Lord Whitty, former general secretary of the Labour party, recently lamented in the House of Lords that, under Labour, the rich were getting richer, and the poor relatively poorer. ‘The distribution of wealth has actually deteriorated in terms of equality over the past few years,’ he told peers, while distribution of income was broadly frozen at 1997 levels.
Not everyone agrees. Tony Blair’s biographer, John Rentoul, who wrote a depressing book in the 1980s called The Rich Get Richer, cites official statistics to back up his claim that ‘income and wealth are now spread more equally in this country than when Tony Blair became prime minister.’
The prime minister himself, when told by Andrew Marr in an interview in February that ‘overall inequality’ had risen on his watch, replied with a less than convincing: ‘Well, it depends how you measure it.’
Few would have thought that, after 10 years of a Labour government, we would be unsure whether the wealth gap was narrowing or widening. Does it matter? As long as the poor are getting richer, should we care if the rich are getting richer even more quickly?
I saw Roy Hattersley give an after-dinner speech a few years ago on the subject of equality, and by the end of it, a senior Fabian Society official on my table was bristling with anger. He simply didn’t feel that equality was something Labour should care about. But the Tories have cheekily brought up Labour’s record, with a claim that the number of households in ‘deep poverty’ – earning below 40 per cent of median income, rather than the official poverty line of 60 per cent – has risen under Blair.
And Peter Hain is calling for a ‘war on inequality’. (Isn’t it amazing how things liven up when there’s a deputy leadership election underway?) He points to the City bonuses worth £8.8bn in total this year, with 4,000 individuals receiving more than £1m, and warns: ‘There’s a real problem of people on average incomes feeling there’s a sort of super-rich class right at the top.’
An ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph in February found that 73 per cent of the public think City bonuses are ‘excessive and something should be done about them,’ while 69 per cent think the gap between the highest earners and average earners is too large.
Gordon Brown slapped down Hain in the past when he proposed a new, higher top rate of income tax, for fear that the move could put off middle-class voters who came over to Labour in 1997. But taxing City bonuses would feel much less threatening, even to most high-earners. And, like the windfall tax on utilities in 1997, the policy would put the Tories in a quandary over how to oppose it.
Otherwise, Labour’s strongest weapon might be that extraordinary photo of an undergraduate David Cameron with fellow members of his all-male, all-public school dining club, all dressed in £1,000 tailcoats. Somehow ministers need to remind voters that it is the Tories, not Labour, who are traditionally the party of privilege.
As protests go, 1.7 million signatures on an electronic petition against road pricing are less impressive than the one million who marched in Hyde Park against the Iraq war. You can’t go on a march in your slippers, while you’re surfing the internet at 3am, or during a coffee break at work.
But both totals are vastly superior to the 30,000-odd signatures on the Downing Street petition to legalise fox hunting. And this from a cause once regarded as powerful and well-disciplined. The Tories are committed to repealing the hunt ban as soon as they take power, but on the strength of this protest it’s hardly a big vote-winner.