Think tank Reform have published a condemnatory report showing up UK society as the most unequal and least least socially mobile of all Western developed nations.
[Live here? You're unlikely to escape...]
According to the report, despite the successes of the UK economy over the last 30 years, we have merely gone from being the ’sick man’ to the ‘divided society’ of Europe. Not very catchy, but then they are academics.
The report certainly makes depressing reading: inequality is up; child poverty is up; and severe poverty is up. At the same time income growth has accelerated for the richest 10%. The share of total income for these top 10% is apparently now at comparable levels to the 1940s, which rather mocks the idea of progress to a fairer society.
Life chances, they say, are increasingly determined by background rather than aptitude, citing studies that argue that kids from wealthy backgrounds consistently outperform kids from poorer backgrounds. This is a result of an unfair two-tier education system, which means the children of the richest get the best start in life.
I was 16 at the millennium, and the report says surprisingly little about my generation. However, it has always been clear to me that British society is deeply divided. Here in London the inequalities are stark, as anarchic town planning puts leafy suburban idylls right next to the kinds of places where you put your ipod away and hope your phone doesn’t ring. Class divisions extend right down to choice on public transport: poor people ride the bus while rich people ride the obscenely expensive Tube.
One of the biggest lies ever propagated by this Labour government was that 
“we’re all middle class now.” In reality we’ve all been ground into various rough gradations of proletariat, in the most Marxist sense of the word. British society is at its most divided for 60 years, and inflation continues to push up prices faster than employers are willing to raise wages, making life even harder for the poorest. This has resulted in record profits for corporations, while the average person is struggling to make ends meet.
Thatcher’s dismantling of the post war economic consensus, continued by succeeding Conservative and Labour governments, sent the UK economy into overdrive; but it also took away a significant safety net for the most disadvantaged. Privatisation destroyed key industries that had provided lower class employment as the lifting of exchange controls turned London into a Mecca for finance. The British economy lost its manufacturing base in favour of financial services, which gave greater rewards to fewer workers. The government happily trotted out GDP and growth statistics citing them as evidence of a wildly successful economy, when really it just meant that the rich were getting rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Few of the economic gains of the various booms since the 1980s have trickled down to the population at large in the UK, even with the supposedly more redistributive Labour party at the helm. Indeed, since gaining power in 1997, this Labour administration has done much to dismantle the mechanisms for social mobility, like introducing top up fees and abolishing assisted places to 
public schools. At the same time, educational standards in state run education have dropped as a result of thoughtless centralisation, a culture of league tables and an obsession with assessment by examination. No matter how much money they pump into the system, it seems to become more dysfunctional with each passing year.
And that money has to come from somewhere. According to Treasury estimates the tax burden is set to rise from 34.9% of GDP in 2003-4 to 37.5% in 2011-12. But these increases in public revenue will not come from taxing our rich multinational companies and non-domiciled residents. Instead, as the recent furore over the abolition of the 10p tax rate has shown, Labour have continually increased the tax burden on the poorest sections of society, while giving away massive tax breaks to the richest, for whom the UK is an effective tax-haven.
What’s clear is that this massive scale exploitation of UK society is likely to continue as long as people remain convinced that it doesn’t affect them. This is the true lie behind the claim that we are all middle class. Your average Joe thinks that because he’s got a crippling mortgage for some 1 bedroom hovel in Hackney and he wears a suit for work that he is somehow middle class. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We are all working class now.
Spot the difference
