Yet the relationship between different peoples and countries in this common destiny has been accompanied by growing global inequality and by a declining popular interest in the fate of the poor in the brave new integrated world. This is strange, since the experience of people all over the world who live and work in conditions reminiscent of the Britain of the early industrial era, replicates, to an astonishing degree, that of the workers of Manchester, London or Leeds 150 years ago. Of course there are differences. People live in other climates and cultures, they are the inheritors of other religions and ethnicities. In spite of this, the inhabitants of the slums of Sao Paulo, Manila, Dhaka or Manila suffer the same want and insecurity which were characteristic of our own workers.
People are always poor in the same way.
Hunger, insufficiency, sickness know nothing of cultural difference, but torment the body of Hindu, animist, Nigerian and Burmese in an identical fashion. And with the spread of the market economy to virtually every country on earth, the strategies for survival on which they rely show an extraordinary convergence. It is precisely this creation, elsewhere, of our own past, that ought to make us pause and wonder at the nature of our own transformation, the sunny conflict-free consensus of New Labour, with its undeniable insistence that the world has changed. It has indeed. Yet it remains eerily the same.