The Politics of Inequality

Since the 2007-08 global financial crisis, empirical sociology has made great headway to better understand economic elites and their bearing on social fragmentation. By contrast, much less concerted, co-ordinated attention has been given to extreme marginality in the lowest range of the socio-economic order across late capitalist contexts.

In part, this stems from a (misplaced) belief that the incidence of destitution is reserved for ‘other’ people and places outside of Europe and North America.

In this session, we will interrogate this idea by exploring an increasing depth of poverty in the UK. Learning lessons from past attempts to map categories of (class) disadvantage, we will reflect on the need to ensure all social groups are legible in poverty analysis if we are to fully understand deepening inequalities globally.

Since 2019 in the UK, there have been more food banks than there are branches of the fast food chain McDonalds. Austerity measures, amplified by a continual erosion of the social security system, has led to emergency charitable food aid provision in the form of food banks, food pantries, and related forms of food provision becoming an increasingly expected and visible part of daily life.

But is what we are witnessing now really an emergency? Or is it actually chronic and permanent? These questions are even more important given the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on ethnographic work on food bank use since 2013, and current work exploring the permanence of charitable food in the UK, US and Canada, a series of questions will be outlined.

Can food and other services be gathered and distributed by the third sector with dignity and efficiency without building permanent institutions that begin to take the place of what should be the role of government? From a human rights perspective, can the provision of corporate food charity and the fight for social justice co-exist?

And finally, is it possible to move away from a model of charitable food aid, towards one centred on rights and social justice?

In this session we discuss the importance of international ties amongst the UK’s global economic elite, by exploiting administrative data derived from tax records. We describe how this data can be used to shed light on the kind of transnational dynamics which have long been hypothesised to be of major significance in the UK, but which have previously proved intractable to systematic study.

Our work reveals the enduring and distinctive influence of long-term imperial forces, especially to the former ‘white settler’ ex-dominions which have been called the ‘anglosphere’. These are allied to more recent currents associated with European integration and the rise of Asian economic power. Here there are especially strong ties to the ‘old EU-6’ nations of France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Italy.

The incredible detail and universal coverage of our data means that we can study those at the very top with a level of granularity that would be impossible using traditional survey sources. We find compelling support for the public perception that non-doms are disproportionately highly affluent individuals who can be viewed as a part of a global elite. However, whilst there is some evidence for the stereotype of the global wealthy parking themselves in the UK, this underplays the significance of the working rich. Our analysis also reveals the remarkable concentration of non-doms in central areas of London.