse, the median paid worker. This of course massively reduces the ratio, ignoring the lack of value placed on the lowest paid and often hardest working (and most stressed) workers in our society. Otherwise limited to requiring more information for shareholders (when most shares are held by other large businesses anyway) and some pious hope of capitalism caking itself in enough greasepaint to present a half-acceptable face to the public, this proposal is just a load of window-dressing from a Government too scared to challenge its own paymasters (that's if it actually wanted to!).

But why on Earth, at a time when the capitalist system is on the ropes with the Last Chance Saloon clearly in sight, are we not tackling the rapaciousness of the rich, the very people who in so many ways are ruining our world? Why, in a reality of inevitably limited resources, are we not setting maximum pay as well as minimum pay? We cannot tackle the poverty of the poorest without also tackling the wealth of the richest. Full stop.

Capitalism is vicious and deceitful, but it is also very clever - it sells the myth that it rewards effort when in fact it mainly assists those who already have wealth to engorge themselves ever more: it holds out the naive lie that anyone can share in the fest if only they work harder just that bit longer, etc. It is the socio-economics of Del Boy; this time next year, we'll all be millionaires. And the real tragedy, like the brilliant pathos of the comedy of Only Fools, is that so many still buy into the myth.

And that must be Mr Clegg's hope - that his tilting at windmills might yet fantastically transmogrify into a belief that he has miraculously slain the dragon of excess without even lifting his lance. That is the trouble with myth - it is at its most appealing when it tells its biggest lies to the most desperate of people in the most desperate of times. It bends and outlives reality, becoming exposed as fake often only when its premise has destroyed all around it and it finally stands naked and exposed as the lie it is. So the Government may cloak its inaction on inequality with fiery rhetoric about damnable greed, but in doing so it will allow the carnival of destructive excess to carry on yet longer, causing more and more irreparable damage to our social fabric and the well being of our country and planet.

"Tolle divitem!" : why abolishing the rich would do us all a favour

"Mankind is divided into three classes - the rich, the poor, and those who have enough...Abolish the rich and you will have no more poor...for it is the few rich who are the cause of the many poor."

Radical words. An extract from Marx's "Das Kapital"? A trade union leader rallying their members against job losses? A motion passed by the last Green Party conference declaring its support for a maximum wage?

It could be any of the above, but in fact its none of them. The words were written by an author known as the "Sicilian Briton" in the first few years of the fifth century. As the Roman Empire was beset by barbarian invasions and usurper Emperors, the plebeian and slave classes began to agitate for a fairer share of the resources of the world's first superstate. While some openly rebelled and established their own states as the bacaudae, the western world's first social revolutionaries, others used parts of the newly established Christian church to demand change - the Sicilian Briton, a monk himself, was one of their spokespeople.

But what happened?

History tells us how the Roman State died, not with a bang but with a whimper - its once mighty body ebbing slowly over three generations or more before it simply faded from view and was lost to history. All through its long demise, its richest citizens clutched onto their possessions, hiding their wealth, claiming all manner of privileges (privi-legium: the law of the individual) to avoid paying taxes or contributing to the common cause. While demanding and receiving continued status as the Optimates, the "best citizens", they continuously connived to abrogate themselves of any obligation to serve their society. When Alaric the Goth stood with his army at the gates of Rome demanding gold to go away, the Senate refused him even although most of its members could have easily met the amount demanded from a modest portion of their own purse. While lamenting the darkness of their times, they willingly sacrificed their City to preserve their own wealth.

Yesterday Rome, tomorrow...?

I quote this passage from an obscure, 15 centuries old source for two reasons - one because of the old saying that if we do not learn from history we are bound to relive it; and second because the parallels between fifth century Rome and our modern world are so striking and relevant.

This week, in the UK, the Government is pledged to undertake massive spending cuts in public services. In spite of a few feints to fairness, the clear story is one of the unremitting gloom of an assault on education, welfare, transport and even aspects of the military. The reason is allegedly because of a national debt described by the Government as "record breaking" in peace time.

Except that this is far from true - indeed, it was higher than it is now every single year from 1916 until 1971. Its actual record high was in 1947, unsurprisingly just after the second world war, when it peaked at 238% of annual gross domestic product (GDP) - over four times its current level of 56%. However, that did not prevent the government in the following year launching the National Health Service. Nor did debt levels well in excess of 100% of GDP prevent the economic boom of the 1950s, with Tory Premier Macmillan boasting to a grateful electorate that "We've never had it so good!"

It was only with the Thatcherite revolution from 1979 onwards, with the Conservatives adopting the monetarist doctrine of American economist Milton Friedman (a doctrine taken up by Reagan's America as well) that it became the orthodoxy that low national debt was essential for prosperity, embraced even by pseudo-social democratic parties like New Labour and Clinton's Democrats. In Britain, public services were cut relentlessly and people thrown out of work until in 1991 national debt stood at just above 25% of GDP.

Parallel to this "tight money" policy, and the true reason for it then and now, Governments also reduced taxes for the better off, with more and more exemptions for the richest of all. Globally, off-shore tax havens have allowed an estimated $250,000,000,000 per annum of tax to be legally evaded by the very wealthiest. Britain is particularly culpable for this trend - 11 out of 40 havens identified by the OECD are British Overseas Territories; with the UK itself now an effective tax haven for "non-domestic" millionaires. Corporation tax is legally avoided by many large companies at a cost of nearly £7 billions per annum to the British Government - almost the same as the planned reduction in spending on social housing.

Even in the last recessionary year the wealth of the richest 100 people in the UK has risen by over 30% to over £355 billion. Internationally, as financial cuts bit hard across the planet, the Forbes Rich List found that 611 of the 1,011 billionaires on the Earth had increased their wealth - only 70 had seen an appreciable reduction. The richest man in the world - the ironically named Carlos Slim Herlu of Mexico weighed in with over £35.7 billion, his wealth greater than the annual GDP of over sixty nation states.

Of course, whichever country we live in, we are told we must indulge these people otherwise they might go somewhere else and we would lose their vital talents. Much better to waive their bill and hope they will stay, graciously permitting their wealth to trickle down to the rest of us in dibs and drabs. Meantime, the rest of us ingrates will need to accept increased taxes and massively reduced services to bailout these geniuses when their schemes collapse around them, as it is predicted will happen again with the British banks in 2011.

In spite of initiatives such as introducing national minimum wages these have not stopped the rise in inequality - one report found Britain to be the fourth most unequal society out of 25 affluent nations studied. Instead, in the absence of any cap on individual or corporate wealth, fantastic fortunes have been amassed by a tiny elite of super-rich people, whose lifestyles and power are ruining the lives of billions and relentlessly driving the planet to resource depletion and environmental disaster.

Professor Greg Philo of the Glasgow University Media Group has recently proposed a one-off tax on the richest 10% of Britons - taxing just 20% of their assets would raise over £800 billions. That would be enough to pay off the entire national debt and massively reduce the deficit. Unfair? Hardly, given that much of that wealth is unearned and in many cases will have been obtained by avoiding tax in the first place. Moreover, as the salaries (as well as the untaxed share options) of top executives have burgeoned to ridiculous levels in recent years, isn't it time to claw back some of that unfairly paid money?

In the years ahead, as our resources become scarcer and billions more mouths have to be fed, we need to share our wealth more equitably - between countries and within them as well. There is still enough to go round to feed and support people fairly and sustainably, but only if it is shared fairly. The capitalist system, with its focus on individuals seeking to maximise their material gain and a theoretical basis of limitless supply, is not fit for purpose for the challenges to come. Rather, left unchecked, it will simply hurry us over the precipice towards not only its own collapse, but of society and human civilisation itself. With a "perfect storm" of competing demands for food, water and fuel predicted to come as early as 2030, time is short.

We may be fifteen centuries late, but we are not too late. Not just yet. But we need a new, radical will and the sense to do us all a favour. Change the politics. As the Romans used to say: "Tolle divitem!" Abolish the rich!