Hatred of the rich is back in fashion

9 June 2007

Ross Clark says that the anti-globalisation rioters protesting at the G8 summit in Germany and Labour’s deputy leadership contenders are part of a new and dangerous trend towards wealth-bashing

It would be easy to dismiss the resurrected anti-globalisation movement as a bunch of incoherent nutters. But that would be to underestimate the influence of anti-globalisation on left-wing thought generally — and not just on the fringes. It has become such a commonplace to blame the oil industry for any meteorological-induced hardship in the Third World that no one seems to protest any more — even though such cheap jibes are polluting serious debate over climate change. Likewise, no one seems to mind any more that Western clothes manufacturers — in adverts by once respectable aid charities — are blamed for creating poverty in the Third World: when the reality is that they only attract workers to their factories by paying higher wages than any other local employers.

A dozen years after Tony Blair ditched Clause Four and declared an end to the politics of envy, it has suddenly become fashionable again to bash big business and attack people for being too wealthy. Last week’s Newsnight debate between the candidates for the Labour deputy leadership exposed a general leftwards shift in the party’s outlook. But what was most remarkable about it was that the most rabidly left-wing remarks came not from Jon Cruddas, the mild-mannered ‘old’ Labour candidate who wants Britons to return to living in council houses, but from Harriet Harman, the former social security secretary and middle-class paragon. Demanding a return of the Royal Commission on Distribution of Income and Wealth, the body set up by Harold Wilson in the days when the government thought it its duty to squeeze the rich until the pips squeak, she complained: ‘You can’t have proper equality of opportunity with a huge gap between rich and poor.... Do we want a society where some struggle and others spend £10,000 on a handbag?’

Like so many of Ms Harman’s utterances, her appeal to the Left doesn’t bear analysis. What about the people who sew the £10,000 handbags together — surely the more that the wealthy spend on their handbags, the more they earn? I don’t think, somehow, that Ms Harman would be any happier if the price of handbags was capped at £100 and as a result handbag-stitchers were on subsistence wages.