The Specator’s Notes

Of all the buzz-phrases which New Labour invented, ‘the many, not the few’ remains the most effective.

Of all the buzz-phrases which New Labour invented, ‘the many, not the few’ remains the most effective. Labour may, in fact, have failed the many, but they retain their rhetorical advantage over the Conservatives. Now the government wants to make inequality actually illegal, through its Equality Bill, and the Tories are frightened of being on the wrong side of this argument. Yet surely common experience shows that the many need the few. This is true in the straightforward sense that the few pay a vastly disproportionate part of income tax (the top 1 per cent produce over 20 per cent of the total take), but also in the sense that almost all of us learn more from exceptional people than from the ordinary run of which we are a part. A world of equal ability, equal wealth, equal talent, is unimaginable.