Confronting inequality - Capitalism must change or be changed

Inequality, like the poor, will always be with us, it seems, but yesterday’s Oxfam report which recorded that the combined wealth of the world’s 85 richest people is equal to that of the world’s poorest 3.5bn — half of the world’s population — is shocking.

It is an indictment of how easily we have accepted the winner-takes-all conceit driving today’s market economies. It highlights nearly every democracy’s inability — or reluctance — to confront international business to control the concentration of wealth. It shows how we have failed to ensure that a great swathe of humanity lives with basic comforts and dignity. This unsustainable divide is a threat to stability, especially in developing economies. It jeopardises the very system that supports such an unjust imbalance — capitalism. It also threatens all of the security and social good that flows, or at least should flow, from that system.

It is terribly ironic, and an indication of how poorly we learn from history, that this is so as we approach the centenary of one of the catastrophic Russian revolutions provoked by similarly intolerable circumstances.