The announcement that the Conservatives had published a major new report on inequality surprised and intrigued me. What policies would they propose to narrow the inequality gap? What would they have to say about a culture of excessive wealth and soaraway incomes where a set of behaviours were encouraged and rewarded that brought our banking system to the brink of collapse? How would they square their professed interest in reducing inequality with their stated policy priorities of cutting inheritance tax for the 3,000 richest estates and introducing tax breaks for marriage, of greatest value to the better off?
The report, when I read it, didn’t even try to address these points. Labour’s Two Nations simply combined a set of familiar, if depressing, statistics (and at least one glaring inaccuracy), showing that the poor fare badly on a range of outcomes, with a cluster of rehashed Conservative policy proposals, whose effects will at best have a limited effect on inequality, at worst serve to make it worse. Other proposals, meanwhile, pretty well reflect current government policy. It’s not clear what the Conservatives intend to do differently, for example, in bending health spending to disadvantaged areas (this already happens) or how payment by results for getting long-term benefits recipients off benefits and into work differs from the thrust of Labour’s recent welfare reforms.
Indeed, it’s hard to see that the primary driver of the Tories’ proposals has much to do with reducing inequality at all. Rolling back the state and passing responsibility for public services to the voluntary sector and the community says less about reducing inequality and more about traditional Conservative hostility to ‘big’ government – and to keeping public spending down. Limiting Sure Start to the poorest families gives a further taste of how spending on public services would be cut under a Conservative government: the universalist approach would be ditched in favour of targeted, residualised services – with all the risk of stigma, poor quality and ever-reducing investment that such an approach can bring. Policies on supporting marriage and increasing schools’ independence, meanwhile, reflect traditional and longstanding Conservative ideologies, but their effects would be to leave the most vulnerable and excluded further behind – and at a high cost to the exchequer in the case of the marriage tax break.
What’s most striking about the Tories’ thinking is not what’s there (it isn’t much) but what is not. Stark assertions reveal policy blindspots – that redistribution under Labour hasn’t worked (no recognition that perhaps the problem was that we needed more of it), or that inequality between the bottom and the middle matters more than between the middle and the top (handily permitting their richest friends to continue to enjoy their wealth undisturbed). What’s more, any discussion of the huge rise in inequality during two decades of Conservative government, and the policies that caused this, is airbrushed out of the analysis, with the focus only on the difficulties Labour has experienced in turning back the tide.
The discussion of the causes and consequences of poverty and inequality (and casual muddling of the two) most starkly reveals the Conservatives’ reluctance to address income inequality as the root of the social ills they identify. Indeed, many of the party’s policies would put the circumstances of low-income families at further risk. Tax credits are to be removed from families on modest incomes, the child trust fund which guarantees an asset to young people at age 18 is under threat. Yet low incomes and lack of assets are clearly associated with a range of poor outcomes, from poorer health and life expectancy, to poorer educational attainment. Nonetheless, and despite acknowledgment of the evidence from around the world of the damage that inequality does – for example as identified by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson – the implications for more redistributive public policies are simply ignored. Sir Michael Marmot’s top-line message that increasing the minimum wage would be one of the most effective measures the government could take to secure improved public health outcomes doesn’t get a mention at all.
Discussion of some of the structural drivers of inequality – for example gender, disability and ethnicity – is also largely missing from the Tory analysis. And while concentration of disadvantage in geographic areas is acknowledged, and rightly connected with high levels of worklessness, it comes without the recognition that in many such communities the destruction of traditional industry brought about by Thatcherism means that there are simply no jobs to be had. While Labour has concentrated on measures to create jobs to support the recovery, the Conservative focus, by contrast, has been on cutting the deficit, likely again to lead to the loss of thousands of jobs.
Nor have the Conservatives shown much enthusiasm for the institutional framework by which greater equality would be secured. The party’s hostility to the Human Rights Act and to the equality bill, which creates a duty on public bodies to promote equality, are the most recent examples of its resistance to any concept of equality as of right.
So what we end up with is a high-blown rhetoric about levels of inequality, but a set of proposals that are at best insufficient to deal with it, at worst deeply flawed. There might be increased opportunity for some, but the overall effect of an approach that emphasises individual opportunity will be to leave many behind. It is impossible to imagine that inequality can be systematically reduced in this way, and so we have to ask how serious the Conservative commitment to greater equality – particularly to greater equality of outcome – can truly be seen to be. In that regard, one of the most striking – perhaps quietly shocking – phrases in the Labour’s Two Nations document is the statement that Labour set itself targets that it couldn’t meet. What is now abundantly clear when it comes to reducing inequality is that we should expect no such visionary ambition from the Conservatives.