| Poverty 
In Britain today almost 14 million men, women and children live below the poverty line. Over the last decade inequality has risen faster in Britain than in any other country in the world apart from New Zealand- with Cymru being the poorest part of the UK plastic state.Yet for a few, Britain is truly booming and we have the biggest gap between rich and poor since records began. Internationally, 815 million people worldwide go hungry. We live on a planet where 55% of the 12 million child deaths each year are caused by malnutrition. And it’s getting worse. According to the United Nations, the poorest countries are worse off now than they were 30 years ago. On the basis of current trends, the numbers living in absolute poverty - that is, on less than a dollar a day - will increase by ten million a year for the next 15 years. The Aids epidemic has already killed 25 million people and is predicted to kill a further 68 million in the coming decades. In Botswana alone, 39% of the adult population have HIV/Aids. Richest country on earth Meanwhile in the US, the richest country on earth, the wealthiest 1% has seen their incomes increase by 157% in real terms since 1979. By contrast, the bottom 20% are actually making $100 less a year in real terms, 45 million people live below the poverty line and over 40% have no medical cover. Despite all the advanced technology and wealth available to the US, more than 32 million people have a life expectancy of less than 60 years. It is not mainly the arguments of socialists that are changing peoples’ outlook, it is their experience of the system we live under - capitalism. Ten years ago capitalism declared victory when the Soviet Union collapsed. What existed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was not genuine socialism but a grotesque caricature of it. Nonetheless, its failure was a golden opportunity for capitalism worldwide. American philosopher Francis Fukuyama put it bluntly in 1989: "What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War [the post-1945 conflict between US imperialism and the Soviet Union] but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of man’s ideological evolution and the universalism of Western liberal democracy." Ten years after this declaration of the "end point of man’s ideological development", and even Fukuyama has changed his tune. The cold war is supposed to be over but arms spending totalled $804 billion in 2000, an average of $130 a person. Humanity’s supposedly wondrous endpoint is a world of war, poverty, dictatorship and, above all, incredible inequality.
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