Britain: Wealth, Capital and Power -"The Rich Don’t Get Richer" - by John Rentoul

I once wrote a book called The Rich Get Richer, which was about a period, the 1980s, when it was true.

Since then, I have spent much of my time trying to point out that, despite what everybody knows, the degree of inequality in Britain has stayed about the same since the sharp increase during the Great Thatcher Divisiveness. In particular, I have pointed out that it was a remarkable achievement for the New Labour governments to have avoided any significant increase in inequality in an open economy such as Britain’s.

One problem with this defence of Labour’s record is that, while information on the distribution of incomes is of high quality, the only consistent and comprehensive data series on the distribution of wealth was abandoned in 2003 because officials at HM Revenue & Customs decided it was “not suitable” for estimating the distribution of wealth. I reported this at the time.*

The reasons are explained more fully in the HMRC’s UK Personal Wealth Statistics 2008-10, which refers us instead to the Office for National Statistics’ Wealth and Assets Survey, the first of which was conducted in 2006-08. I had ignored it because, as the first survey of its kind, it did not tell us anything about trends over time.

However, in July this year the results of the second wave of the Wealth and Assets Survey were published, covering 2008-10. A summary is here, but the interesting bit is Chapter 2, which includes this table:



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