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 PART 4 – Inequality (p. 220)

 
The article below was written by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, the authors of The Spirit Level (March 2009), a successful book about social equality.
 
 
1 READING
Read the text and find out the main idea in each paragraph.
 
 
Yes, we are all in this together
 
[…] Throughout The Spirit Level, we also discuss the vital importance of social relationships to human health and well-being and show that higher levels of income inequality damage the social fabric that contributes so much to healthy societies. Now, a major new review of the evidence from almost 150 studies confirms the important influence of social relationships on health. People with stronger social relationships were half as likely to die during a study's period of follow-up as those with weaker social ties. The authors of the report found that the influence of social relations on survival was at least as important as that of smoking, and much more important than heavy drinking, physical activity or obesity. […]
    We also showed that there is a large and consistent body of evidence on income inequality and violence. More recent studies continue to confirm this link. One study of 33 countries, published in 2010, also showed that social cohesion – as measured by levels of trust – seemed to provide the causal link between income inequality and homicide rates, whereas public spending on health and education did not. […]
    Greater inequality increases the need for big government – for more police, more prisons, more health and social services of every kind. Most of these services are expensive and only very partially effective, but we shall need them for ever if we continue to have the high levels of inequality that create the problems they are designed to deal with. Several states of the US now spend more on prisons than on higher education. In fact, one of the best and most humane ways of achieving small government is by reducing inequality. […]
    We show in the book that trust and the strength of community life are weakened by inequality, and this is true not only of interpersonal trust, but also of trust in government – the difference between the attitudes of Americans and Scandinavians to their governments is well known.
    In addition, international data suggests that people trust government less in more unequal states. There is also evidence from societies where voting is not compulsory (as it is, for instance, in Australia) that voter turnout may be lower in more unequal countries. Whether or not this reflects a greater separation of interests and an increasing sense of 'us and them' between people at opposite ends of the social ladder, it certainly suggests that too much inequality is a threat to democracy. […]
    Over 90 per cent of the American population say that they would prefer to live in a society with the income distribution that exists in Sweden rather than that of the US. Research in Britain also shows that people think income differences should be smaller, even though they hugely underestimate how large they are. The world really is full of people who have much more egalitarian preferences and a stronger sense of justice than we tend to assume. However, the rise of neoliberal political and economic thinking in the 1980s and 1990s meant that egalitarian ideas disappeared from public debate and those with a strong sense of justice became, in effect, closet egalitarians.
    It is now time egalitarians returned to the public arena. […] Because the evidence shows that few people are aware of the actual scale of inequality and injustice in our societies, or recognise how it damages the vast majority of the population, the first task is to provide education and information.
    Understanding these issues is already changing attitudes to inequality among politicians. […] But changing policies and politics, changing the way our societies organise themselves, will require the evidence to be recognised even more widely. Few tasks are more worthwhile than this: as we think The Spirit Level shows, the health of our democracies, our societies and their people, is truly dependent on greater equality.
 
(Adapted from «New Stateman», 11 November 2010)

 
2 READING
Read the article and answer the questions below.
 
1 What signs of unrest have been seen in Britain in the past year?
2 What is the common cause behind them?
3 Why were many people critical of the Metropolitan police and the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC)?
4 Which are the three main reasons for the present riots in Tottenham?
5 What is the ‘context’ or ‘bigger picture’ mentioned in the title?
6 Which examples of social problems are mentioned by the writer?
7 What, according to the writer, has made Britain one of the most unequal countries in the developed world?
 
 
There is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored
Those condemning the events in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture
 
Since the coalition came to power just over a year ago, the country has seen multiple student protests, occupations of dozens of universities, several strikes, a half-a-million-strong trade union march and now unrest on the streets of the capital (preceded by clashes with Bristol police in Stokes Croft earlier in the year). Each of these events was sparked by a different cause, yet all take place against a backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures. The government knows very well that it is taking a gamble, and that its policies run the risk of sparking mass unrest on a scale we haven't seen since the early 1980s. With people taking to the streets of Tottenham, Edmonton, Brixton and elsewhere over the past few nights, we could be about to see the government enter a sustained and serious losing streak.
The policies of the past year may have clarified the division between the entitled and the dispossessed in extreme terms, but the context for social unrest cuts much deeper.
The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last Thursday, where it appears, contrary to initial accounts, that only police bullets were fired, is another tragic event in a longer history of the Metropolitan police's treatment of ordinary Londoners, especially those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, and the singling out of specific areas and individuals for monitoring, stop and search and daily harassment.
One journalist wrote that he was surprised how many people in Tottenham knew of and were critical of the IPCC, but there should be nothing surprising about this. When you look at the figures for deaths in police custody (at least 333 since 1998 and not a single conviction of any police officer for any of them), then the IPCC and the courts are seen by many, quite reasonably, to be protecting the police rather than the people.
Combine understandable suspicion of and resentment towards the police based on experience and memory with high poverty and large unemployment and the reasons why people are taking to the streets become clear. (Haringey, the borough that includes Tottenham, has the fourth highest level of child poverty in London and an unemployment rate of 8.8%, double the national average, with one vacancy for every 54 seeking work in the borough.)
Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture: a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than in any other developed country.
As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, phenomena usually described as "social problems" (crime, ill-health, imprisonment rates, mental illness) are far more common in unequal societies than ones with better economic distribution and less gap between the richest and the poorest. Decades of individualism, competition and state-encouraged selfishness – combined with a systematic crushing of unions and the ever-increasing criminalisation of dissent – have made Britain one of the most unequal countries in the developed world.
Images of burning buildings, cars aflame and stripped-out shops may provide spectacular fodder for a restless media, ever hungry for new stories and fresh groups to demonise, but we will understand nothing of these events if we ignore the history and the context in which they occur.
                                                                              (Adapted from «The Guardian», 8 August 2011)

Questo file è un’estensione online del corso M. G. Dandini, NEW SURFING THE WORLD.
Copyright © 2010 Zanichelli Editore S.p.A., Bologna [1056]