ABSTRACT
Despite many protestations to the contrary by apologists of free market economics, experience in Britain (as well as in the United States) since 1979 suggests that increases in poverty and social inequality are a given feature of free market societies-a logical consequence of the adoption of free market policies at national level. A large number of studies now document, in considerable quantitative detail, the scale of the ‘social revolution’ that has taken place in Britain in the 1980s and early 1990s, which has put into fast reverse the slow movement which had been taking place through the earlier post-war period towards a more equal distribution of wealth in Britain (cf. for example, Walker 1990).1 Official Department of Social Security figures, released in July 1994, showed that the poorest tenth of the population of England and Wales suffered a 17 per cent fall in real income after housing costs between 1979 and 19912, compared to an average income increase of 36 per cent: the richest tenth of the population enjoyed an increase of 62 per cent.2 These figures almost certainly underestimate the scale of the social revolution in question, since they rely so heavily on the numbers of people registered for work or willing to answer the Census and other survey enquiries. It is now widely accepted that very large numbers of people in ‘the inner city’ and other deprived areas do not so register.3 In November 1994, it was estimated that almost a third of full-time workers in Britain (about 5.5 million in total) were earning less than the ‘threshold of decency’ set by the Council of Europe-in other words, that their wages were actually the ‘wages of poverty’ (Guardian 22 November 1994, reporting a survey by the House of Commons Library). This increase in levels of poverty is the subject of some essentially rather cold-blooded academic and political debate, particularly as to whether the poverty in question is ‘absolute’ or merely relative (i.e. by comparison to what were celebrated as increasing levels of ‘comfort’ elsewhere within the same society). So also there is some interest in both academic and political circles as to the unevenness of the general increase in poverty-however measured-and inequality. Even within quite small regions of the country, there is evidence of considerable
concentration of poverty within particular neighbourhoods or towns and, therefore, of a very local form of income inequality: particular towns or rural areas within the same region may be relatively prosperous by virtue of some helpful local economic development, where other towns or urban areas may seem to be locked into a spiral of decline, and to have become what Massey and Meegan, in their pioneering work on the unevenness of de-industrialisation and its effects, called ‘sinks of unemployment’ (Massey and Meegan 1982).
