Crossing the line of social cohesion

YOUR contributor Philip Milton asks us to be more concerned about the poor in places like Africa than our own disadvantaged citizens.

We should of course be concerned about both, and it saddens me that people doing essential roles in factories, shops, care homes and hospitals in the UK are often rewarded very poorly, compared with the most wealthy. Someone has to do the jobs that are currently on minimum wages.

At some point, inequality will reduce our collective happiness and social cohesion in my view and I believe we’ve crossed that line.

I wonder if he’s considered the fact that the wealthiest have the largest carbon footprints and that this, through climate change, will increasingly have a devastating impact on third-world communities already living on the edge of starvation. Those are the very people he asks us to focus on.

The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%. Yet the latter are suffering the most and many have no realistic prospects.

He may tell us that the mega-rich are often generous benefactors, but their collective generosity cannot undo the climate mayhem their emissions are causing. Neither does it buy a starving person in Somalia a legal way to move to somewhere that can actually sustain them.

At the other end of the scale, the least well-off here can’t afford to reduce their own modest emissions. Think of the family living in rented and poorly insulated houses with expensive and inefficient heating systems. I’m afraid global warming means that inequality in the UK and everywhere matters to his family in Africa, but we seldom think about it. Michael Carter

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