It’s time to address damaging inequality

Labour aims to radically transform Britain; it is a change that is long overdue. The public are quite rightly fed up with the idea that an economic bloodletting is a necessary purgative after the excesses of a boom. Labour recognised this in 2017 and reaped the benefit. Since then, the Tories have sought to claim that they have fixed the economy – and therefore they can go some way to matching Labour’s spending pledges, at least in the election campaign. If ending austerity means ditching self-imposed fiscal targets, Boris Johnson reasons, so be it.

Yet the public is entitled to ask why the state was in so many areas deliberately rolled back, reducing aggregate demand when the economy would have benefited from it. The result was an immiseration of ordinary people and the forced decay of the public realm. It was a political decision taken because the Tories have been running the economy for the benefit of rentier capitalists, those privileged individuals and businesses whose market and political power allows them to extract a great deal of rent – that is cash – from everybody else. That is why Jeremy Corbyn’s attack on the ‘‘tax dodgers, dodgy landlords, bad bosses and big polluters’’ ought not to be dismissed. Inequality is at a damagingly high level and the system is being rigged in favour of wealthy interests. Politicians need to realise that it is not just the economy that is at stake – they are risking our democracy too.