And most people now think this is probably as good as it gets on tackling inequality for another generation. Cuts dominate the pre-election debate. The British Social Attitudes evidence shows public attitudes towards the poor becoming harsher. Labour will be told after more than a decade in office that, if it hasn’t succeeded, it must be time to try something completely different.
So more of the same is not going to work. If Labour has reached the limits of a ‘social democracy by stealth’ approach, calls for greater boldness need to articulate a public argument and strategy which could place fairness at the heart of a Labour manifesto, and mobilise winning coalitions which demand a deeper politics of fairness. How?
1. Have a robust account of the record
There are political difficulties in defending a record which results from a decade of ‘running up the down escalator’. The false charge that nothing has changed is made from left and right. Inter-generational inequalities in opportunity or life expectancy cannot be reversed, even in a decade. Interventions with long-term potential, like Sure Start, the child trust fund and education policies where inner city schools are now showing the greatest improvements, must be defended.
We must also reject the canard that Labour’s record shows that redistribution has failed. The opposite is true. The record shows that redistribution works, where it is attempted. Why else would we see sharp falls in pensioner poverty and reduced child poverty while poverty rose among single adults out of work? Precisely because these were the groups which government policy did, and did not, redistribute to. The 1980s also offer clear proof that redistribution works. By redistributing upwards, through a much flatter tax system, policy drove one of the biggest changes in inequality, poverty and collapsed mobility of any western democracy in the last century.
Yet Labour’s record also shows the limits of placing too great a burden on public services and modest redistribution. A deeper politics of equality requires a political economy which seeks to shape market outcomes, not just correct them after the event.
2. Be clear about what’s wrong with Britain – and why inequality matters
Labour’s fundamental critique of Britain today is that too much about our life chances are inherited at birth: where we are born and who our parents are still matters far too much in determining our opportunities and outcomes in life. And so our own choices, talents and aspirations count for too little. This should mean a particular focus on ensuring the fairest start in life for all, and a particular concern with challenging entrenched inter-generational inequalities.
Political opponents may now accept these arguments. Social democrats must make equality talk mean something.
3. Don’t leave out the top if we want effective pro-equality coalitions
An effective politics of equality must bring together the interests of low and middle-income earners while arguing that there would be social benefits in a fairer and more equal society for us all.
That is why defending universal services against those residualised for the poor is essential to the long-term prospects of a politics of fairness. By contrast, the ‘broken society’ is again a segregating narrative, which seeks to cut the issue of poverty off from questions of the range of opportunities and outcomes across society.
It also means it is a mistake to leave out the top, despite what both New Labour and the modernising Conservatives have argued. In statistical terms, it is the growth in inequality in the top 1 per cent which means that inequality has risen under Labour, as measured by the Gini coefficient, while inequality between those 10 per cent from the top and 10 per cent from the bottom has been modestly reduced. The effective challenge to the top may be less about ‘how much?’ and ‘how did you get it?’
But the political strategy point is much more important. But there is no effective politics of support for equality if the ‘squeezed middle’ hears the message that the priority is to help those at the bottom, while their own relative position against those higher up is not of concern. Those who claim that challenging inequality at the top will offend instincts about aspiration have nothing to say to the aspirations of this crucial group. Spreading aspiration and opportunity should be central to a politics of greater equality. Just as JS Mill’s ‘harm test’ limited liberty when it encroached on the liberties of others, a fairness test would support aspirations for ourselves and our families – but reject demands, whether because of environmental constraints or using ‘sharp elbows’, to dominate positional goods, which depend on denying similar aspirations to others.
4. Pick some popular battles for a more equal Britain
If there is a claim to ‘shared progressive ends’, then Labour’s argument must also be about willing the means. ‘Fairness doesn’t happen by chance’.
This becomes particularly important when spending is going to be very tight. For all of the talk about ‘tough choices’, we have had a ‘politics of the surplus’, where tax cuts were prioritised in the 1980s and public spending by New Labour. A politics of fairness now must look at the distribution of current resources and spending,
The left can get itself into the mindset of thinking that the public is hostile to egalitarian ideas, and miss out how often its arguments chime with public sentiment. There are few ideas more popular than a higher minimum wage, or proper financial support for carers, for example. As John Denham has said of the Fabian Society’s research on public attitudes towards inequality: ‘Not everything that would make Britain more equal is seen as fair, but many of the things that would make us more equal are seen as fair.’
How can such policies be resourced? Applying a fairness test to the current distribution of spending and taxation would be a start. For example, stopping giving over £10bn in pension relief, and a quarter of the total, to the top 1 per cent of earners, instead sharing incentives to save fairly.
Private education has long been in the ‘too difficult to think about’ box. Yet its impact on stalling social mobility is becoming clearer. A popular equality policy here would be to revive Gordon Brown’s aspiration to close the gap in spending per pupil between state and private schools. A contribution to this could be made by levying VAT on private school fees (an idea considered, but dropped, by New Labour ahead of the 1997 campaign), hypothecating the funds raised to spending in state schools generally, and to the poorest areas in particular, simply to offer a level playing field in school funding.
It is a policy which meets the fair aspiration test. And the objection that these parents would be ‘paying twice’ is nonsense: who advocates that the childless should be able to opt out of funding universal education?
David Cameron has cast doubt on whether money makes that much difference, arguing that it is ‘the warmth not the wealth’ which really matters. He exaggerates his point, yet it would be strange for him then to wish to defend the funding gap in education.
This would be one example of a broad popular challenge on equality and fairness which could challenge those who use equality language while never willing the means.