This chapter examines the politics of global poverty, inequality and development. The first section provides the background for our analysis of global poverty and inequality. Any meaningful discussion of poverty and inequality necessarily has to be in relation to development – which, as we show, is itself contested in theory and practice. The second section provides an outline of a relational perspective of global development. The third section focuses on the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda. We conclude with some critical observations about the political significance of the relationship between development, poverty and inequality.

Here we look at poverty from a quantitative viewpoint to examine trends over time as well as highlighting the social and demographic groups who are most disadvantaged. This reveals a section of society that faces the hardship of life on reduced resources and that lack the necessities for daily living. It also shows the central role that poverty plays in the notion of social exclusion, particularly in exclusion from social activities. Since the 1970s there has been an increase in poverty in the UK, alongside an increase in the cost of key necessities such as energy and housing costs. unstable and under-employment, problem debt. and financial instability, alongside stringent reforms of the social security system, all of which have disproportionately affected those on low incomes. Associated with these has been an increase in material deprivation and the dramatic rise in foodbanks, and we see increasingly precarious and risky lives lived by significant sections of the population. This changing social and economic environment has implications both for the quality of life of people living with mental health conditions as well as the health and well-being of significant numbers of the general population.

A global federal government would be a mighty instrument – and lots of power-hungry leaders and groups from around the planet will no doubt vie with each other to manipulate it to their parochial ends. The global institutions will therefore need to incorporate robust mechanisms to ensure that they remain rigorously accountable, fully transparent, and genuinely independent and impartial in their basic functioning. Four features would therefore be important to include in such a government: strong subsidiarity, the separation of powers, an executive branch with plural leadership, and a high bar of supermajority voting before major action can occur in the world legislature. A second key goal for this government will be to reduce the gross disparities in wealth and opportunity that divide the world’s peoples. One plausible mechanism for achieving this would be a UN-run system of Guaranteed Minimum Income, implemented globally. Such a government could also adopt pragmatic policies to nudge the world’s autocratic nations toward higher degrees of democratization and respect for human rights.

Considers how rights have been used to address economic and social justice. Social and economic justice advocates turned toward what is commonly called a rights-based approach to development, beginning in the 1990s. The case study in this chapter traces how and why Oxfam recast its goals as a set of what it called “basic rights.” Incorporated original interviews and archival research to outline Oxfam’s adoption of human rights language in its aid and economic justice advocacy work. Rights-based advocacy by development groups was taken up at the same time that traditional human rights NGOs hotly debated how and whether to take up economic, social, and cultural rights more directly. Argues that the emergence of rights arguments in development work demonstrate the potential flexibility of human rights tools in justice-seeking.

This final chapter argues that there is a far greater crisis heading our way. What is far worse than nature ‘biting back’ with a deadly virus is that we now live with the disturbing knowledge that the natural world that sustains us all is liable to collapse. COVID-19 is not a ‘once in a hundred years’ event that we can soon confine to folklore. It is a warning shot across our bows, alerting us to the seriousness of the imminent challenges of climate change and the escalating crises of nature and social inequality. These cannot be addressed unless we discard the neoliberal straightjacket and revitalise a nurturing society.

It is often considered that the industrial revolution was Britain’s most unique contribution to world history. However, that achievement emerged from a society and economy that had enjoyed unprecedented success due to its adoption since c.1600 of the policies, principles and practices of collectivist individualism, a more valuable British legacy to the world than the unbalanced individualism adopted in the subsequent industrial revolution. It is a legacy that urgently needs to be rediscovered to enable us all to find the commitment to each other needed to meet our imminent challenges. Coexistence, anti-exploitation and nurturing are the moral codes of the collectivist-individualist ethics, a morality of giving, not taking.

The conclusion reflects on the author’s motivations for writing a book on resistance and how resistance is becoming an unavoidable part of politics. The panic in late 2018 around migrant caravans in the United States shows how the lines are being drawn about the conflict between the affluent and the impoverished. We are being faced with an inescapable choice as to where our loyalties lie.