7 - Equality and Discrimination

Summary

We have already seen that disabled people are much more likely to live in poverty compared to non-disabled people, that this is closely linked to the prejudice that still exists against them and that their social security support has been eroded in recent years. Two other dimensions of equality that are intimately connected to poverty are ethnicity and gender.

RACIAL INJUSTICE: THE INVISIBLE POVERTY TRAP

In 2020, the persistence and consequences of racial injustice were put into stark relief by the combination of the shockingly unequal impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and increased activism and awareness sparked by the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. People from Black and South Asian groups suffered disproportionately high death rates from Covid-19, as did people from deprived backgrounds. This shouldn't have been a surprise. Health inequalities are longstanding and stubborn: people from poorer backgrounds have higher rates of illness and shorter, less healthy lives than those who are better off. The accumulated stresses of poverty, the impacts of unhealthy housing and poor-quality work, and less access to health and other services all combine to produce this pattern. The Covid-19 pandemic followed the same path, disproportionately hitting people who already had poor health, lived in overcrowded homes and did jobs that meant they were at higher risk. That led to disproportionately high deaths among people from some Black and minority ethnic groups because of the higher proportions living in poverty, in bad housing and in low-paid, insecure jobs which couldn't be done from home.

If you live in a Black or minority ethnic family, your chances of living in poverty are much higher than if you live in a white family. A fifth of people in white families live in poverty, compared to more than a third of those in Black and minority ethnic families. The patterns vary across different ethnic groups of course: more than half of people in the Bangladeshi group live in poverty, nearly half of Pakistani people and four in ten Black people. By contrast, a quarter of those of Indian heritage do: still higher than the fifth of white people but a much smaller gap.

The most important reason for the higher poverty rates is inequality in our labour market.