[QUOTE]George Osborne caps some benefits, time-limits others and invites inflation to eat into them all for years ahead. It amounts to an assault on the welfare state defying all precedent. Despite the recovery, the effect is evident in London’s resurgent rough sleeping and the preponderance of food banks in market towns.
Where Margaret Thatcher hesitated to tread in the 1980s, the polls today suggest that the right is carrying all before it. Why? Because, as I argue in my book Hard Times, the Great Recession has shifted most voters’ calculation about where self-interest lies.
...The pattern held into the late 20th century. As unemployment soared by a million between 1990 and 1993, working voters reasoned that “there but for the grace of God go we”. The British Social Attitudes survey found that the proportion suspecting that benefits were “too high and discouraged work” fell to less than a quarter. After Lehman Brothers imploded, in contrast, the belief that excessive benefits bred indolence spread; the view was endorsed by 61 per cent by 2009. Why have hard times got harsher? In essence because, after 35 years of rising inequality, the old understandings about shared risk have ceased to apply.
First, there is the spectacularly unequal incidence of redundancy. After 2008, already inflated unemployment rates for the unschooled, for ethnic minorities and dead-end towns increased more rapidly, often rising twice as fast.
In some disadvantaged subgroups, such as young black men, joblessness exceeded 50 per cent. Meanwhile, the luckier segments of society – white, middle-aged graduates, for instance – were almost immune.
Redundancies occur in every recession; the more distinctive hallmark of the recent downturn – and the current recovery – is unreliable and insecure jobs. These, too, are concentrated among the already disadvantaged and barely affect the middling majority.
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[url]http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/07/life-after-crash-why-have-hard-times-made-us-harsher[/url]
well... there was that report from citigroup that said the planet is headed towards a plutonomy.
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