Inequality

According to the Office for National Statistics, the richest 10% of households in the UK hold 44% of all the nation's wealth, while the poorest 50% own just 9%. And according to the World Inequality Database, the top 0.1% wealthiest individuals in the UK had their share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013. Meanwhile, an estimated 14.3 million people in the UK live in what the Social Metrics Commission define as "poverty". That's around 22% of the total population.

Globally, the figures are even more extreme. The richest 1% of the world’s population now owns more than 45% of the world’s wealth, and yet 80% of humanity earns less than $10 a day and 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty as defined by the UN.

Climate change and nuclear weapons are emergency situations because if we do not address them now, it may soon be too late. We cannot know the consequences of continuing indefinitely to increase the wealth of the richest at the expense of the poorest. History tells us that societies that do not meet the needs of their people do not long survive.