Fifty Years’ Movement towards Equality [1951]

On 9 November 1950 BBC producer Ann Shead invited Russell to record a thirteen-minute radio talk for a series entitled “These Fifty Years”, in celebration of the golden jubilee of Australia’s federation. It was Lloyd George also who began the policy of insurance against sickness and unemployment and old age. It is impossible, with income tax and surtax what they are, for anybody to be what would formerly have been called rich; in theory, nobody can have more than 5,000 a year after taxes have been deducted. Judging by past history, one might have expected that it could only be achieved by a bloody revolution with a reign of terror enforced by purges or the guillotine. In fact, neither the French nor the Russians, for all their bloodshed, achieved by their revolutions anything like as near an approach to economic equality as Britain has achieved by gradual and peaceful methods.