by Liam Kennedy
Soaring income inequality inevitably raises discussion of more progressive taxation. But a more fundamental focus on the ownership of capital is needed.
‘Taxes, taxes, taxes … All the rest is bullsh*t in my opinion.’
The now
Outside those snow-capped peaks, there is, of course, widespread recognition of the need to tackle
Unfortunately, this evidence does not always translate into coherent political action. In the United Kingdom, for example, top rates of income tax have become less progressive over the decades while corporation tax has been consistently cut since 2010. Acknowledging the inequality problem is a crucial first step—but there is also a strong case for looking beyond ‘taxes, taxes, taxes’ if it is to be truly tackled.
Half-truths
The UK secretary of state for work and pensions, Amber Rudd, proudly proclaimed at the end of March that ‘since we entered government in 2010, income inequality has fallen’. A recurrent declaration of the current administration, this is, essentially, a half-truth.
Income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient (before and after housing costs), slightly increased from 2010-11 to 2017-18. Moreover, the Gini is just an average of inequalities—it doesn’t show, for instance, that the poor have been falling further behind the middle. It also omits the negative impact across (the intersections of) disability, race
Additionally, UK income-inequality statistics are plagued with problems which militate against any consistent understanding of how much income those at the very top of the distribution are actually ‘earning’. Attempts to adjust for missing information on top incomes dramatically increase levels of inequality, even though a host of income sources remain not properly accounted for. To put it bluntly, the rich are even richer than we
The truth is that the initial fall in income inequality seen after the financial crisis was an aberration which has allowed the government to mask the more systemic and continuing rise in inequality the UK has experienced since the late 1970s.
Problematic approach
The affirmation by the former prime minister Tony Blair that ‘it’s not a burning ambition for me to make sure David Beckham earns less money’ is emblematic of a much longer-run, problematic approach to inequality in the UK. ‘New’ Labour, rooted in a diluted version of the ‘trickle-down economics’ embraced by Margaret Thatcher, was—as Blair’s colleague Peter Mandelson put it—‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes’.
Throughout its tenure (from 1997 to 2010), achievements were made in education but the UK came out of the ‘New’ Labour years more geographically and economically divided than it entered them. As Danny Dorling has noted, ‘the shares of the richest 1
Redistributing through taxes and welfare transfers did offset the sharp rise in inequality seen throughout the Thatcher years but it did not fundamentally alter the structure of the economy. In fact, with austerity and the associated reduction in welfare, the limited ‘progress’ under ’New’ Labour was quickly undone. One need only glance at the UK’s consistently rising poverty rates to see this.
The challenge then is to move to something that is fundamentally new—not just to rely on redistribution by the state to ensure a decent standard of living but to ‘hardwire’ economic justice into the structures of the economy. The then Labour leader Ed Miliband famously referred to such ‘predistribution’ at the 2015 general election but there is a much longer history of this kind of thought from which we can draw lessons.
Butlers and kitchen maids
In an extremely prescient 1964 book, Efficiency, Equality and the Ownership of Property, James Meade warned of a future in which, among other things, there would be ‘a limited number of exceedingly wealthy property owners; the proportion of the working population required to man the extremely profitable automated industries would be small; wage rates would be depressed … we would be back in a super-world of an
This dystopian future was
The recurring theme throughout the big two restructurings of the UK economy over the past century has been ownership. The first was the post-war boom of
On this front, there are many proposals which hold great promise. The work being done in Preston and Cleveland in northern England on community wealth building is a well-known example but there are plenty of others: community land trusts, public ownership of utilities, sovereign wealth funds and so on.
The aim of this wave is not just to tinker around the edges of our economic system but to create one committed to democracy, equality
(Liam Kennedy is