Last Straw

Richard Wilkin­son and Kate Pick­ett writ­ing for The Guard­ian:

The evid­ence shows that almost all the prob­lems that occur most often in the poorest neigh­bour­hoods — includ­ing those that make us a broken soci­ety — are sys­tem­at­ic­ally more com­mon in more unequal soci­et­ies. Rates are not just a little higher, but between two and eight times higher. Wider income gaps make soci­et­ies socially dys­func­tional across the board.

Last Octo­ber Cameron roun­ded on Labour, say­ing: “Who made inequal­ity greater? No, not the wicked Tor­ies. You, Labour. You’re the ones that did this to our soci­ety. So don’t you dare lec­ture us about poverty. You have failed and it falls to us, the mod­ern Con­ser­vat­ive party, to fight for the poorest who you have let down.”

But the truth is that we are suf­fer­ing the impact of the massive increases in income inequal­ity under Thatcher, which Blair and Brown have since failed to reverse. In the 1980s the gulf between the top and bot­tom 20% widened by a full 60% — much the most dra­matic widen­ing of income dif­fer­ences on record.