Inequality affects our mental health. While it triggers self-esteem issues in those worse off, it also increases “status anxiety” in everyone else, in which we worry about our position. To deal with this anxiety, we consume more: designer clothes, flashier cars, bigger houses, exotic holidays, etc, and work overtime to pay for all of this. As a result, household debt levels rise, and it takes us longer to pay off our mortgage.

Inequality reduces our social circles, which is one of the most significant variables in happiness, because it is harder to maintain friendships across class differences. For example, we risk making friends feel uncomfortable, which can make conversation more difficult. Or maybe you want to go to a nice restaurant, but know your friends don’t have as much disposable income, forcing you to choose between the two.

Inequality increases addictive behaviours, including alcohol consumption and substance use, but also includes behaviours such as shopping or gambling. This happens at all levels of society, i.e., we become more vulnerable to these.

Inequality increases public spending costs. It creates an increased mental health burden (more NHS spending) and the number of people too ill to work (more benefit claimants). It is estimated that the UK could save £39 billion per year just by avoiding the problems inequality causes. That’s more public debt and less money for things we want the government to fund.

Inequality increases crime. We pay for this directly when our houses are burgled, our bikes are stolen, etc, through the increased costs of alarms and security systems, and mentally in the increased fear of being a victim of crime. We also pay for this indirectly: when shoplifting increases, businesses factor the losses into their prices, resulting in more expensive goods, such as groceries, as well as increased public spending on policing, courts, and prisons.

Reducing inequality sounds like it would cost us a lot of money. But it doesn’t. It reduces both public spending and the need to consume to manage our status anxiety, meaning those of us who are well off can spend less, work less, and enjoy greater wellbeing. We all gain from reducing inequality.

Nobody should be subjected to this, and political leaders are right to condemn it. However, these statements often feel perfunctory and make no attempt to address the cause of this rise in violence.

The growing inequality in our society is systematically stripping people of their voice. Our society is supposed to be democratic. But “one person, one vote” does not grant people a genuine say when the world is run by multinational corporations that often wield more power than entire countries. These organisations are run by unelected officials who report to institutional investors and high-frequency trading algorithms.

Individual voices are further drowned out by media publishers and platforms overwhelmingly owned by the 1%. None of this is hidden. Jeff Bezos has directed the Washington Post’s opinion section to defend ‘free markets’ and ‘personal liberties’, effectively excluding dissenting views. Elon Musk bought Twitter to loosen moderation policies, a shift that, according to researchers, has coincided with a sharp rise in hate speech and harassment.

Nor can ordinary people find the time to organise and campaign due to the expanding financial pressures of the cost-of-living crisis. Nor can they organise themselves into bigger units thanks to anti-trade union legislation.

Let me be clear that explaining something is not excusing it. The people who carry out these acts are responsible for them, and no grievance makes violence acceptable. But condemnation alone changes nothing if we refuse to ask what produces the violence in the first place. When we, as a society, systematically deny people access to every “proper channel”, political violence becomes a predictable outcome, and we should not be surprised when it follows. If we want to actually reduce it, rather than simply deplore it, we have to address the root cause: the systematic exclusion of ordinary people from real decision-making. That means extending democracy into the economic sphere.

Research shows that, overall, immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits, effectively subsidising British taxpayers. If immigration falls, that shortfall would need to be made up through higher taxes on British citizens.

This is in contrast to our neighbours in Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, all of whom include healthcare workers.

This decision was made by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), but was explicitly done as a cost-saving exercise. Almost every other European nation has instead chosen to prioritise keeping hospital staff healthy and patients safe.

Meanwhile, in November it emerged that the Michelle Mone-linked PPE company, which took £148 million for faulty equipment, has also avoided a £39 million tax bill.

Holding just one such company accountable would pay for COVID boosters for every healthcare worker in Britain.

This is what systemic inequality looks like in action. There’s always money for millionaires, but never for the people who keep the country running.

What is talked about less is that Bevan originally insisted that dental care and eye care were included in universal healthcare, and when Labour introduced charges, he resigned in protest.

Teeth and eyes are not optional extras. They are part of your health.

This is why we need to start judging success by other measures, such as wellbeing.

You might also wonder why Starbucks UK is opening new shops.

The answer is that Starbucks UK paid Starbucks, the owner of Starbucks UK, £40 million last year to use the name Starbucks. This created a £13 million tax credit in the UK, while transferring tens of millions outside of UK tax jurisdiction.

One of the issues is that as phones “advance”, we use more and more data. More data needs the greater bandwidth available at higher frequency radio waves, and higher frequencies are less good at penetrating buildings. The more data we use, the worse it gets, and this problem is likely to get worse in the future.

It’s also an issue that as we build energy-efficient homes and offices. These are designed to reflect heat, which also blocks radio waves, so again, it’s likely to continue getting worse.

There is a solution: in urban areas, we could replace high-powered phone masts with a higher density low-power ones, placing one on each street, or inside large buildings as the Trafford Centre has already done.

But this is expensive. And this is where it intersects with the “efficiency” of the free market.

Right now, the four big network operators - o2, Vodafone, Three, and EE - all maintain their own networks. We’re paying for this through our phone contracts and because each provider only gets a quarter of the market, they can all only afford to build a shitty network that is pretty much as good as their competitor’s network, leaving a lot of people without signal and no better competitor to switch to.

This is unfortunate because building a network to support the entire population costs pretty much the same as building a network to support a quarter: most of the cost is in installing the infrastructure and not per-user utilisation costs, so having four separate networks that do the same thing is almost entirely redundant.

Instead, if we switched to a nationalised network, as we have with the national grid, there would be almost four times as much money to invest in infrastructure and we could have a much more reliable mobile network for potentially the same cost.

Leeds, Bristol, Liverpool, Cardiff, Belfast and Cambridge all lack a light rail or tram system. This is economically damaging. I know people who have had to turn down multiple jobs because there is no reliable way to get from work to their children’s school on time. People want to work. Companies want to hire them. But lack of infrastructure is turning working people into benefit claimants. I don’t want to pay for that.

The target user of HS2, well-paid professionals, have other options (slightly slower trains, planes, cars, online meetings), whereas the lack of public transport limits people who typically work in-person jobs and have no other options for travel. I do want to live in a society where we look after the most vulnerable.

I don’t know if HS2 is a “good” use of money in isolation. But I do know it’s a poor choice compared to building more light rail.

When I retrained from software engineering to psychology, I did one of my placements in a specialist trauma unit for children who had been sexually abused. I was in my 7th year of university, but as a student, I had to work for free. Helping children overcome the trauma of being raped was worth £0 according to the market.

Earlier this year, Elon Musk took SpaceX public. Ahead of this, he merged xAI, maker of Grok, into SpaceX. Over an 11-day period, the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated Grok generated around 23,000 sexualised images that appeared to depict children. They call this feature “Spicy Mode”. So it’s a space rocket slash child sexual abuse images company. This is worth £1,500,000,000,000 according to the market.

I’ll freely admit I’m envious of Elon Musk. I chose to spend my time helping children who have been raped. I could have used my considerable skill as a software engineer to create a child sex abuse image machine. If I had chosen the latter, my family would now be set for life.

House prices have doubled relative to wages, and the average deposit is now above £60,000. So saving £2,000 a year by avoiding fancy coffees and avocado toast would still take you 30 years to save up.

But we have also built a society that has significantly reduced what economists call the “pain of paying”.

We created a society with cheap and easy consumer credit: credit cards, payday loans, buy-now-pay-later, and reduced friction in spending: Apple Pay/Google Pay, pay with your smart watch, cashless shops, and we moved everything into a monthly subscription where you either have all of the music or none of the music and no option to decide “I won’t buy a new record this month because cash is low”.

So when someone gives in, that isn’t weakness. It’s a system doing exactly what it was designed to do.