The richest 1% of households in the UK each have fortunes of at least £3.6m.
At the other end of the scale, the poorest 10% of households have just £15,400 or less, with almost half burdened with more debts than they had in assets.
The wealthiest 10% of households held 43% of all the wealth in Great Britain
The bottom 50% held only 9%.
There are an estimated 27.8m households in the UK. There are just 263,000 in the top 1%.
Bulgaria’s population has declined by 11.5% in the past decade.
The nation has shrunk by 844,000 people, from some 7.3 million in 2011 to 6.5 million today.
The ageing of the population is another lasting trend.
Experts attribute the decline to low birth rates, high mortality, and a steady migration flow that has seen working-age people leaving to look for better jobs and education prospects.
U.N. experts estimate that if these trends continue, Bulgaria will contract further to about 5.4 million people by 2050.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says global food prices rose 28% in 2021.
“The last time food prices were this high was in 2011, when policymakers were actually warning about a global food crisis,” says Dr Abdul Abiad of the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
Even in a wealthy nation like Singapore, it means that the number of families seeking help has increased.
“What we have seen when we make the door-to-door deliveries is that young families with both husband and wife working a part-time job or in the gig economy – these were the families that got impacted when Covid hit and all the part-time work dried up,” says Nichol Ng, co-founder of Food Bank Singapore.
It is not just the poorest 10% of the population who now need help, she says: “It has slowly crept to maybe 20% of the population including middle-income families that might not even know where to get help in the first place.”
Global food prices are expected to remain high this year and the FAO’s David Dawe says this is of concern for Asian governments because price hikes have not yet worked their way through the system.
“If global prices continue to rise, there will be an impact, especially for lower income families who spend bigger proportion of their income on food.”
How the high cost of living is hitting Singapore’s poor – BBC News
Many other groups and organisations are commemorating the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
The blog re-publishes the Socialist Standard’s editorial of the event.
THE THIRTEEN DERRY DEAD
On Sunday 30 January thirteen men were shot dead in Derry as the British Army moved in to halt a march held in defiance of the Stormont government’s ban. The immediate result was an upsurge of Irish nationalism, both in the South and amongst the Catholic minority in the North.
The thirteen Derry dead has completed the alienation of the Catholic population of Northern Ireland from the regime there. After fifty years of passively accepting the role of what its first Prime Minister called “a Protestant parliament for Protestant people”, they are now actively rejecting its authority—to the extent of regarding the IRA as a useful counter to the British Army which is virtually occupying their ghettos in Belfast and Derry as well as whole towns such as Newry and Strabane where they form the overwhelming majority of the population.
The Unionist government at Stormont, and the British government at Westminster, see this as an armed insurrection against the will of the Northern Ireland majority, and to a certain extent it is. But it is well to remember that it was the political predecessors of Faulkner and Co. who in 1914 introduced the gun into Northern Irish politics when they armed themselves to resist the will of the British parliament that Ireland should be given Home Rule. The capitalists in and around Belfast did not want to be cut off from the markets of the British Empire behind the tariff walls of an industrially-backward Ireland. So, from the 1880’s onward, they created a mass political following by stirring up the traditional anti-Catholic fears and prejudices of their Protestant workmen. The strategy worked. When in 1921 an Irish Free State was set up, the six counties of North East Ireland were excluded. The one-third Catholic minority in this area was by gerrymandering and intimidation excluded from playing any effective role in politics there. They were just awkward outsiders which the Unionist government, relying on the support of the Protestant majority, felt it could easily handle. As indeed it did until 1968, despite the occasional IRA “campaign” which fizzled out through lack of popular support. In October of that year part of the official armed forces of the Stormont regime—the notorious B specials—brutally suppressed another march, once again in Derry. From then on the Stormont government lost control and the British Army had to be called in to maintain “law and order”, i.e., to get the Catholic population to once again passively accept Stormont and British rule.
The British government extracted a price from Stormont for this support: gerrymandering and intimidation was to stop; the Catholics in Northern Ireland were to be treated in the same way as they would if they lived in England. Since, with the coming of Common Market capitalism, the original economic reason for Partition had gone the political representatives of the Belfast capitalists were prepared to accept this (even if many of the Protestant workers they had duped in the past were not).
One of the unfortunate side-effects of the Northern Ireland situation is that the term “socialist” has become associated with pro-Catholic politics. Protestant and Catholic alike expect someone who calls himself a socialist to back the IRA or at least support a United Ireland. Well, we support neither. We know that “independence” for Ireland in 1921 was just a change of masters which left the basic position, and problems, of the Irish worker unchanged. We know that Irish nationalism and republicanism was the ideology of the up-and-coming capitalists in the South who, being weaker than their counterparts in Belfast, wanted Home Rule and tariffs as a protection against British competition.
The tragedy of Northern Ireland is that the present political division of the working class there reflects yesterday’s divisions amongst the Irish capitalist class, divisions which now have no relevance even for capitalism since both Britain and Ireland are about to join the Common Market and since the same international companies have investments both sides of the Border.
Our advice to the worker in Northern Ireland is, first: Do not do anything, in word or deed, which might encourage further killings of your working-class brothers, whether Protestant or Catholic or, for that matter, British soldiers. And, secondly: Think carefully about the situation to see if the issue of a United Ireland versus a British Ulster is worth a single drop of working-class blood.
The British government’s declared aim is that Northern Ireland should become a part of Britain like Scotland or the West Country so that being a Catholic would not affect your job or house prospects. The IRA, and now Bernadette Devlin, the Social Democratic and Labour Party and others, stand (despite their socialist pretensions) for a United Ireland, in which the Protestant worker would retain the “civil and religious liberties” he now has (i.e., freedom from the interference of the Catholic Church in what he reads, or thinks, or does).
True, both programmes are somewhat unrealistic since the Catholics of Northern Ireland, with some justice, distrust the Unionist politicians who would continue to rule Northern Ireland while the Protestants, again with some justice, doubt the ability of Irish politicians to control the Catholic hierarchy. But, for the moment, suppose both aims could be achieved.
Would the working class be worse or better off under one or the other? Would there be anything to choose between the two “solutions”? Surely, in both a British Ulster or a United Ireland, the workers’ standard of living would be much the same. So would the slums, the unemployment and the other problems of capitalist society. And world Socialism would remain the only solution to these problems. The only difference would be the colour of the flag that would fly over the government buildings in Belfast: Union Jack or Irish Tricolour? Is this an issue worth killing and being killed over? No, Socialists reply, a thousand times No!
Editorial: The Thirteen Derry Dead – spgb.net (worldsocialism.org)
A Short Story from the January 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard
Russia’s population declined by more than one million people in 2021. The new figures continue a downward trend from the previous year when Russia’s population fell by more than half a million.
Birth rates have been falling because the generation now becoming parents were born in the 1990s when the birth rate plunged due to economic uncertainties after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The number of births per woman stands at around 1.5, well short of the minimum of 2.1 necessary to renew the population.
The government has introduced a number of financial incentives for parents with more than one child, such as cash bonuses and favourable mortgage rates.
Last December, Putin stressed that 146 million people are not enough for the country from a “geopolitical standpoint” and leave labour shortages.
“The demographic crisis is definitely a failure of the state’s policies,” said Sergei Zakharov, a demography expert at the Higher School of Economics based in Moscow. He said that measures to increase the birth rate encourage families to have children earlier but do not change how many children they want in total, adding that the government’s influence on birth rates is “limited” and shifting births to an earlier period will result in a “demographic gap” in the future.
For Stepan Goncharov of the independent Levada Centre pollster, the low birth rate is connected to widespread “uncertainty about the future”. Living standards in Russia have continuously deteriorated since 2014, with the economy strained by repeated Western sanctions, dependence on the oil and gas sector and widespread corruption. “People haven’t stopped buying and their income and savings have reduced,” Goncharov said.
According to last year’s survey by recruitment website SuperJob, 43 percent of Russians do not have any savings.
“People are not setting money aside and are not planning the future of the family,” Goncharov added.
Russia loses a million people in historic population fall (yahoo.com)
Scientists have warned the government that allowing large numbers of people in lower-income countries to go unvaccinated is “reckless” and could lead to new Covid variants.
More than 320 experts have written to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, calling for urgent action. Some 13 scientists who sit on the UK government’s scientific advisory committee, Sage, have also signed it.
They say more than three billion people globally have not had a first dose.
In their letter, the experts argue that the Omicron variant is a stark warning of the dangers posed by global vaccine inequality. Jabs can help keep infections low, giving the virus fewer opportunities to mutate.
They are asking ministers to support moves to waive the intellectual property rights on Covid vaccines so that developing countries can manufacture their own versions.
Former NHS chief executive Lord Crisp was one of the letter’s authors and said vaccinating the world was the best way to keep the health service safe.
“The solution is global solidarity – working together and that means partnership,” he said. “It means – in the short term – releasing some of these patents in order to deal with this pandemic…”
Covid: Scientists warn over ‘reckless’ lack of vaccines for poorer countries – BBC News
Baroness Valerie Amos, a former UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told Sky News: “The world food programme estimates if we don’t urgently get money into the country and help people that there will be three million children under five who will face acute malnutrition by March.
“Of those, a million children will die.”
Sir Mark Lowcock, a former UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told Sky News: “The vast majority of the population are starving and that is the reason people resort to these extreme measures. It’s not at all appropriate to enforce a sort of collective punishment on the total population of the country because you don’t like the regime that those people haven’t chosen.” Sir Mark added: “It’s not just a question of morality and humanity – that it’s not acceptable to impose a collective punishment on 40 million people for things they didn’t do – it’s also going to be counterproductive because it will antagonise people further, it will create grievances.”
Ben Slater, a former British soldier who led an escape effort from Afghanistan after he was stranded in Kabul, said the selling of children has been happening since the fall of Kabul.
“The selling of young girls, for around $200-$300 (£149-240), started immediately, weeks after the takeover,” he told Sky News. “Most families live day by day, hand to mouth. That has been going on for months. The selling of organs is horrific and they are fetching about $3,000 (£2,240) on the black market at the moment.”
‘One million children will die’: UK urged to release unspent Afghanistan aid (yahoo.com)
Millions of people face destitution this year as soaring energy and food prices mean that out-of-work benefit payments may no longer be enough to cover basic essentials, experts have warned.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) said levels of out-of-work benefits may soon fall below the amount required to avoid destitution, meaning recipients would not have enough money to afford necessities like heating, clothing and adequate nutrition.
The Trussell Trust, a food bank provider, reported increasing demand for its emergency food parcels this winter and warned it was “inevitable” that more people would be left destitute.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank expects millions of people to be unable to afford essentials, and “face impossible choices between heating and eating”. Henry Parkes, senior economist at IPPR, explained, “Come April, millions of low-income households are going to be particularly hard hit by spiralling energy bills, with the poorest families spending more than 10p in every pound on heating their home,” Mr Parkes said. “At the same time, those in receipt of universal credit will see their benefit increase by as little as £2 a week – a fraction of the rising costs they face.”
After years of real-terms cuts, jobseeker’s allowance and the basic level of universal credit are now just £74.60 per week for a person aged over 25. When inflation is taken into account, the payment is its lowest level for three decades. Research by the JRF and Heriot-Watt University in 2018 found that a single person living alone needed £70 per week to cover absolute essentials.
With inflation now running at an annual rate of 5.4 per cent and expected to hit as high as 7 per cent this year, the minimum income needed to escape destitution is certain to jump – and increases to benefits are not keeping pace. The JRF said that this point could soon be reached, with energy bills expected to soar by 50 per cent in April before rising again in October.
“If the income level needed to avoid destitution rises above our basic rate of out-of-work benefit for a single adult, we can expect to see a big rise in destitution, which is very worrying,” said Peter Matejic, deputy director of evidence & impact at the JRF.
The UK’s poorest families are expected to see a big hit to their incomes as the value of benefit payments falls this year. This April, social security rates are due to rise by 3.1 per cent, well below the increase in living costs that low-income households face.
“That’s a recipe for disaster for struggling families, said Alison Garnham, chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group. “In the face of soaring costs, families need help – the priority must be to increase social security by 6 per cent in April.”
The impact of rocketing fuel bills on low-income households would be “scary”, said Garry Lemon, director of policy and research at the Trussell Trust.
“People referred to food banks have often been through a difficult life event like losing a job or family breakdown. But the number one driver is the inadequacy of our benefits system which has seen a decade of cuts, caps and freezes. It is failing to lift people out of destitution.” In October, the government withdrew a £20-per-week uplift to universal credit seen as a lifeline to many families. Food bank managers are seeing the impact of the policy “right now”, said Mr Lemon. “These families are being crushed from different directions. You have the removal of the uplift to universal credit and you have benefits not being uprated as quickly as inflation is rising. The cost of absolute essentials – heating, eating – is rocketing upwards. People caught in the middle of that will suffer the most.”
Benefit payments ‘too low’ to keep people out of destitution as energy bills soar | The Independent
As NATO and Russia face one another over a possible Ukrainian war, both sides are currently engaged in using their respective media to sway public opinion, the SOYMB blog has been reminded of what a great author once wrote:
“There has never been a just war, never an honorable one–on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful–as usual–will shout for the war. The pulpit will–warily and cautiously–object–at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, ‘It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.’ Then the handful will shout louder.
A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers–as earlier–but do not dare say so. And now the whole nation–pulpit and all–will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open.
Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
― Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories