It is truly staggering (or is it just expected?) that after nearly 13 years of New Labour the 10% richest in Britain – not a tiny group, but 6 million people – now have wealth no less than 100 times greater than the 10% poorest. It is equally staggering that a hairdresser has an income of £12,400 whilst the chief executive of a major bank or FTSE 100 company has an income (like Stephen Hester at RBS) of £1.2 million , again 100 times more, and that’s without counting the stock options, bonuses, target-based incentives, and assorted fringe benfits which escalate top executives’ salaries to £5-10 million a year. In the 1930s the richest 1% took 12.6% of total UK income, but the war and post-war Labour Governments shrunk this to 4.2% by 1976, since when the Thatcher and Blair governments have bounced their share up again to 10.0% of all income. These findings from a study published today by the National Equality Panel should be a call to arms. They are of course the inevitable and predictable outcome of the unfettered market-rules-all de-regulated neoliberal agenda pursued equally by the Tories and New Labour.

Short of a war, it will require a profound revolution to change this. The bankers did their best, first with their recklessness and greed, then with their arrogance and hubris, to drive the detestation to dethrone them from their wealth. But the political system is now so moribund and rotten that it failed to respond to the stirrings of revolt and for the moment the groundswell of popular uprising has petered out. Come the election, however, if the ancien regime is overthrown, a new era may yet emerge propelled by disgust at the political and financial elites. But it needs a new politics to channel the discontent , and that is tghe central missing piece in the jigsaw.

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