In 1964, Lyndon Johnson told the US Congress: “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” Fifty years later, Ed Miliband is set to declare his own war – on inequality. More than ever, the Labour leader is convinced that the widening chasm between the rich and the rest (revealed again today by Oxfam) is the defining issue of our time.
In the years before the crash, inequality was dismissed as a left-wing talking point, redolent of the “politics of envy” and inimical to middle class “aspiration”. Incomes might have been rising faster at the top than at the bottom but all, it was thought, were sharing in the fruits of seemingly permanent growth. Tony Blair captured the spirit of the age when he declared that he didn’t go into politics “to make sure that David Beckham earns less money”. But the financial crisis and the uneven nature of the recovery that has followed mean that, as Miliband declared in his Hugo Young Lecture last month, “tackling inequality is the new centre ground of politics”.
Content from our partners
