Lefty myths about inequality

As a Tory, I’ve been thinking a lot about inequality recently. Has it really increased in the past five years? Or is that just scaremongering on the part of the left?

By most measures, there’s not much evidence that the United Kingdom became more unequal in the last parliament. Take the UK’s ‘Gini co-efficient’, which measures income inequality. In 2009/10, it was higher than it was at any point during the subsequent three years. Indeed, in 2011/12 it fell to its lowest level since 1986. Data isn’t available for the last two years, but there’s no reason to think it has exceeded what it was when Labour left office. George Osborne claimed that inequality had fallen in his budget speech and the Institute of Fiscal Studies confirmed this, if you assume everyone has faced the same rate of inflation since he became Chancellor.

The fact that Labour’s track record on tackling income inequality is worse than the coalition’s doesn’t mean present levels are acceptable, of course. The median income of the highest-earning 10 per cent of couples with two children is roughly eight times larger than the median income of their equivalents in the bottom 10 per cent. Is that too high?

Few conservatives would object to income inequality on principle. Rather, it is regarded as the inevitable consequence of the fact that talents are distributed unequally, with some being able to charge more for their labour than others. For the most part, conservatives have the same attitude towards wealth inequality (which has grown over the course of the last parliament, thanks mainly to rising property prices). Like Peter Mandelson, we’re intensely relaxed about the rich.

We might be more troubled by in-equality if it was leading to more crime, but it isn’t. According to the latest Crime Survey for England and Wales, crime has fallen to its lowest level since the surveyors started collecting data in 1981.