New research shows that introducing a guaranteed income floor would cut poverty, narrow inequality and reduce dependency on means testing.

It has long been recognised that extreme inequality has many serious social consequences, as well as causing economic fragility and weakness - now the time has surely come to act.

In the last thirty years, a rising share of the global economic pie has been colonised by the world’s rich. It is this concentration of income that is the real cause of the present crisis. It created the conditions for the 2008 Crash and is now driving us into an era of near-permanent slump.

As part of his TUC touchstone report "Unfair to Middling: How Middle Income Britain's Shrinking Wages Fuelled the Crash and Threaten Recovery", Stewart Lansley argues that a long term wage sqeeze on lower and middle income groups has had a serious effect on the global financial crisis, and may threaten any 'green shoots' of recovery in the future