Maybe we aren’t all in this together after all

Educational consultants are advising British infant-school teachers that their pupils should be discouraged from having ‘best friends’. It seems that the Fluffies have decided the ‘scarring pain’ of having a bust-up with that best friend could emotionally disturb kids for the rest of their lives.

In Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and Somalia, children are suffering from the intense famine that has grown increasingly worse over the last three months. No rain has fallen for more than a year in some parts of the region, while some 12 million people face starvation in what is considered the worst drought in 60 years. I somehow think that dying from such a problem is more likely to dominate the consciousness of these kids than the idea of swapping friends for acquaintances.

In Spain, house prices will fall another 30% (say experts) because the property bubble there was so pronounced, only when prices are back to pre-explosion levels will they level out.

But while much of the eurozone is dealing with high debts, recession and burst credit bubbles, Germany’s real-estate market is spiralling out of control. Low interest rates and cheap ECB loans to banks pushed property prices up 5% in the Bundesrepublik during 2011 – double the rate of inflation. In some of Berlin’s better neighbourhoods, price rises have been in double figures.

The minimum wage is to be frozen for the UK’s younger workers, but adults will see their pay rise by 11p to £6.19 an hour from October 1, the Government announced today. Rates for younger workers stay the same at £4.98 for 18 to 20-year-olds and £3.68 for 16 to 17-year-olds. Apprentices will get a 5p increase in their minimum wage to £2.65 an hour.

Payouts to the co-heads of the Barclays Capital investment banking arm were revealed in a stock exchange announcement which also showed the pair had sold almost all the shares they were given so have pocketed the cash, which dates back to awards of shares from as far back as five years ago. Antony Jenkins, the head of the retail business, received and sold £1.9m of shares while Tom Kalaris, the head of wealth, received £2.1m shares and sold half of them. Mark Harding, the legal counsel, received £1.1m and Robert Le Blanc, the head of risk, sold shares worth £1.4m.

We are always going to have material disparities. This is because there is a massive spread of IQ levels, motivation quotients, and social class in every society on Earth. This is part of natural selection: those who think Homo sapiens somehow represents an exception to 300 million years of evolution are clearly over-impressed with being a member of that species.

However, only Homo sapiens has money. And with the possible exception of dolphins, only our species introspects enough to see when things might be just a tad unfair on those at the bottom. Since the late eighteenh century in modern history, the gulf between rich and poor has been a constant concern. After the French Revolution of 1789, European governments paid heed to the message, and introduced social measures to keep the poor folks vaguely happy. The exception was Russia, and they had a revolution in 1917. It took them seventy years to recover any semblance of order and justice. Twenty five years later, things are if anything getting worse.

Equally, only our species seems to do daft things – like shielding kids from the knocks of life, rubbing the lower order’s face in it, pursuing false forms of contentment, and demanding that everyone else conform to our cultural values.

Political correctness, the EU, trickle-down economics and poorly rationalised greed are profoundly daft ideas. I look forward to the day when enough people wake up, and they are condemned to a past that will not be repeated.