The routes from poverty to a fairer society for all

HE scale of poverty in the UK and around the world can sometimes be hard to take in, so huge are the numbers, but Oxfam has come up with one image that may help. According to the charity, eight billionaires own the same wealth as the world’s 3.6 billion poorest people. In other words, a group small enough to fit in a golf buggy are sitting on more financial assets than the people of half the world put together.

It is quite a statistic and the timing of its publication, in the same week as the World Economic Forum, is deliberate. Writing on these pages, Oxfam’s Katherine Trebeck says her charity’s report reveals that the gap between rich and poor is even greater than feared and we have to build an economy that is fairer for more people.

Doing so will require action on a number of fronts and, in Scotland and the UK, a profound change to the settled view on wages and taxation. One of the realities of modern poverty is that its victims are often in work, which means that until governments commit themselves to protecting a minimum wage that covers the cost of living, the problem will persist.

There are other critical elements to any solution, particularly in western countries. In Scotland, an estimated 210,000 children live in poverty and their life prospects will not be transformed until their chances of going to university are massively increased.

However, it is on the question of taxation that the most action is required. Ms Trebeck says the inequality crisis is fuelled by the rich dodging taxes, which is true, but the crisis can only be tackled if the tax burden is also distributed more fairly.

In Scotland, the Government has resisted raising the upper rates of tax or reforming council tax so it is based on a more progressive assessment of wealth. And yet there is one inescapable fact at the centre of the debate on poverty: those European countries with the lowest levels of poverty pay the most tax.