Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequality in Britain Today
Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Granta Books, 249pp, £12.99

High up in a glass office tower in Canary Wharf, a group of City bankers and lawyers are quizzed about their earnings. All receive over £150,000 a year, yet few recognise the good fortune they enjoy. Few realise they are all are comfortably in the top one per cent of earners. One even thinks he earns an average wage. And when asked to estimate the poverty line, the group places it at double the actual level. Insulated from the rest of society, they neither appreciate the true scale of its problems nor feel a sense of obligation to help tackle them.

Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s book is a meticulous and passionate examination of inequality in today’s Britain. In the context of the current economic crisis, it provides a timely challenge to Labour to step up its efforts to tackle inequality. The book’s principal weakness is that the strength of its analysis is not matched by the remedies it recommends.

The strength of Unjust Rewards is the force with which it makes its case. It vividly contrasts runaway wealth and the out-of-touch attitudes of the highest earners with the formidable obstacles to social progress for those at the bottom. It provides a potent critique of society’s judgmental attitudes towards those on low incomes, and a forceful defence of the power of government to change society for the better. Packed with striking illustrations of the rising tide of social inequality, the book dares Labour to go further and faster in quelling it.

Due credit is given to the efforts the government has already made. Visiting a Sure Start centre in south-east London, Toynbee and Walker set out how government policy is breaking the cycle of intergenerational disadvantage. Describing the government’s Aim Higher programme, they explain how aspirations are being widened for young people whose families have never enjoyed such opportunities before. Tax credits are celebrated. And witnessing the huge strides made at a struggling school, they applaud government investment in literacy and numeracy.

Where Toynbee and Walker are most critical is of Labour’s failure to tackle inequality at the top. They are breezily dismissive of politicians who fail to talk openly about inequality, attributing their lack of nerve to their being ‘mesmerised’ by ‘cascades of cash’. The electorate, they believe, would unhesitatingly endorse action against runaway wealth, if only the evidence and the moral case for doing so were spelled out by their timid political leaders.

Scant attention is paid to political constraints. Yet as the trauma of Labour’s 1992 election defeat demonstrated, the electorate is often inconveniently sceptical of political motives. The case for high earners paying their fair share is all too easily interpreted by voters as an attack not on inequality, but on the aspirations, values and work ethic of middle earners. It is this simple insight that has steered Labour away from an open narrative on inequality and towards redistribution by stealth. Yet Toynbee and Walker sidestep this.

Instead, the book provides ammunition for those who argue that the political caravan has moved on. Many, the authors included, argue that the current economic crisis has turned existing assumptions on their head. The financiers whose indifference to, and ignorance of, inequality earns them such contempt from Toynbee and Walker are no longer revered by society as economic alchemists. Instead, economic problems are traced directly to their hubris and excess. Attacking avarice need no longer be seen as an assault on aspiration.

Toynbee and Walker may be right – there is little doubt that the economic crisis has shaken the political kaleidoscope. Furthermore, after eleven-and-a-half years in office governing solidly from the centre, Labour should have the self-confidence to discuss inequality without being spooked by past defeats and without reverting to class warfare.

However, the book’s prescriptions do not provide a consistently convincing answer. The case for a living wage is well made and Toynbee and Walker argue compellingly for wider ownership of assets and tougher enforcement of existing employment rights. But other proposals, such as changes to the honours system to penalise tax avoiders, smack of tokenism, while their claim that wealthy tax dodgers can be shamed into paying their fair share seems doubtful. Taken as a whole, the remedies laid out in the book are oddly inadequate to the ills they are intended to cure.

Ultimately, Toynbee and Walker’s case for urgent action on inequality is a moral one. They seek to expose the shocking scale of inequality and convince people of the transformative power of government to tackle it. They faithfully believe that the moral case for action would then translate readily into a political coalition for achieving it. Readers may doubt that the task is so straightforward, but what the book lacks in political strategy it makes up for in moral force.