Layer 268 . . . Berlusconi, Bannatyne, Bunting . . . and Catholicism

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The Berlusconi Show
I'm becoming irritated with Sam Wollaston, who's one of the Guardian's TV critics and commentators. I'm getting sick of wanky journos who seem to care mainly about getting easy chuckles and taking cheap shots. I don't mind the odd chuckle or cheap shot, but I also expect more than glib summaries of some pretty important work on TV.

This week we've had a wealth of brilliant documetaries to savour and enjoy on our TV networks - the ones on Detroit, Gaza, and the encounter between Maya Angelou and Dave Chappelle, which Oxzen has already commented on - to name but three.The documentary film is an increasingly important art form.

These three documentaries were anything but straightforward reportage on their subject matter: a great deal of creative thought and energy had gone into their editing, sound, images, and so on. Work of this quality deserves to be taken seriously.

And then we had a documentary called The Berlusconi Show, made by Mark Franchetti, and shown on BBC2 in prime time on Wednesday.

So what does young Wollaston have to say about it?

This fine study of Italy's leader leaves me amazed, says Sam Wollaston. How did he ever get elected?

Mark Franchetti, who's lived away from his native country for 20 years, goes back to find out how the hell this clown came to lead a European democracy in the 21st century. Franchetti  speaks to lots of people on both sides, and looks at the historical context of Berlusconi's rise to power; this is proper, balanced reporting.

For the viewer, though, what stands out is the stuff that makes you wince. It's not as if we didn't know it all before: the media control, the alleged mafia connections and corruption, the links to the extreme right, the trials, the legislative changes, the escorts and young girls, the cosmetic surgery, the parties, the gaffes, the dissing of Angela Merkel, the referring to Barack Obama as "tanned". It's just that, when it's all presented together, you're left with your jaw on the floor. How the frigging frig did that happen? And again. And again. He's been elected three times.

This was extraordinary, fascinating and worrying, all at the same time.

So Sam - which bit of it didn't you understand - when you ask the question: "How did he get elected?"

Francitti in fact did a superb job in examining the Italian psyche and revealing how Berlusconi, ever the populist, very cleverly "triangulates" in ways that Blair and New Labour could only dream of. Slippery Silvio is smart enough to make sure that he speaks TO the working classes, and not ABOUT them or AT them. And he also makes sure that he offers them enough treats to keep them happy, unlike New Labour. He also delivers on his promises and bribes. Unlike New Labour. The programme made all of this perfectly, beautifully, clear.

Of course he also behaves like a tycoon, a megalomaniac, a monopolist, and a smug, self-satisfied would-be tyrant, which appeals to the Italian middle and upper classes, who like their leaders to be "strong", powerful", "decisive", "colourful", "maccho", "bold", wealthy, nationalistic, xenophobic, anti-socialist, anti-communist, anti-trade unionist, Machiavellian and to also have a passing resemblance to Garibaldi.

And not dissimilar to that other Italian guy - what was his name? - oh yes, Mussolini.

"His Excellency Benito Mussolini, Head of Government, Duce of Fascism, and Founder of the Empire", to give him his full title.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/mar/18/the-berlusconi-show-the-man-who-ate-everything

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_fascism

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Duncan Bannatyne

Here comes another tycoon with aspirations to be a political big wheel. He was on Desert Island Discs this week. And he's yet another guest of DID who knows nothing (and cares nothing) about music. Or, as he put it himself - "Ah wasnae intae music all tha' much."

How very true. Not at all into it, in fact.

Rod Stewart   — Maggie May
Tom Jones   — Green, Green Grass of Home
Dawn  — Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Ole Oak Tree
Michael Ball   — Love Changes Everything
Beverley Knight   — Shoulda Woulda Coulda
Chesney Hawkes   — The One and Only

Sample lyric -

I can't wear this uniform without some compromises
Because you'll find out that we come
In different shapes and sizes
No one can be myself like I can
For this job I'm the best man
And while this may be true
You are the one and only you

Yuk.

But at least he didn't feel the need to throw in anything classical. Strange though how so many of our 'celebrities' either don't have time for music or are just very fond of wall to wall schmaltz. Or both. Sentimental. Florid. Maudlin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Bannatyne

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r8h99#segments

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Chopin was quoted on R4 today as having said, "The aristocracy in Britain are brought up to treat music as background noise."

Hmm. They're not the only ones.

Chopin also wrote, "Scottish people are kind - but such bores. God help me."

It seems Mr Bannatyne is a well-known supporter of charities. Which is nice.

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He was on BBC1 on Friday - dancing for Sport Aid. Incredibly badly. Unsurprisingly for a man who has no taste in music, he shows an abysmal sense of rhythm. I.e. none whatsoever. As one of the judges said - appalling. Cringe-makingly bad.

Still - it's for cheridy. And Mr B would rather be bigging up his "profile" on TV - even if people are basically laughing and cringing at him - than not be on TV at all.

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Madeleine Bunting is right on the ball again with a piece in the Guardian today about Catholicism and child abuse -

An inquiry is vital, but the church's moral authority is lost for ever

There is only one conceivable reaction to the fast-spreading crisis in the Catholic church: horror. Only the most virulent anti-papist could ever have quite envisaged the scale of child abuse and the doggedness of the church's desire to stifle scandal. The rest of us are astonished and appalled. Quite rightly, Angela Merkel saw fit to intervene. After decades – perhaps we should rather be referring to centuries – of obfuscation, the Catholic church has to be called to account for what has happened.

Last summer the Ryan report exposed decades of systematic abuse of thousands of children in Ireland.

Abuse allegations emerge across Europe in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy.

The current issue of the Catholic weekly, the Tablet, carries a thoughtful article by the head of Berlin's Institute of Sexology and Sexual Medicine which acknowledges that the church's celibacy requirement may have appealed – misleadingly appearing to offer a solution – to paedophiles' conflicted sexuality. While the debate about disproportion continues, what is increasingly clear is that the church's determination to preserve its institutional power and authority repeatedly involved suppressing the truth – even when that put children at further risk.

The crisis simply accelerates what is already happening: the drift away from a model of religious experience which younger generations find increasingly unintelligible. Despite all the talk in Ireland and elsewhere of inquiries to ascertain the truth and "rebuild confidence in the church", such initiatives are very unlikely to achieve that outcome. Inquiries prompt more lurid headlines as they expose further the scale and detail of the abuse. They are necessary and important, but they will not save the Catholic church.

There will be plenty celebrating the Catholic church's plight, and it is hard not to agree in some part with MacCulloch, that hubris has played a huge part in this institution's history and its current crisis. But it is also important to acknowledge that this is more tragedy than anything else. For the victims, their families, their congregations – many of whom see no cause for celebration despite their need for truth – and for those causes on which the church has proved a trenchant champion, stirring lazy consciences on the arms race, global inequality and capitalist excess.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/mar/19/catholic-church-child-abuse

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/mar/18/catholic-church-abuse-pope

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/17/catholic-church-abuse-germany-ireland

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/17/catholic-sex-abuse-benedict-vatican

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I'm going to bed slightly depressed tonight, having read so many bullshit comments on CIF following Lynsey Hanley's latest column in the Guardian, which was basically a good news story about Newham Council allocating over £1m so that every child in ther borough can have music lessons on an instrument of their choice.

The really depressing thing is that our education system turns out so many people who've been to probably quite decent schools, and even universities, and still end up witless, mean-spirited and up their own arses. What's more these morons have nothing better to do than hang around the Guardian's website ready to spew out their ignorant and reactionary bile, totally incapable of any constructive or even any interesting thoughts.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/19/music-lessons-schools-cultural-learning?

http://www.musicmanifesto.co.uk/news/details/Newham-Council-pledges-to-make-Every-Child-A-Musician/24721

http://www.musicmanifesto.co.uk/

Watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43tqQhOTCgQ

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This is great. I just wish we'd been able to keep the one that carried us nearly all the way across Africa.

http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/16032010/36/celebrating-icon-six-decades-vw-camper-0.html
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Layer 213 Family, Friends, Politicians, Presidents, Expenses, Democracy, Admissions and the Age of Crappy Music

Back home after several wonderful days in gorgeous Devon, and what's new in the world? Eldest granddaughter had her 5th birthday, and a brilliant all-afternoon party attended by her parents, her uncle and aunt, her little sister and baby cousin, her cat, her guinea pigs, her mum's dog who now lives with her uncle, her aunt's new and very playful puppy, and her grandparents, one of whom was late arriving back from Devon owing to great granny not feeling very well, and of course due to the ever-atrocious traffic.

Aunt had baked a superb birthday cake, and there were cards and presents galore. One very happy and chatty little girl had a ball the whole day long. Dad had given himself a day off work for this very important occasion, which fortuitously fell during half term week. It seems more and more fathers are now questioning their work/life balance and saying to themselves that they owe it to themselves to enjoy more time with their family, especially on important occasions, as much as they owe it to their loved ones.

So what else is new in the world? I have a very dear and wonderful friend who's spending time in hospital, one who's just spent a couple of days in Paris enjoying the city in warm sunshine, and another who's just popped over to Brittany for a couple of half term days with two of his lovely daughters. I have a friend who's just getting ready to fly out to Nigeria for a month or so, another who will soon be flying out to Thailand, and another who's organising a musical soiree for a select group of friends who are willing to play and sing songs of their own choosing by way of entertaining one another. Should be interesting!

Meanwhile, ex-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was on Question Time, showing a lot of gall for a woman who might soon find herself in court for her ludicrously false expenses claims. How come she's still an MP and still appearing on QT? Oh well, if it's OK to invite Nick Griffin . . . Although she's given an apology of sorts she still reeks of an attitude that can only be summed up as New Labour - the professional hard-faced machine politician, clinging on to a career that's in ruins, thoroughly disgraced but determined to remain in post and in the public eye. Just like New Labour.

On the same programme the ever-cuddly John Sergeant strongly endorsed Tony Blair's canditature for the EU's Presidency, which immediately signals that this is a man who's a ridiculous twat of the first order, and in truth about as cuddly as a rotund little ball of fresh doggydoo.

How many more of these supposedly intelligent commentators and politicians can't see that Bliar is thoroughly detested throughout Britain and Europe, and not just by the leftist element of the chattering classes? That he's a war criminal? That to endorse him for this high office is tantamount to signalling to the world that you're an unreformed New Labour lickspittle and a halfwit of the first order?

Gordon Brown for one. Yes, our Prime Minister, who's a well-known Blair hater, who has more reason than most to know about Blair's egomaniacal and psychopathic tendencies, has strongly endorsed Blair to be the top man in Europe. For fuck's sake, Gordo - you're in a big enough hole! Stop fucking digging! What more can this man possibly do to alert the rest of the world to the fact that he's an idiot who no longer cares about getting re-elected? Clearly he wants to completely destroy the Labour Party and to be the only New Labour prime minister never to be elected to that post. How can anyone vote for a man like Brown who clearly lies through his teeth and recommends the vile Tony Blair for the European presidency?

Timothy Garton Ash wrote an interesting column yesterday about the EU job and its potential candidates -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/28/president-of-europe-foreign-policy

This EU job is no presidency. It will rely on another. And it won't be Blair

As any reader of the Guardian knows, many on the British left are apoplectic at the prospect, above all because of Iraq ("war criminal", and so on). So are many mainland Europeans, especially those that opposed the Iraq war.

There is, however, one who fits the bill – although he'd need some persuading to take it on. This is Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland, UN international mediator and last year's winner of the Nobel peace prize. Ahtisaari has the stature, gravitas and experience for the job. An elder statesman, he would have avuncular authority with the current generation of EU heads of government. He is an excellent chair, without being even remotely chairmanic. He would be taken seriously in world capitals without anyone feeling that he was stealing their limelight. As the co-chair of the European council on foreign relations, he has already spent a couple of years thinking hard about what a European foreign policy should look like.

But it's not just about Blair, is it? Why on earth would any Europhile want a Brit to be the first to hold this high office when Britain has constantly been the backslider and the opter-out as far as Europe is concerned? Bloody hell - we've even refused to join the Euro!

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Roy Hattersley wrote a good column yesterday about the expenses scandal, in which he concluded,

The crisis of confidence in politics and politicians is not the result of Douglas Hogg claiming parliamentary expenses for cleaning out his moat. It is the product of politicians failing to debate the merits of a society in which one family lives in a moated grange while another survives in a bed and breakfast hostel.

If it becomes only possible to become an MP by making material sacrifices, there will be more conviction politicians. It is because the House of Commons has increasingly become a career, rather than a vocation, that a proportion (a small proportion) of members behave like bankers in search of a bonus.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/28/kellys-irrational-expenses-rules-appease

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Hattersley writes about financial inequality, whereas in today's paper Simon Jenkins writes about educational inequality and elitism -

Holy texts and lineage are no way to assemble state schools

The primitive barring of a child on ethnic grounds is the nadir of the pursuit of 'choice'. Pupils should go local, warts and all

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/oct/29/schools-admissions-labour-policy-jewish

Soon we shall cry, come back 11-plus, all is forgiven. The spectacle of the supreme court trying this week to decide whether racial purity should be the basis for admission to state education shows how close we still are to the dark ages. If I had to choose between putting my child through a test of the three Rs or trying to prove his mother's maternal bloodline, give me the three Rs any day.

The case of the London Jewish Free School (JFS), now before the supreme court, should never have been brought to trial. There is something primitive about religious adherence or ethnicity conferring privilege in state education. That this should be the result of Labour government legislation is extraordinary.

The 2006 act governing school admissions clearly states that, where a school is oversubscribed, its governors may discriminate by selecting on grounds of religion. This has driven a coach and horses through the comprehensive principle that state pupils go to their local school, as happens in most normal democratic countries.

I am against eccentricity or exclusivity being validated with public money.

It is preferable for a state school admission system to be based on locality. Schools are cohering local institutions, for richer, for poorer, and that is how admission is determined across most of the globe. If aptitude or ability are to be criteria, as was the ambition of the 11-plus, let the test be public and fair. It is not reasonable for admission to be based on parental class, background, faith or group affiliation. Those who want such schools can pay for them. Many do. It is a free country.

When I went to primary school, I went with everyone from my village.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, the discipline of local catchment eroded, as white flight sought ever more devious ways of avoiding high-immigrant inner-city schools. Successive governments introduced the concept of "choice", and middle-class parents besieged church schools as havens of collective security. These schools were oversubscribed and found themselves not chosen but doing the choosing. Admissions criteria – and covert charging – became the rage.

The pews of London churches with school nominations were soon packed with desperate parents. Others were emptied of their congregations. In 2006, the government attempted to legislate that a mere 20% of places in church schools should go to non-worshippers. By then the pass had been sold, and even that was too many for the church lobby. The minister, Alan Johnson, capitulated as, more recently, has Ed Balls. Across a third of English schools, the Labour party has handed back to the church the keys to the door of the bourgeoisie.

Urban vicars, with hundreds of desirable school places in their pockets, are the new, mostly regressive, social engineers. Their discretion is remarkable. Some allow prospective parents who go to weekend "second home" churches in the country to include this in their attendance score.

From the moment "choice of school" gained traction under John Major, the old tensions resumed.

The 11-plus was abolished because thousands of middle-class parents were enraged at being denied access to their local grammar school when a child failed the exam. That was why the Tories swore never to reintroduce it and accepted comprehensive education – until leaders arrived who had forgotten, or never known, the battles of the 1960s.

Now to have parents roaming the country looking for an ever "better" school reopens the can of worms that 11-plus selection tried, but failed, to close. Allied to the pernicious league tables, so-called choice has left popular schools and eager parents in an unholy alliance to maintain the quality of intake and reject unsuitable pupils. Both know that it is enrolment that separates star schools from sink ones.

As schools get ever more cunning in selecting bright pupils, it is easy to see what happens next. The public will protest and the government will insist on a national admissions test to promise a level playing field. It may not be called the 11-plus, but that is what it will be.

Children should go to their local school, primary and secondary, warts and all. It does not matter how a school is run, but it does matter how the state allots places in what are public institutions. Labour's crude attempt to ingratiate itself with middle-class voters has ended in a ridiculous court case. If tests there must be, let them be proper ones, not recitations of holy texts or mother's birth certificates.

Some of the comments on CiF after Simon's piece are well worth reading too.

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Seamus Milne wrote a good column yesterday with the heading,

Spying on us doesn't protect democracy. It undermines it

By branding protesters and mainstream Muslim activists as extremists, the police are effectively criminalising dissent

He concludes,

[This] is a timely reminder of the self-serving tendency to fantasy among intelligence organisations. Unleashing such people on those exercising their right to protest or take part in non-violent politics has got nothing to do with the defence of the democratic process – it's an assault on democracy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/28/spying-doesnt-protect-democracy
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On the music front, Lynsey Hanley wrote a column in which she says this,

There are few more obvious signs to be found of the revolution in opportunities for working-class people born between 1945 and 1970 than in the backgrounds of pop stars of the period.

Pop is in danger of becoming another of the closed-shop professions that anyone without the breeding or the nous finds it impossible to enter. The charts are strewn with posh pop stars who could, frankly, have found gainful employment at the higher end of the civil service. What do Florence and the Machine, La Roux, Will Young, and Lily Allen have in common? A private education, of course, which affords them the galloping confidence and social network required to make their way in whichever field they choose to excel in.

Then there are the state-educated artists – Amy Winehouse, Adele, Katie Melua, the Noisettes – who learned the same tricks at the specialist Brit School in Croydon. The result of such fame-farming is that you end up with the Kooks when what we really need for inspiration are actual kooks.

The one bucket-educated, self-made current star who has managed to steer his way through pop's Krypton Factor course completely on his own terms, without contacts, industry polish or the aid of reality television, is Dizzee Rascal.

How can pop stars any longer be at once the great inspirers and the great transformers when, thanks to stage schools and Simon Cowell, they're subject to a weekly time-and-motion study worthy of the Model-T Ford? Most of the Top 40 is guff at the moment to anyone over the age of 15 . . .

It's good to read this total condemnation of contemporary 'pop music' from someone who's clearly not just a grumpy old man [or woman].

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/28/top-of-the-pops

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And on the subject of music, try this -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/6453463/Vicar-attacks-Princess-Diana-funeral-culture-for-pop-songs-at-funerals.html

Read what Guardian readers think about it here -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/poll/2009/oct/29/religion
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Layer 212 . . . The Way We Live Now and The Spirit Level

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I heard the other day that there are people from the Ministry of Children and Parents and Carers and Families and Schools and Things going around talking about the book I blogged about earlier in the year – The Spirit Level. Maybe some people are indeed starting to take notice, but what a pity New Labia didn't give a lot more thought to what ought to be the raison d'etre of the Left in politics – the need for a more equal society – for all our sakes – instead of just droning on for 12 years about “more equal opportunities”. Obviously this equality thing smacks too much of socialism to make it palatable to the likes of Blair and Brown.

So it's time for an update. Here's what Lynsey Hanley, Equality Correspondent (see also Layer 210) wrote about it in the Guardian some time ago:

The way we live now
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/13/the-spirit-level

"We are rich enough. Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries, and in some cases appears to be damaging health. If Britain were instead to concentrate on making its citizens' incomes as equal as those of people in Japan and Scandinavia, we could each have seven extra weeks' holiday a year, we would be thinner, we would each live a year or so longer, and we'd trust each other more.

Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett don't soft-soap their message. It is brave to write a book arguing that economies should stop growing when millions of jobs are being lost, though they may be pushing at an open door in public consciousness. We know there is something wrong, and this book goes a long way towards explaining what and why. 

The authors point out that the life-diminishing results of valuing growth above equality in rich societies can be seen all around us. Inequality causes shorter, unhealthier and unhappier lives; it increases the rate of teenage pregnancy, violence, obesity, imprisonment and addiction; it destroys relationships between individuals born in the same society but into different classes; and its function as a driver of consumption depletes the planet's resources.

On almost every index of quality of life, or wellness, or deprivation, there is a gradient showing a strong correlation between a country's level of economic inequality and its social outcomes. Almost always, Japan and the Scandinavian countries are at the favourable "low" end, and almost always, the UK, the US and Portugal are at the unfavourable "high" end, with Canada, Australasia and continental European countries in between.

This has nothing to do with total wealth or even the average per-capita income. America is one of the world's richest nations, with among the highest figures for income per person, but has the lowest longevity of the developed nations, and a level of violence - murder, in particular - that is off the scale. Of all crimes, those involving violence are most closely related to high levels of inequality - within a country, within states and even within cities. For some, mainly young, men with no economic or educational route to achieving the high status and earnings required for full citizenship, the experience of daily life at the bottom of a steep social hierarchy is enraging.

The graphs also reveal that it is not just the poor, but whole societies, from top to bottom, that are adversely affected by inequality. Although the UK fares badly when compared with most other OECD countries (and is the worst developed nation in which to be a child according to both Unicef and the Good Childhood Inquiry), its social problems are not as pronounced as in the US. 

Wherever you look, evidence favouring greater equality piles up. As the authors write, "the relationships between inequality and poor health and social problems are too strong to be attributable to chance".

But perhaps the most troubling aspect of reading this book is the revelation that the way we live in Britain is a serious danger to our mental health. Around a quarter of British people, and more than a quarter of Americans, experience mental problems in any given year, compared with fewer than 10 per cent in Japan, Germany, Sweden and Italy.

Wilkinson and Pickett's description of unequal societies as "dysfunctional" suggests implicit criticism of the approach taken by Britain's "happiness tsar" Richard Layard, who recommended that the poor mental health of many Britons be "fixed" or improved by making cognitive behavioural therapy more easily available. Consumerism, isolation, alienation, social estrangement and anxiety all follow from inequality, they argue, and so cannot rightly be made a matter of individual management. 

It's impossible to overstate the implications of their thesis: that the societies of Britain and the US have institutionalised economic and social inequality to the extent that, at any one time, a quarter of their respective populations are mentally ill. What kind of "growth" is that, other than a malignant one?

What Japan and Sweden show is that equality is a matter of political will. There are belated signs - shown in the recent establishment of a National Equalities Panel and in Trevor Phil lips's public pronouncements on the central place of class in the landscape of British inequality - that Labour recognises that its relaxed attitude to people "getting filthy rich" has come back to bite it on the rear. 

Twelve years in power is long enough to reverse all the trends towards greater social and economic stratification that have occurred since 1970; instead they have continued on their merry way towards segregation.

There are times when the book feels rather too overwhelmingly grim. Even if you allow for the fact that it was written before Barack Obama won the US presidency on a premise of trust and optimism, its opening pages are depressing enough to make you want to shut it fast: "We find ourselves anxiety-ridden, prone to depression, driven to consume and with little or no community life."

However, the book does end on an optimistic note, with a transformative, rather than revolutionary, programme for making sick societies more healthy. A society in which all citizens feel free to look each other in the eye can only come into being once those in the lower echelons feel more valued than at present. The authors argue that removal of economic impediments to feeling valued - such as low wages, low benefits and low public spending on education, for instance - will allow a flourishing of human potential.

There is a growing inventory of serious, compellingly argued books detailing the social destruction wrought by inequality. Wilkinson and Pickett have produced a companion to recent bestsellers such as Oliver James's Affluenza and Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety . But The Spirit Level also contributes to a longer view, sitting alongside Richard Sennett's 2003 book Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality , and the epidemiologist Michael Marmot's Status Syndrome , from 2005.

Anyone who believes that society is the result of what we do, rather than who we are, should read these books; they should start with The Spirit Level because of its inarguable battery of evidence, and because its conclusion is simple: we do better when we're equal."
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This whole issue is really to do with spiritual intelligence. Anyone with a substantial degree of spiritual intelligence doesn't need to be convinced by masses of statistics that gross inequality is wrong and just plain idiotic - they can feel it in their souls and their bones. To turn their gaze from poverty and inequality and not give a damn about it not only means someone is greedy and callous, it means they are spiritually stupid and impoverished.

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Here's a review from the New Statesman by Roy Hattersley - http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/03/spirit-level-wilkinson-pickett

An interview with the authors, by John Crace, on “What might be the most important book of the year” - http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/12/equality-british-society -The Theory of Everything - “These two British academics argue that almost every social problem, from crime to obesity, stems from one root cause: inequality.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y36BJoelaMc

http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781846140396,00.html
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