The gulf between the rich and the poor

Nothing concentrates the mind so much as a miss-timed trip to London’s West End on a Saturday two weeks before Christmas. I needed a new printer/scanner and resorted to the ‘never knowingly undersold’ entity having wandered through their website to look at what was on offer. I coupled the trip with a visit to Selfridges to look for a ‘designer product’ for a daughter.

Naturally the density of the surge on Oxford Street was itself a shock. So too were the heaving queues of ‘tanks’ – vast BMWs, Range Rovers, Volvos, Mercs and the rest jostling for space in attendant underground car parks. Have I ever seen more? I can’t think that I have. Inside there is a sense of ‘recently wealthy’.

And then there are the homeless, the apparently aimless – the occasional guy sitting with a dog with a label round its next saying ‘hungry’. Those contrasts have always been there.

It’s when you go to the street markets beyond the West End – Inverness street in Camden, Chapel Street in Islington that the contrast deepens. The pound shops too seem fuller, and there seem to be more of them, more charity shops too.

This is all anecdotal. One London cyclist’s glimpse of life around him. May be it can be argued that the poor are not as poor as they might have been in the 1980s recession. But my sense is that the rich are very much richer than I have ever known – and the gap between very rich and very poor is wider than I have ever known.

Treasury figures tend to support this view. Are the rich paying tax? Are they paying all the tax they should? How much of the wealth is non-indigenous – Russian, Nigerian, Latin American, Chinese?

At the other end – unemployment? Housing? I catch passing headlines in my mind’s eye – fewer houses built than in any time in the last ninety odd years. And this morning ‘former city minister calls for break-up of banks’.

I feel I experienced a strange and unnerving weekend in the aftermath of the violence of student demonstration. There’s a gulf out there the scale of which we may not have seen in our lifetimes, any of us. Multicultural successful, happening London. Is all that glitters quite as gold as we hope it is this Christmas?