2 results
11 - Reducing inequality
- Edited by David Darton
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- Book:
- The Right Use of Money
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 14 July 2004, pp 79-86
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Summary
Polly Toynbee is a political and social commentator for The Guardian. Her most recent book is Hard work: Life in low pay Britain (Bloomsbury, 2003).
In future times looking back on the last quarter of a century, historians will see the pattern of the distribution of income and wealth and wonder at how little debate there was at the time over its extraordinary fluctuations. Why were the politics of these times so little exercised about the most fundamental economic facts upon which all its social programmes were built?
The economic history of the last century was one of almost continuous progress towards a more equal distribution of income. (Ownership of wealth is a more complicated story.) From 1900 to 1978, the annual income gap from top to bottom of society narrowed. But in the last quarter of the century, it soared away into an ever-widening gap, with no prospect of any restraint or diminishing of this dangerous trajectory.
Does it matter? On coming to power, still cautious about alarming the City and business, New Labour said loudly and often that it did not. While determined to pull up the poorest, Tony Blair always said there was no problem about how ‘successful’ those at the top might be. Class envy and Denis Healey's “squeezing the rich until the pips squeaked” was a dead and failed agenda of Old Labour. Although she left top rates of tax at 60% for her first eight years, Mrs Thatcher did immediately cut top tax rates by a sharp 34% which at a stroke gave a huge burst of extra income to the top earners. Top tax rates have stayed among the lowest in the Western world ever since. It is not just tax rates but also low inflation that have fuelled the widening income gap across the West.
There is an overwhelming reason why Labour will have to think again about this question. In the most radical pledge that any British politician ever made, Tony Blair promised to abolish all child poverty by the year 2020. Through introducing a minimum wage and above all through greatly increased social security for children with generous tax credits topping up incomes in low-paid families, the quarter-way mark towards that goal will almost certainly be reached by 2005, with at least 1.1 million children lifted out of poverty – a remarkable achievement. But on present policies, it will be very difficult to reach the halfway mark by 2010. As for total abolition, nothing in present strategy begins to suggest it is possible to achieve. Economists cannot see how it can be done in a society shaped as Britain's is currently.
14 - Making welfare work
- Edited by Robert Walker, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford
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- Book:
- Ending Child Poverty
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 05 July 2022
- Print publication:
- 06 October 1999, pp 111-116
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Summary
The need for a new consensus
There is a search party out for some big new idea, an overarching vision that will define and rationalise the whole untidy social security system. Welfare reform was promised at the election, and all heads nodded wisely. The idea that we spend far too much, and don’t spend it well, has been strongly promoted by the Prime Minister himself. Reform can sometimes sound rather more like a threat than a promise.
Although Britain spends less than most other Western nations on social security, although a life on Income Support is undoubtedly one of abject poverty, although we have had a Conservative government for 18 years committed to rooting out fraud and scrounging, the fact remains that there is very little public trust in the integrity and efficiency of the benefit system. Nor is there an obvious guiding principle to encourage support for it and, alas, all too few political advocates over the years willing to promote it. Political capital has all been invested in promising to squeeze, cut or even throttle it. But trust and support for social security urgently needs to be restored, because the real value of benefits will otherwise continue to diminish with the poor getting even poorer, which is not only wicked in itself, but immeasurably damaging to the fabric of society for everyone else. We need to reach a stage where there is broad public support for a strategy of increasing benefits.
For millions of poor people money may not be the only, or even the single most important thing that can improve their quality of life, but money is a sine qua non.
Most people can agree on what the social security system is there to do. It is to give those who genuinely cannot earn their living a decent life roughly comparable with the rest of us – though exactly how much so will always be in dispute. Social security is there to help the truly helpless while weeding out the idlers. However, most people would also agree that the system is Byzantine and incomprehensible. Recent research shows how little its own users understand it.