The Big Smoke

Last summer Sir Ronald Cohen, the leading financier and backer of Gordon Brown, predicted there would be riots on the streets of London. The cause? Our ever-growing wealth divide. As increasingly ludicrous stories hit the papers about hedge fund managers eating foie gras from virgin geese out of the navels of supermodels, or turning entire Chelsea streets into Kubla Khan-style pleasure domes, the stark fact is that the capital also has a higher percentage of children living in penury than any other region in Britain. We are a city splintered between the plutocrats and the poverty-stricken: inner London is the richest area in the EU but one in seven of the capital’s workers lives below the poverty line. Most shocking is the effect this has on life expectancy: a 2007 survey showed that while a wealthy woman in Little Venice can expect to live till she’s 96, a woman on the Churchill Gardens estate (also in the City of Westminster) will be lucky to make it to 77.
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According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), this wealth gap is the widest it’s been for 40 years. A key reason is that the UK’s friendly tax breaks now make the capital a magnet for the world’s billionaires. Among them is Lakshmi Mittal (the Indian-born steel magnate, worth £19.25 billion according to the most recent Sunday Times Rich List) and Roman Abramovich (£10.8bn). Time for a little wealth redistribution perhaps? Well, Chancellor Alistair Darling is certainly trying. But judging from the shrieks of horror at his attempts to make non-domiciled businessmen who have lived here for more than seven years pay the Exchequer a new annual tax of £30,000 (less than a third of what some hedge fund managers might spend on a watch) the haves are mostly quite happy to maintain this chasm between themselves and the have-nots.

If you want proper proof of London’s wealth divide, you don’t even have to glance at the research documents. Just take a walk through this schizophrenic city and see what it reveals. In Chelsea a local resident enters a high-class bakery and lays down a cashmere blanket for her miniature poodle. In Tower Hamlets a single mother with five children struggles to stop her flat falling apart. A house close to Kensington High Street is sold for £80 million, making it the most expensive single residence in the world. A Ghanaian cleaner leaves her under-furnished tower-block flat at 7pm to begin a night shift, which at £5 an hour will never raise her above the poverty line.

Why do the rich live longer than the poor? A recent Food Standards Agency survey that looked at the eating habits of the lowest 15 per cent of the nation’s earners concluded, to the researchers’ surprise, that nutritionally they weren’t that much worse off than the wealthy. However, although the upper classes are far from immune to alcohol and substance abuse, there’s a higher recorded level of alcohol and cigarette consumption among the poor and far lower levels of exercise. This – combined with other factors – has an impact on quality of life as well as lifespan. Among those aged 45 to 64, 45 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women in the poorest fifth of a group surveyed by JRF reported a long illness or disability. By comparison only 10 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women in the richest fifth of the group were similarly afflicted.

A recent study of 1,552 volunteers at St Thomas’s Hospital also suggests that people of lower socio-economic status actually become biologically older than those in higher socio-economic groups. The study focused on pieces of DNA called telomeres, which are supposed to correlate to biological age. As people age, their telomeres become shorter. Smoking and obesity can speed up this process. But so too can the type of job an individual does. Among women aged 46 (the average age of the group), those who did manual work were shown, at chromosomal level, to be seven years older than those in non-manual work. To check that this was not caused by genetic factors, the study looked at twins who had ended up in different social classes and discovered that with them the difference was nine years.

This, then, is a tale of two – increasingly polarised – cities. It’s clear that unless something radical is done, nothing will change. Here one man (and the super-wealthy are most often men) can coolly lay down £100,000 for a space tourism trip organised by Richard Branson, while another individual will struggle for over a decade to earn the same amount. The Labour Government has actually made things worse. Is it only a matter of time until the riots begin?