News Flash: Conservatives Discover Inequality (at Least in the UK)

By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality. Posted August 13, 2008.

Inequality in Britain, the only developed nation in the world with an economic divide that rivals the gap in the United States, came under attack last week -- from the country's Conservative Party. The British "financial gap between the richest and the poorest," charged a top Conservative leader, Chris Grayling, in a nationally hyped speech, now stands "at its widest for generations."

"The gap between the life expectancy of the richest and the poorest is now at its widest since the Victorian era," Grayling would go on to add. "There could be no clearer indicator of a society that is getting things wrong." Such a declaration -- from a top conservative -- would be almost unimaginable in the United States, where right-wingers typically either deny the reality of inequality or minimize its impact. Indeed, this past spring, new federal research revealed a "large and growing" gap between the life expectancy of rich and poor Americans, and no top conservatives made any public fuss.

So what makes top conservatives in the UK more inequality-sensitive? Credit that "sensitivity" to the dynamics of partisan politics. In the UK, conservatives don't have to take the blame for recent surges in British inequality. Inequality has soared over the last decade with the Conservative Party's top rival, the Labor Party, running the show.

Tony Blair and his "New Labor" allies took parliamentary control in 1997. Right from the start, they distanced themselves from "old" Labor Party priorities -- like discouraging the concentration of wealth. New Labor, noted Blairite powerbroker Peter Mandelson early on, would be "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes."

New Labor would end up ""intensely relaxed" even when the rich didn't pay any taxes. Under Blair, the world's billionaires made London one of their favorite tax havens, and the Labor Party blew no whistle.

By 2007, the wealth of Britain's 1,000 wealthiest had nearly quadrupled in just a decade. The new British super rich, the Compass think tank observed last year, are "distorting society and recreating Victorian levels of class distinctions as conspicuous consumption, obscene financial rewards, and a new servant class are returning after an absence of over a century."

Britain's poor, meanwhile, are enjoying no similar golden age. Blair had pledged to have child poverty poverty halved by 2010. Child poverty last year actually increased -- by 100,000 kids.

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Sam Pizzigati is the editor of the online weekly Too Much, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.