Know Your Enemy

"Not even the great prophetess of the free market [Margaret Thatcher] could have predicted that Britain would become the very centre of global greed and vicious inequality, a modern Herod’s Temple, where profiteers gather and lucre is worshipped."

The Independent's Yasmin Alibhai Brown, reacting to the Oxfam report that half the world's wealth will very soon be concentrated in the hands of 1% of its population.

What's most alarming for her is that not only are our government not seeking to minimise the disparity between rich and poor, but are actually actively seeking to increase it. As she's noted in a previous column, inequality on its current scale is something that should be urgently addressed for pragmatic, selfish reasons if not for the sake of simple decency, sympathy and compassion - something that was underlined by an OECD report in December. At what point will the Tories (and other governments like them around the world) wake up, smell the coffee and realise the gross error of their ways - even if they do so out of continued self-interest rather than anything more noble?

(Thanks to Adam for the first link.)