Even dyed-in-the-wool Tories know inequality has become a big problem

How do we begin to ratchet down income inequality so that, over time, the top one per cent of Britain’s labour force takes home, let us say, ten times as much as the average wager-earner instead of a hundred times more? How do we bring down property values (especially in London and the Southeast) so that a mansion in Mayfair sells for £2 million, not twenty million, and a three-bedroom semi in Finsbury Park fetches £250,000 rather than three-times as much? How, in other words, do we introduce sanity, as well as decency, into the shared wealth and individual spending power of the British people? 

The answer, I think we can all agree, does not lie in Far Left dreamonomics. Marxism, as such, has never been tried in the UK, but very few would see it as the answer to a nation’s prayer. 

Jeremy Corbyn’s modest 1960s terraced home in Islington is said to be worth at least a million pounds. If the former Commissar put it up for sale, how would he feel if a trade union colleague with a young family offered him a quarter of its current market value? My guess is, he would hold the offer up to his weak eye. But if he was able to buy a smaller, well-set-up apartment down the road, closer to the Tube, for a lesser sum, leaving him in profit, would he go for it, or would he still hold out, hoping for more? I have no idea, but then most of us are not Jeremy Corbyn. 

The Lionesses who reached the final of this year’s Women’s World Cup in Sydney reportedly earn thirty-five times less than their male counterparts. Mary Earps, the England goalkeeper, is paid a salary of around £150,000. By contrast, Jordan Pickford, the England men’s and Everton keeper, is paid some five-and-a-half million pounds. 

There are, surely, two wrongs here. Earps is paid too little, but Pickford is paid far too much. If Premier League wages came down 90 per cent, that would still leave the men, like  “Rich” Harry Kane and “poor” Harry Maguire pulling in high multiples of the wages their fans live on. Would that be wrong? Would the idea of “the market” not be able to withstand such an assault on its fundamental premise?   

The existing free-for-all means that the haves live big – indeed very big – while the rest, increasingly, have to watch the pennies. Even dyed-in-the-wool Tories know this. 

In business, Sir James Dyson, who invented a better vacuum cleaner back in the 1980s, has amassed a personal fortune of £23 billion. In 2019, he moved his tax residency to Singapore but owns three luxury homes in England as well as a reported 32,000 acres of prime farmland. 

Few would dispute that Dyson’s bagless vacuum-cleaners were a smart idea. Visitors to motorway service areas and pub toilets who have benefited from his system-related hand-driers would probably agree that they are a step up from paper towels or those cloth rolls that always seem to get stuck on the first tug. 

But twenty-three billion pounds! 

Dyson is not, of course, the only one whose wealth is worth more than its weight in gold. There are an estimated 171 billionaires in the UK right now, controlling an aggregate £684 billion. According to the Sunday Times Rich List, the industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe, now domiciled in Monaco, is even better off than Dyson, with a net worth of £30 billion, give or take the price of an entire street in Camden. Ratcliffe is in the bidding to purchase Manchester United for as much as £6 billion. If he succeeds, he will be one of only a handful of Britons who could look down their noses at the sort of money earned by star footballers. 

Top executives – CEOs and the like – seem generally to be remunerated on the basis that they love money and expect to be paid a lot of it even when they are sacked. Their expensive suits, chauffeur-driven cars and annual bonuses are more a measure of their self-worth than of their typical year-on-year accomplishment. Beyond “growing” their company – an endeavour that is rarely achieved by any one individual – their aim is to accumulate wealth. By the time they retire to their estates in Surrey, the Cotswolds or Cheshire, it is measured in the tens of millions.

The average wage in Britain, meanwhile, is – depending on where you live – between £25,000 and £35,000. Millions, including a majority of those on part-time or zero-hours contracts, make do on annual incomes of less than £20,000. 

Which brings me back to my central theme. If the two Sir James’s each retired with a net worth of one or two billion pounds; if Jordan Pickford and Mary Earps were both paid £250,000; if the head of Thames Water earned a bonus only when she stopped pumping sewage into rivers; if the average price of a three-bedroom semi in London fell by 50 per cent; and if the average wage for ordinary Britons rose to £35,000, would the UK not be a better place in which to live? 

The problem is, of course, how do we get there? How do you convince a sales manager in Tufnell Park that a phased-in property slump would result in a more fair and equitable housing market? How do you persuade an ambitious Premier League footballer to accept that under a new cost-conscious dispensation, he will end up, aged 35, with only £10 million in the bank, not 80 million? And what incentive would there be for a young PPE graduate to enter the corporate world if he – or she – ended up no better off than the Prime Minister or the head of the Civil Service? 

The answer to all three questions is clear: no way, no way and none. Britain, and the world generally, is caught in a vicious upwards spiral in which the rich are getting richer faster, the middle classes are struggling and the poor – in their millions – are circling the drain. Keir Starmer and his team will no doubt do their best in the few years allotted them next autumn and they may succeed in smoothing out some of the rougher edges of the new feudalism. But they will be swimming against the tide. 

The only way to transform the present system would be by way of revolution, with everything deemed capitalist swept away so that we started again from Year Zero. And that’s not going to work. Instead we need an honest conversation about spreading wealth more fairly.

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