‘Richer getting richer as the poorer get poorer’

THE UK economy is in a bad way, and has been getting worse for a long time. High streets are in severe decline.

Ordinary workers’ wages haven’t risen in real terms since before 2010, unlike prices which have rocketed.

Billionaires have become much richer while ordinary people have become poorer. The property-owning middle class is disappearing fast.

When there is a relatively equal economy, every person in that economy is a small-scale wealth holder, a worker and also a consumer.

Everybody can work for each other and consume each other’s work. But once you have a very unequal society, you have first a large group of poor people needing work, and second a very small group of extremely wealthy people with enormous amounts of money to spend, by no means always ethically earned.

If your small town has no rich people – many workers and no employer – it soon becomes non-sustainable.

Highly unequal countries don’t have cute little towns for ordinary people, they have slums. People have to move to find work, to where rich people want workers.

There are never enough jobs for everyone, so wages stay low. Cities become huge and sprawling with affluent centres surrounded by large areas of poor quality housing.

Family farms are bought by rich conglomerates. The countryside becomes large industrialised units containing few people.

In Victorian times, inequality was rife, but during the 20th century that balance shifted.

After the Second World War up to the crash of 2008, inequality in the UK decreased dramatically, but now that has reversed.

The Conservative government since 2010 has amplified the decline.

To reverse this dark path must be a key priority of a new Labour government. Dilys Morgan Scott