Separate and unequal...

Hatty Harman has managed to get a commission into inequality to report (summary here). Here's some of what they say:

Britain is an unequal country, more so than many other industrialised countries and more so than it was a generation ago. This is manifest in many ways – most obviously in the gaps between those who are well off and those who are less well off...

For some readers, the sheer scale of the inequalities in outcomes which we present will be shocking. Whether or not people’s positions reflect some form of ‘merit’ or ‘desert’, the sheer scale of differences in wealth, for instance, may imply that it is impossible to create a cohesive society. Wide inequalities erode the bonds of common citizenship and recognition of human dignity across economic divides. A number of analysts have pointed to the ways in which large inequalities in the kinds of economic outcome we look at are associated with societies having lower levels of happiness or well-being in other respects, and to the social problems and economic costs resulting from these...

Most people and all the main political parties in Britain subscribe to the ideal of ‘equality of opportunity’. The systematic nature of many of the differentials we present, and the ways in which advantages and disadvantages are reinforced across the life cycle (as we describe in Chapter 11 of the main report), make it hard, however, to sustain an argument that what we show is the result of personal choices against a background of equality of opportunity, however defined. Inequality in turn then acts as a barrier to social mobility...

Median income in 2007-08 was £393 per week (at 2008 prices) – in other words, half the population was in households where income adjusted for household size put them in a position that was less favourable than a couple without children with a net weekly income of £393 (£20,500 per year), and half was in a more favourable position. A tenth had incomes below £191 and a tenth had incomes of more than £806 per week (including more than 5 per cent above £1,000 per week). Thus the 10th percentile was just under half the median, and the 90th percentile was just over twice the median, and so the 90:10 ratio was more than four...The top 1 per cent has incomes more than five times the median...

Occupational social class is the only breakdown where within-group variation is generally substantially less than that within the population as a whole, although it remains large (Table S5). Growing inequality between broad occupational classes was one of the important contributors to the growth in earnings inequality over the 1980s....

The evidence we examine confirms that social background really matters. There are significant differences in ‘school readiness’ before and when children reach school by parental income and mother’s education (Figure S12). Children entering primary school in 2005-2006 whose mothers had degrees were assessed 6 months ahead of those who had no qualifications above Grade D at GCSE. In addition, every extra £100 per month in income when children were small was associated with a difference equivalent to a month’s development. Rather than being fixed at birth, these differences widen through childhood...

What could be clearer, inequality of outcome creates inequality of opportunity. Class is the big divider.