It is odd that so many people believe that capitalism is a system that brings prosperity to all. Even as the evidence stacks up against it with poverty increasing across the world, it is still accepted by too many as the only game in town.
Poverty in the UK tends to be invisible when it comes to the mainstream media. They are more likely to focus on poverty elsewhere. Yet poverty in the UK is considerable by any standard. Some figures compiled by Oxfam give an indication of just how poverty blights the lives of so many across the UK.
In the UK 13 million people, more than 1 in 5, live in poverty, with the majority of both children and working age adults in poverty living in working households, 55.3% of children and 52.9% of adults. Bang goes that excuse that they are poor because they wont work!!. How does poverty translate in to real life? One example would be that a child born in the poor district of Calton in Glasgow has a life expectancy of 54, where as a child born in the more affluent area of Lenzie on the outskirts of Glasgow has a life expectancy of 82. They are separated by about 10 miles.
In the supposed affluent UK, 1 in 8 men and 1 in 4 women earn less than £7 hour and almost 50% of home owners earn less than the minimum wage. In this land of advanced capitalism a staggering 3.9 million children live in poverty with more than half of these in working households. The reality of this is that children born into poverty are more likely to have lower birth weight, higher infant mortality, and poorer health than their counter parts born into better off homes.
Another feature of this advanced capitalist society is the fact that the number of households in which no-one has ever worked has almost doubled since 1997. According to the Office of National Statistics, 1.7% of all households were permanently jobless by the second quarter of 2010, up from 1% in the second quarter of 1997. Of course as we know, capitalism is an unfair system so these figures are not spread evenly across the country. For example in the more affluent East England it is just 0.5% jobless households, compared with inner London which stands at 6.5%.
Everything seems to working fine!!
As the gap between rich and poor gets wider by the year and the number of poor increases, surely we will reach that point where we say enough is enough. After all capitalism is just a man made system, one that benefits the few at the expense of the many, it is not created from tablets of stone or ordained by a supreme being. Men created it, men can destroy it, and create a more fair and just system that benefits all our people, not just a handful of parasites.
