Suddenly we want an equalising wind to blow them down – for they seem like men from another, callous, planet.

TO BE NOTED: From the FT:

"Now we get what we deserve – inequality rage

By John Lloyd

Published: March 27 2009 19:16 | Last updated: March 27 2009 19:16

“On the one side, inequality harms by pampering; on the other, by vulgarising and depressing. A system founded on it is against nature and, in the long run, breaks down.”

Matthew Arnold, lecture on “Equality”, 1903.

Inequality rage stalks the world, from Vladivostok to Helsinki, from Vilnius to Washington. The trashing of Sir Fred Goodwin’s windows and Mercedes in Edinburgh points to the dangers of unrepentant insistence on continuing privilege displayed by the former Royal Bank of Scotland chief: this was, warned the trashers, “just the beginning”. A Put People First demonstration will parade in London on Saturday – and will be, say the organisers, “noisy but peaceful”. But what of demonstrations planned by the G20 Meltdown group and others for the meeting of the Group of 20 developed and emerging countries in London on Wednesday and Thursday? One website advocates the burning, another the hanging, of bankers. Sounding like a Jeeves gone demented, the London Chamber of Commerce advised that “businesses might want to consider asking their staff not to dress in a suit and tie”.

Suddenly we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it from these bloated creeps any more. Suddenly we want an equalising wind to blow them down – for they seem like men from another, callous, planet.

In their book, Unjust Rewards (2008), Polly Toynbee and David Walker – writers on the left-of-centre Guardian newspaper – describe speaking to a group of City of London bankers and lawyers, among whom the lowest-paid had a salary of £150,000. These bankers did not think of themselves as rich – they assumed they were just middling. “They wanted,” wrote Toynbee and Walker, “to compare themselves to richer people.” That sentence reveals a mindset where what matters are those above – in the same company; in the same job – who have another hundred thousand; another million. It is the “because you deserve it” society.

It explains Sir Fred’s stone-deaf incomprehension: did he not work for his millions? Wouldn’t everyone take them if they could? The savvier know they cannot much longer: Michel Platini, president of the Union of European Football Associations, called for higher taxes on the wages of star players, saying everybody knew that “the market is incapable of correcting its own excesses”. In fact, everybody does not know it: both the European and the British associations of top clubs told him to get lost.

And thus, through anger, the old socialist cry for equality swims up on a populist tide. The case has been made on moral grounds. In Equality (1931), an inspirational text for generations of social democrats, the British ethical socialist, R.H. Tawney, concluded that “a society is free insofar as . . . its institutions and policies are such as to enable all its members to grow to their full stature”. A more recent text, The Spirit Level, by the medical researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, attempts a more gritty argument: that inequalities are bad for health, life expectancy and the incidence of crime. It has its critics – John Kay, in this newspaper, found its policy recommendations flimsy – but he allowed that “the argument is a powerful counter to any simple equation of social progress and the advance of GDP”, especially now.

Populist tides go this way and that. Radicals of the left blame bankers; those of the right blame immigrants: protests have flared in Spain and France, Italy and Britain, diverse in their targets but all mobilising a resentment that living standards, outraged by those above, should be also threatened from below.

The large question is how far the rage will have lasting consequences, and how far old and new arguments for equality can be translated into a fixed, general and electorally sustaining opinion, driving out the view of the past few decades that the prosperity of the few is to the ultimate benefit of all. Socialism of any strong kind seems as far away as at any time since the 1970s: if the far-left groups are gaining militants, the leftwing parties of Europe are generally in opposition or, if in power, battered and unpopular. Neither of the great growth economies, China and India, has any stated intention of returning to socialist economics.

Equality thus becomes a cross-party matter. It is already hydra-headed. Where for Tawney it was largely confined to what the state could do about incomes and education and health provision, it now resides in issues of race, sex, esteem. In every aspect, it is a popular as well as a populist cause: almost no one speaks against sexual or racial equality, and polls reveal a strong preference for less inequity of income and privilege.

The past few decades have licensed the Promethean, even Nietzschean, super-business-being who – as did Sir Fred in his prime, remoulding the prim provincial RBS into a global force – tears up rules, pushes finance into areas too complex for common understanding and ramps up profits, yields and incomes to unprecedented levels. Everyone could be a winner: the first-time low-income homebuyer in unity with the masters of the financial universe – financial legerdemain allowing the first to buy and the second to get rich at the same time. Now all of us are or will be losers, in one way or other: and the sour weight of our losses and rage will, if stopping short of burning bankers, underpin the rhetoric and perhaps the reality of more equable societies, at least for a time. It may, indeed, be good for us."