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Since 1997, British governments of both parties have pursued a policy of cutting material inequality within the wage-and-salary class while trying to increase inequality between low-paid workers and able-bodied dole bludgers* and being broadly relaxed about the increasing wealth of the super-rich. It isn't clear to me how much of this was deliberate, but almost every government economic policy since 1997 is either that agenda or a transfer to pensioners.
* Hence why every marginally employable adult in the UK has found a disability.
The super rich are irrelevant to British politics unless you’re a communist. This is because everyone except Jeremy Corbyn and Zach Polanski types understand that the rich are transient, that they have little money in Britain, that if their businesses are based in Britain they usually derive the majority of their earnings from overseas, and that the exceptions are a few elderly landlord who are mostly politically and economically irrelevant, and whose wealth is itself propped up by the transient international rich (eg the Grosvenor family owning half of central London). You can’t really rinse the Ambanis or the Qatari royal family or Ken Griffin (to name three super rich people who own some of the most expensive ultra prime property in London) because they are ‘British’ the way that I am Maldivian when I go on vacation.
The moderately rich, people at the top end of finance, commercial law, some corporations, insurance etc are similarly transient. The businesses they either work for, ultimately serve, or both, are mostly not based in the UK. That the UK serves as the global or regional center for finance, insurance, consulting, ex-US commercial law etc is a matter of history and convenience and, in a big pinch, could be relocated to any number of other welcoming jurisdictions. This leaves the domestic moderately rich, like the owners of successful chains of car dealerships, large scale fast food franchisees, property developers, medium sized manufacturers, etc. They can probably be squeezed a little but not much.
Domestically wealth in Britain is concentrated in the upper-middle class who did pretty well until 2009 but have been rinsed since then by a combination of tax changes, extreme salary stagnation, a weakening pound, stagnant property values in the southeast and London especially etc.
I agree that this has been a well-intentioned aim, but of course in classic British fashion almost every innovation designed to ‘make work pay’ and ‘increase the percentage of people in work’ (most infamously recent measures like PIP, Motability and UC) have only served to increase the welfare bill with laughably exploitable mechanics that the British underclass and their sponsors quickly figure out.
The problem in British politics is that both main political factions (the Left and the Right) each rely on a welfare-dependent constituency. This is true for both Labour and the Tories and, if they have any hope of government, the Greens and Reform, too - not to mention the regional parties. Under FPTP in the British multiparty system, small swings are enough for a parliamentary majority.
The sum of these effects is that it is impossible for Labour to cut (or slow the growth rate) of any benefits whatsoever (the baseline welfare class plus second generation migrants who are disproportionately welfare reliant are its core voter base, while pensioner swing is necessary for a Labour majority even if most of them vote Tory), and it is impossible for the Tories to cut (or slow the growth of the bill) in net terms, since they can’t do anything about pensions, and while they can slightly trim some benefits they tend to compensate for others by jacking up in-work benefits to buy votes among the poorly paid white working class, who are still far below the ~40k net contribution threshold.
The bizarre salary compression story, where a 19 year old warehouse worker and a 26 year old graduate get paid the same, is a consequence of government policy but, much like the “triple lock” bill, largely unplanned, a simple byproduct of the above political dynamics worsened by the unfortunate fact that Oxford PPE seemingly doesn’t, in fact, teach you as much economics as it should. Raising the minimum wage as significantly as the UK did is essentially a Hail Mary attempt to boost consumption at any cost since the working poor spend everything they make; in a way, it is (kind of) working. Whether ‘it working’ is actually good for the country is questionable.
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