Inequality has not begun to enter the national political debate. It is not a word in the government’s vocabulary, only ‘fairness’ – a flexible word used as easily by the Conservatives in their party slogan this year. Their ‘fairness’ includes the right to take your own ‘fair’ share of cash out of local services to spend in the private sector. So ‘fairness’ is a matter of opinion, whereas inequality is a matter of fact.
Labour’s fear that the word suggests a trajectory towards total equality and totalitarianism means the argument so far only concerns removing the worst excrescences of injustice, with a (very low) minimum wage and mild rebukes of greed at the top. The issue of the widening gap between rich and poor is avoided.
Yet few imagine a society that continues to diverge at the rate of the last twenty years is sustainable indefinitely. Most people would agree that when the lives of the top 20 percent become so entirely different to the lives of the bottom 20 percent they can hardly be said to inhabit the same society. They might differ over where to draw the line, but most would agree that at some level gross inequality matters.
Labour will need to stop tiptoeing around it. The promise to abolish child poverty by 2020 is probably the most radical pledge ever made. The first quarter will be achieved by 2005, but nothing in present policy or language suggests how the halfway mark is to be reached, let alone the whole lot. As poverty is measured as those living under 60 percent of the median income, the goal can never be reached without some considerable flattening of incomes, for which the voters have not begun to be prepared.
The only countries with no child poverty are Sweden and other Nordic nations that have made conscious, publicly agreed social democratic choices about the distribution of income over many decades. We will not achieve poverty abolition unless people actively agree to head in a Swedish direction – high taxes, high prices and greater income and living standards equality. Labour needs to warn voters to avoid the US model, where gross inequality means some 40 percent of Americans live in a third-world economy.
So the single most important task is for Labour to start engaging openly with the electorate about these choices, laying out a vision of a better society that would make abolition of child poverty a possibility.
There are three practical measures the government can take. Raise the minimum wage as high as it can go without losing jobs; then raise the pay of all low-paid public sector workers to a living wage, setting a higher market rate for manual work. Bring back wages councils to fix high minimums in different sectors: one minimum wage doesn’t fit all.
Tax earnings over £100,000 or more and begin a public discussion on reasonable top pay. Name and shame the greedy, use company law on excess. ‘Globalisation’ does not apply, since virtually no FTSE 250 top executives are foreign: there is no brain-drain demand for our executives.
Universal children’s centres would see all children get a Sure Start, including affordable, high-quality childcare for any family that wants it, to catch all children in danger of failure. Sure Start is hardly more than a pilot programme at present.
Make all schools beautiful community centres with one-to-one coaching for all who fall behind, with welfare support, psychotherapy, nurses and classes for parents. All thirteen year-olds need vocational options of such high quality that it is not a despised second best. The poorest 40 percent, as at present, should get free further or higher education.
But talking about social injustice comes first. Why is a care assistant toiling in an old people’s home paid 200 times less than a company executive? It is not the ‘market’, nor is it some iron economic law, but a political choice that Labour has not dared discuss.