When Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett’s highly influential The Spirit Level was published ten years ago, it inspired the soon-to-be Prime Minister David Cameron to say, “We all know, in our hearts, that as long as there is deep poverty living systematically side by side with great riches, we all remain the poorer for it.”
This expression of egalitarian sentiments reflected Cameron’s efforts to rebrand the Conservatives as a party of fairness. However, in office, Cameron’s Coalition government failed to demonstrate a commitment to greater equality: an academic analysis of tax and benefit changes during that period showed, “the bottom half lost (with the poorest groups losing most as a proportion of their incomes) and the top half gained”. As a consequence, said a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies published this week, inequality is now so wide as to be “making a mockery of democracy".
Luckily, Cameron’s then-coalition partner, Nick Clegg, suggested a means of retaining the government’s claim to fairness. He redefined fairness. “Social mobility is what characterises a fair society” wrote Clegg, “rather than a particular level of income equality”.
