It’s the largest act of wealth destruction on document. We knew Trussonomics was a disaster, however now a brand new report has laid naked the invoice; sky excessive rates of interest, sparked by the Liz Truss funds, and the Tories’ shedding battle in opposition to inflation has now despatched up in smoke an unimaginable £2.1 trillion of family web price in simply two years.
But after all, it’s not unhealthy information for some. As a result of over the identical interval, 2021-2023, these luckiest sufficient to luxuriate in a spot on the Sunday Instances Wealthy Listing, together with Rishi Sunak, have seen their wealth rise by £710 billion.
Simply as new ONS figures reveal that one in 20 adults reported working out of meals – and unable to afford extra.
So, what ARE the perfect concepts for tackling poverty and inequalities within the UK right now? And what are these insurance policies that the general public will vote for?
Ten years on from the Thomas Piketty’s landmark e-book, Capital within the twenty first Century, we got down to pin down these solutions. In a significant venture with the Coverage Institute at King’s Faculty London and the Equity Basis, the APPG on Inclusive Progress ran an enormous ballot to make sure that, earlier than the manifesto writers get to work, we now have on the desk the very best concepts for fixing poverty and tackling inequality.
First, we drew collectively the important thing concepts from a community of specialists and constructed a listing of concepts that we then took to the general public. The outcomes are outstanding. Not least the brand new consensus we found between left and proper, younger and previous, Brexiteers and Remainers.
Individuals are life like; they don’t see motion in a single space as being a ‘magic bullet’ for lowering inequality in Britain over the subsequent ten years. Reasonably, the polling reveals broad public assist for a variety of potential options to poverty and inequalities throughout seven areas – employment, tax, social safety, housing, well being, schooling and equalities.
On the planet of labor, our ballot revealed sturdy assist for elevating the minimal wage from £9.50 and an finish to zero-hour contracts – and agency motion to repair the gender pay hole.
Voters would love extra social housing and a few kind of restrict on non-public sector landlord rip-offs. And folks desire a social safety system that ensures that assist for these with ill-health is beneficiant sufficient to forestall poverty, along with campaigns to make it possible for everybody is aware of what they’re entitled to. There’s a shocking stage of assist for a common fundamental revenue (although far fewer assume it’s ‘credible’).
Individuals need extra money for colleges, smaller class sizes and significantly better assist for kids with particular academic wants and disabilities, together with low-cost childcare, extra high-quality apprenticeships and lower-cost college charges.
Within the NHS, folks need much better entry to high quality psychological well being providers, together with higher entry to contemporary meals and much better assist for carers.
And methods to pay for this? Right here too there are some surprises. Overwhelmingly, folks need to see a crackdown on tax avoidance and tax havens – however there’s additionally outstanding assist for an annual wealth tax for the super-rich with property of over £10 million – and a 50p price of tax on incomes of over £150,000.
Whereas there are variations between Labour and Conservative supporters, these are usually not enormous – with massive proportions of Conservatives recognising that inequality is attributable to components outdoors of people’ management and huge proportions of Labour supporters recognising the position of particular person expertise and laborious work.
However, simply because the welfare state was constructed on the brand new consensus of 1945, it’s potential {that a} new consensus is now being born earlier than our eyes. After the horrors of the Second World Battle, the British folks understood that the brand new peace required us to do issues in a different way. And so, folks of all political flavours, voted to create social insurance coverage, a free NHS, and common schooling. It’s that consensus that has underpinned the general public providers we now have right now. It might be that after the trauma of current years, a brand new consensus is ready to be outlined.
