The ConDems claim that pay for most rose faster than prices
in the year to April 2013 is a con trick that cannot disguise a rapid growth in
inequality of household incomes since 2008. And with another credit-fuelled
frenzy under way, a second crash is much more likely than a “sustainable
recovery”.
First, while the figures rolled out by the government take
account of tax cuts for those in work, they omit the benefit reductions
suffered by millions of people as a result of austerity attacks on welfare. Secondly,
since April last year, energy and transport costs have soared while incomes
have remained static.
All in all, most people are much worse off than they were
before the recession kicked in after the banks went belly up.
More potent and revealing figures are those relating to
crime, which were published yesterday. Police records show a 4% rise in
shoplifting and a 7% rise in “theft from the person”, such as snatching
expensive mobile phones from passers-by. Nick Gargan, chief constable of Avon
and Somerset Constabulary, told the Financial
Times that police leaders were starting to talk about an “austerity bulge”
in crime figures.
“We are seeing a ramping-up effect as the cuts take hold,”
Gargan said. The rise in shoplifting came in more than two-thirds of the UK’s
43 police force areas, with the biggest increases in the West Midlands,
Merseyside, and West Yorkshire. The British Retail Consortium said thefts from
shops were 26% higher than the annual average.
The numbers arrested are overwhelming local forces. Chris
Mould, executive chairman of the Trussell Trust, which last year handed out
more than 700,000 food parcels from its network of foodbanks across the
country, said
that in Islington
police had given vouchers to some shoplifters who were obviously not
criminals, just in desperate need.
In the last three months police in Byker, east Newcastle,
stopped 26 first-time offenders, compared with five the previous year. Twenty
of the first-time shoplifters were female and 11 of the 26 incidents were
low-value, food-related thefts. Another indication of growing desperation was
shown by scuffles this week between shoppers and police at a 99p store in North
Wales when it scrapped its half-price sale
Lancashire chief constable, Steve Finnigan, said there was a
rise in the theft of basic food items, such as bread, milk and cheese. "The
offenders are first-time offenders and, when you talk to them, they are not
stealing food to sell on; they say they are stealing to feed themselves"
he says. "In my own force we have seen an increase in shoplifters who are
first-time offenders and say they are doing it to put some food on the
table."
“People are struggling for all sorts of reasons,” Mould
said. “Hunger in Britain is a really serious problem and it’s affecting large
numbers of people. Thirteen million people at least are in poverty, according
to the government’s own statistics, which is defined as people on 60 per cent
or less of the average income. And that average income is getting lower, so
it’s 60 per cent of something that’s getting worse, while the cost of basics
such as food, power and, increasingly, housing is rising.”
All sorts of people are warning about a coming social
explosion. The police themselves are getting tooled up. This week they asked home
secretary Theresa May to authorise the use of water cannon arising from
“ongoing and potential future austerity measures”. The sinister Association of Chief Police Officers, as
guardians of state power, are pressing their case. May has yet to respond.
Even in Davos, at the annual meeting of the transnational
capitalist class, there was talk of the “wealth divide” as the elites
acknowledged the fact that any “recovery” in output is founded on the vast quantities
of money printed by the central banks since 2008.
As the Observer’s Will Hutton, notes, the “inequality
that drove the last crash is even greater now and, ominously, the same
forces are abroad again”. While it’s not apparent to Hutton, creating a more
equal Britain now patently requires a more equal, democratic society beyond
capitalism, where resources are held socially and used for the common good.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
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