Sir Richard Jolly has been a pioneer in understanding and addressing inequality throughout his distinguished career at the UN and Institute of Development Studies. In this inspiring review of a major new book, How to Fight Inequality (And Why that Fight Needs You) by Ben Phillips, Sir Richard urges everyone to get involved in what he sees as the cause for our times.
Inequality has been growing – no, soaring – since about 1980, when neo-liberal economic policies and controls came in, and progressive taxes went out the window. In my view, growing inequality, along with climate change and environmental risks and disasters, are now the three most serious problems the world faces.
Fortunately, the UN has long recognised the need for action on inequality – incidentally, well before of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The International Labour Organisation (ILO) in the 1970s recognised inequality to be a major factor acting against employment and economic growth as well as poverty reduction. Most recently, the UN has built inequality into one of the Global Goals. Goal 10 states briefly and starkly: ‘Reduce inequality within and among countries’.
Ben Phillips has long been a campaigner for action in ActionAid, Oxfam and the Fight Inequality Alliance. In his book, he introduces us to some of the frontline heroes of action. It is a mobilising book, full of examples, motivating and powerful in its 150 pages. If you want to be inspired for action, this is the book for you – or for one of your children or even grandchildren!
On pages 81-82, he lists many of the actions which need to be taken, drawing on a report he oversaw at ActionAid. It’s a long and comprehensive list. Almost any one of the items would help and if taken together would bring fundamental change: increasing investment in public services in health, education and early child care and in public infrastructure; providing social protection including child benefit and old age pensions; raising minimum wages to living wages; recognising, redistributing and reducing women’s unpaid care burden. And, of course, shifting away from indirect taxes back to more direct taxes (as Britain relied on before neoliberalism) and making them more progressive and closing loopholes and tax holidays. He also calls for bolder action – widening access to land and redistributing large private landholdings.
Phillips recognises the big challenge all this would take – the challenge to the power of the world’s wealthiest, the ‘top one per cent’. So he calls for strengthening trade union rights, instituting a wealth tax and increasing corporate democracy by increasing workers’ decision-making roles as well as instituting a maximum wage that could be paid relative to companies’ junior workers; and, a big point, limiting private finance for political parties and political campaigns.
It’s a big agenda – but as Phillips says, we are not suffering from a dearth of ideas but from how to make such changes possible. This is where the whole book provides examples of people big and small, national, international and local, taking action. It’s a tonic to read, although if read at one sitting, perhaps like the effect of drinking a full bottle of wine.
Sir Richard Jolly is a former Director and now Honorary Professor and Research Associate of the Institute of Development Studies. He was Deputy Executive Director of Unicef, Special Advisor to the Administrator of UNDP and Principal Coordinator of the UN Human Development Report.
How to Fight Inequality (And Why That Fight Needs You) by Ben Phillips was published in December 2020 by Polity Press.
