Poem on the wealth gap plus a Shakespeare twist

Anna Chen – 14 September 2025, poem

Written in June 2011, my poem, “Big Society: On a conversation in the Foundling Museum”, was a response to a lunchtime chat with a pleasant middle-class woman who was a fellow guest at one of our mutual friend’s regular sessions for disabled people. So, assuming I was in the company of like-minded citizens who care about the more vulnerable amongst us, my guard was down.

This was in the summer of 2011, when the world was still reeling from the American Great Crash of 2008 which had dragged us unto recession. Officially, the UK recession lasted from the third quarter in 2008 to the end of 2009. That might have been true for the wealthiest but the rest of us are still feeling the effects of austerity today.

In fact, the recession was an opportunity for a huge transfer of wealth from poor to rich to be grabbed with gusto. The wealth gap widened massively: the higher up the pecking order you were, the more you made. The rich grew richer exponentially while the rest of us stood still or fell into poverty.

In 2010 the top ten were worth £48 billion. In 2022 they were worth £188 billion. Whenever they screech “where’s the money tree?” remember the wealth of the richest 100 individuals and families rose to £683.856 billion in 2023.

Given we were standing on the site of the Foundling Hospital in London, established by Victorian philanthropists who were moved by the plight of the poor at a time of Empire and great riches, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Of course, self-serving attitudes have always existed. But the setting and the current social inequities under austerity measures made it all the more disturbing. Although she had donated to my friend’s impressive work for a neglected section of the population, she seemed unaware of contradictions that made charity necessary in the first place.

Our cost of living crisis, slow growth, rising interest rates hitting mortgages especially hard, food price inflation, loss of public services and under-investment threaten to send us crashing to similar levels of poverty that so shocked some of the Victorians. Unfortunately, the same philanthropic mindset is absent. Sympathy aside, they were smart enough to realise that if you didn’t give the poor a semblance of relief, revolution was a probable outcome and then the party would soon be over.

Having said that, you do not have to make the working classes suffer to get them to take power. All that happens under unremitting misery is degeneration and a contraction into the arms of the right.

Look at what’s happening now. You’d think that national pauperisation through the elite’s greed, Brexit, Covid mismanagement, war and outright theft by the powerful would have resulted in some sort of organised resistance. But the left allowed a vacuum to persist for twenty years as the collective consciousness atrophied, the trade unions trod water and the right wing succeeded in turning migrants into scapegoats.

What work of depravity is a man who amasses more than he can spend in a lifespan? And when will we rise into the light of the sun?

Borrowing from Hamlet’s soliloquy in which he contemplates his existence, I’ve repurposed it to consider outmoded representation in this vale of tears.

Anna two poetry collections are available from Aaaargh! Press: Reaching for my Gnu and Chi Chi’s Glorious Swansong

The Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury