IT WAS an American wit, probably Will Rogers, who liked to tell his
audiences that it's no crime to be poor, but it might as well be. In
Britain, as the obituaries for a lousy century are being put together,
we could probably add that it's no crime to be rich -- it just looks
that way.
Three useful things can be said about the Rowntree Foundation Inquiry
into Income and Wealth, published last week. The first is that its
findings surprised no-one; the second that no-one has questioned their
validity; the third that no-one in British politics has a blind idea
what to do about them.
The report said simple, devastating things: that since 1979 the bottom
10% of the population have become 17% worse off while things for the top
tenth have improved by 60%; that the number of people existing on less
than half of average incomes has tripled; that one in three children is
being raised in poverty; and that 30% of us have made no gains
whatsoever from economic growth. It did not add, though it could have,
that all of this took place amid an ''economic miracle''.
Inequality on this scale is no passing phase. It is a worm at the
heart of society. It is one thing to know that the bottom 50% of the
population owns only 8% of the country's wealth; quite another to hear
that the top 10% have locked up almost half of the total.
The Rowntree report amounts to evidence that government neither
represents nor cares for perhaps a third of Britain's citizens, yet
no-one who has drawn breath recently will find its conclusions
surprising. Poverty is on the streets, naked and foul, and it won't be
wished away by Ministers who believe all things are relative, as though
to say Richard Branson is relatively poverty-stricken when set alongside
the Duke of Westminster.
Laissez-faire Thatcherism perpetrated two vicious deceits during the
eighties. One was the myth that anyone can become rich. The second was
the delusion that the accumulation of wealth is at all times a blameless
pastime, good for the country and good for the soul. Wealth would
''trickle down'', as though from a golden goblet to a sewer.
Lacking any good excuses of their own, John Major's administration has
stuck to these lethal, rusty guns. In the Commons this week Peter Lilley
was again defending the idea that inequality means economic efficiency
and accusing anyone who thought otherwise of the politics of envy. Major
was boasting of how, ''on average'' and in ''real terms'', just about
everyone is better off than they ever were.
THE truth, as Rowntree demonstrates, is that wealth in Britain is
being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The power that this implies
is important, for only those in possession of such power are capable of
effecting change -- one reason why the poor are rarely of any political
consequence. None of this is denied by the Government, of course; only
its meaning is disputed.
Labour, conversely, knows what it all means but cannot bring
themselves to say what they will do about it. Donald Dewar was, by all
accounts, his passionate self in the Commons, enumerating the social and
economic consequences of Britain's biggest growth industry. Yet when
pressed on what, precisely his party proposed, he faltered.
Harold Wilson liked to say that if Labour is not a crusade it is
nothing. The trouble is, you do not embark on a holy war unarmed.
Confronting poverty, Wilson's successors look like naked pacifists
taking on tanks. All the arguments are on their side; all the artillery
is with the enemy.
Writing in one of the Sunday papers, shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown
laid out a convincing case for a reformed welfare state and for
investment in skills and people. He wrote of the need for a national
minimum wage and for the continuing education of 16 and 17-year-olds not
in work. The Dunfermline MP recognised the need to tackle unemployment
head on and ameliorate the effects of free-market policies. But he
denied himself one word.
Nowhere in his article did Brown mention tax. The idea that you can --
indeed must -- achieve redistribution through the tax system has, it
appears, been purged from Labour's thinking.
New Labour's problem is, in this matter, old Labour's problem --
wealth is economic power; share one and you share the other; duck the
challenge and you achieve nothing. Besides, as Peter Lilley knows, we
just aren't killing the poor off fast enough.
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