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.
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