The Richer, The Poorer charts the rollercoaster history of both rich and poor and the mechanisms that link wealth and impoverishment. This landmark book shows how, for 200 years, Britain’s most powerful elites have enriched themselves at the expense of surging inequality, mass poverty and weakened social resilience. Stewart Lansley reveals how Britain’s model of ‘extractive capitalism’ – with a small elite securing an excessive slice of the economic cake – has created a two-century-long ‘high-inequality, high-poverty’ cycle, one broken for only a brief period after the Second World War. Why, he asks, are rich and poor citizens judged by very different standards? Why has social progress been so narrowly shared? With growing calls for a fairer post-COVID-19 society, what needs to be done to break Britain’s destructive poverty/inequality cycle?
Author(s): Stewart Lansley
Publisher: Policy Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 318
City: Bristol
Cover
Title
Copyright
Table of contents
List of figures
Preface and acknowledgements
Introduction: Knighthoods for the rich, penalties for the poor
PART I 1800–1939
1 Hierarchical discipline
God’s will
The age of capital
2 Britain’s gilded age
Extractive capitalism
An ideological counter-offensive
3 Public penury and private ostentation
The ‘undeserving rich’ and the ‘deserving poor’
A plutocratic playground
4 A roller-coaster ride
A conscription of riches
What about the rentiers?
Icy indifference
PART II 1940–59
5 The future belongs to us
A patrician last fling
The turning of the public mood
Not for patching
6 Britain’s ‘New Deal’
Treachery
7 Brave new world
A Plimsoll Line for incomes
The cracks appear
What is poverty?
8 A shallow consensus
The ‘people’ versus the ‘old gang’
Egalitarian optimism
PART III 1960–79
9 The rediscovery of poverty
The poor and the poorest
The rise of the poverty lobby
10 Poorer under Labour
About-turn
Burying Beveridge
11 Consolidation or advance?
A doomed species?
Spreading wealth
12 Peak equality
The battle for child benefit
Statistical darkness
A harsh lesson on the politics of distribution
PART IV 1980–96
13 Don’t mention the ‘p’ word
This is what we believe
Let our children grow tall
14 Zapping labour
A wave of panic
Financialisation
Poverty: a no-go area
15 The dark shadow of the Poor Law
A war of attrition
Shirkers and scroungers
Heavy-handed tactics
The shift in lobbying power
16 The great widening
Poverty in paradise
An economic megashift
17 Money worship
Tomorrow’s money today
A multi-speed society
A two-thirds, one-third society
PART V 1997–2010
18 The elephant in the room
Pragmatic realism
Blair’s war on poverty
19 Still born to rule
Morally naked
The Great Gatsby curve
20 I’m not Mother Teresa
An orgy of self-enrichment
Western hubris
In the service of power
Gap thinking
Immune to inequality
21 The house of cards
The 2008 crash
Me, more, now
22 The good, the bad and the ugly
Wealth begetting wealth
Governing for all
Part VI 2011–20
23 Divide and rule: playing politics with poverty
Poverty plus a pound
An old libel
Don’t push me in a statistic
24 A leaner state
Folklore economics
A disciplinary state
Communist clerics
25 Burning injustice
Filling the gaps
Inequality denial
26 Growing rich in their sleep
Giving everyone a stake
Corporate overreach
27 Breaking the high-inequality, high-poverty cycle
The ghosts of the past
More than patching
Afterword: COVID-19 and ‘the polo season’
The exposed poor, the shielded rich
Notes
Index
