Inequality is the least of our problems

I FOUND Joyce McMillan’s claim that “inequality is our biggest threat” quite surprising (Perspective, 28 December). Is she entirely unaware of the economic situation we find ourselves in?

The British government is running a deficit of over £100 billion per year. More than one £1 in every six that it spends is borrowed.

The government has repeatedly resorted to quantitative easing – that is creating money out of thin air – which has inevitably resulted in inflation.

Interest rates are being kept artificially low in order to 
ease the financing of the national debt. As a consequence, there is a lack of lending to the private sector to finance growth.

Despite a decade of state education, many young people leave school functionally illiterate and thus barred from most opportunities to improve themselves. Indeed, one recent survey estimated that 20 per cent of school-leavers were so handicapped.

Our tax and welfare system has created a poverty trap with perverse incentives that discourage work and self-
improvement. Our national energy policy, with its subsidies to the part-time electricity from wind turbines, is costing jobs and creating fuel poverty. Indeed, our biggest problem is the obsession of our political and media classes with equality to the exclusion of commonsense and all practical concerns.

Otto Inglis

Inveralmond Grove

Edinburgh

Joyce McMillan ignores the entire 20th century, when a huge movement known as Communism attempted to eradicate inequality with the result being dictatorship and genocide.

The idea of soaking the rich via progressive taxation is also a Marxist idea, as is the notion that the state has the right to “redistribute” wealth from those who have earned it to those the government thinks should have it – with the implicit premise being that all wealth belongs to the state by right. The belief that the state has the ability to help the poor, let alone the duty to, by punishing success is false and must be rejected if the country is to emerge from the stagnation caused by tax and spend, and interventionist boom-and-bust economics.

Bruce Crichton

Victoria Road

Falkirk, Stirlingshire

Might I submit it is more important that we all get better off than that we should live in a society where everybody is forced into absolute uniformity. A growing economy making us all better off would be greatly preferable.

In which case, our “biggest threat” is that we have been held in recession for more than four years, with no GDP growth, while the world economy (at least excluding the European Union) has been growing at 6 per cent annually.

Much of the reason for our recession must be blamed on a political and media class whose views Joyce McMillan so ably represents. UKIP has a range of policies that would bring us the growth the rest of the world is achieving. But this is anathema to our political and media elite, who prefer building a bureaucracy committed to total equality, in the Maoist style, than to building a better future.

Neil Craig

Secretary

UKIP Glasgow Branch