Class Matters: UK Law Would Require Gov't to Lessen Inequality

The British Labor Party came to power a dozen years ago with a commitment to attack poverty -- and a willingness to leave rich people alone. Britain's rich proceeded to make the most of that opportunity. By 2007, the UK's wealthiest 1,000 had nearly quadrupled their collective fortune.

The poor would not be so fortunate. In 2007, child poverty in the UK increased -- by 100,000 kids. Brits born in 1970 have less chance of overcoming a lowly economic start in life than Brits born in the 1950s. Among major developed nations, only the United States displays as little social mobility as Britain.

What to do? Last week, in an official "white paper" entitled New opportunities: Fair chances for the future, the Labor Party government offered a surprisingly novel -- and rather remarkable -- proposal.

The absence of real opportunity in the UK, this white paper posits, demands an outright mandate for economic equality: a new law that would make the narrowing of the gap between rich and poor a binding obligation on every level of British government.

"We have already legislated to require public authorities to tackle the inequality that arises from race, gender, or disability," the white paper explains. "But we know that inequality does not just come from your gender or ethnicity, your sexual orientation, or your disability. Co-existing and interwoven with these specific inequalities lies the persistent inequality of social class."

Given this reality, the white paper continues, "tackling socio-economic disadvantage and narrowing gaps in outcomes for people from different backgrounds" needs to become a new "core function" of UK government.

The champion of this new mandate, Labor Party chair and UK equalities minister Harriet Harman, last week spoke in bold strokes to defend her proposal.

It is our task in government to play our part in fashioning a new social order with fairness and equality at its heart," Harman pronounced. "We want to do more than just provide 'escape routes' out of poverty for a talented few. We want to tackle the class divide.

What exactly would that tackling entail? With a mandate to narrow Britain's economic divide in effect, class bias might become grounds for government action against discrimination. Police patrols might be reallocated from wealthy neighborhoods to crime-plagued poor ones. Public sector wages might be raised first, and most significantly, at the lower job grades.

Would Harman's proposed mandate, if enacted into law, also mean an open confrontation with the grand accumulations of private wealth at the summit of the UK economy?

Some government insiders, after the white paper's release Tuesday, pooh-poohed the notion that Harman's proposal would up the pressure for an offensive to level down the British rich.

"This isn't about taking from one group of people and giving to another, more deprived set," one of these insiders insisted to the Daily Mail. "It is about leveling up, improving life for everybody."

But other observers of the UK economic scene are noting that any obligation on government to narrow "gaps in outcomes for people from different backgrounds" would inevitably, if taken seriously, have to confront wealth at the top. The dollars needed for fully funding early childhood programs, after all, have to come from somewhere.

Polly Toynbee, one of the UK's most widely read progressive commentators, added another reason in a Guardian column last week that hailed Harman's class mandate as "legislation of extraordinary radicalism."

If all children truly have equal opportunity, Toynbee's analysis explained, then the children of the affluent will face more competition for the limited number of places at institutions like top law firms and medical schools.