life expectancy and the average; and the second to reduce the gap in infant
mortality between manual groups and the population as a whole by at least
10% by 2010. Policies, however, were thinner on the ground – to the extent
that a 2004 Treasury review concluded that ‘after many years of reviews and
government policy documents, with little change on the ground, the key
challenge now is delivery and implementation, not further discussion’.43
The main policy emphasis was on overall levels of health and increased
spending on health care. Health spending rose as a share of GDP from
5.7% in 1998 to 9.4% in 2006 – and, as for education, funding formulae
were reformed to channel more resources to disadvantaged areas. In addition, Health Action Zones were set up, aimed at developing local programmes to tackle health inequalities in collaboration with social services,
voluntary and business organisations and local communities. However,
despite strong evidence of the importance of childhood health as a driver
of health in adulthood, there was no overarching health strategy for children. The policy for very early childhood relied mainly on Sure Start, with
Public Service Agreements to reduce low birth weight, emergency hospital
admissions, smoking in pregnancy and re-registrations with the child
protection register in Sure Start areas (covering just one-third of poor
children). There were also small initiatives such as the National School
Fruit Scheme, which provides every schoolchild aged four to six with a
daily free piece of fruit; and increases in funding to improve the quality of
school lunches in the aftermath of chef Jamie Oliver’s high-profile campaign on the issue. At the tail end of the Blair premiership, the 2007
Budget announced the extension of child benefit to women from week
twenty-nine of their pregnancy – a welcome recognition that a child’s
health is affected by maternal nutrition well before birth.
In practice, the share of babies born at low birth weight rose slightly
across social classes between 1997 and 2004.44 The social class differential
42 Department of Health (DoH), Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health Report
(London: TSO, 1998); DoH, Saving Lives: Our Healthier Nation (London: TSO, 1999);
DoH, Tackling Health Inequalities: A Programme for Action (London: DoH, 2003). For
further discussion see Franco Sassi, ‘Tackling Health Inequalities’, in Hills and Stewart, A
More Equal Society?
43 Derek Wanless, Securing Good Health for the Whole Population (London: HM Treasury,
2004), cited in Sassi, ‘Tackling Health Inequalities’.
44 A rising share of babies born with low birth weight can reflect technological advances
which enable more premature babies to be kept alive at birth, so should not in itself be
rose between 1997 and 1999 and fell back thereafter, leaving no change
overall: in 2004, as in 1997, children from social classes 5–8 were
one quarter more likely to be born weighing less than 2.5 kilograms than
children from classes 1–4. The class differential in infant mortality
increased slightly between 1997 and 2005, though it peaked in 2003: in
this case progress has been made for all groups, but gains have been a little
greater for higher social classes. The most recent data on spatial
differences in life expectancy are also discouraging: the gap between
England as a whole and the poorest fifth of local authorities widened by
2% for males and 8% for females between 1995–7 and 2003–5.45 For
adults it is arguably much too early to judge the impact of any recent
changes, given both lags in data and the speed with which policy might be
expected to affect health outcomes. But the lack of progress in reducing
health inequality for young children is more worrying – both because the
challenge of reducing later inequality after an unequal start is far greater,
and because young children’s health ought to be quick to respond to
effective policy.
Income inequality
Reducing the level of overall income inequality was explicitly not a goal
for the Blair government. Blair repeatedly emphasised that his concern
was with the bottom half of the income distribution rather than the top
half, and with ‘equality of opportunity’ not ‘equality of outcome’. As he
put it in a Fabian Society pamphlet in 2002, ‘We favour true equality:
equal worth and equal opportunity, not an equality of outcome focused
on incomes alone.’46 Or, more colourfully, on Newsnight in 2001: ‘It’s not
a burning ambition of mine to make sure that David Beckham earns less
money.’47
In practice, figure 19.4 shows that incomes rose marginally faster for
the poorer groups than for the richer groups during the Blair era. This
Footnote 44 ( cont. )
seen as a negative trend: the social class differential is more informative. Data for low birth
weight and infant mortality is from the Office for National Statistics (Childhood, Infant
and Perinatal Mortality Statistics for England and Wales, Series DH3).
45 DoH, Tackling Health Inequalities: 2003–05 Data Update for the National 2010 PSA Target
(London: DoH, 2006).
46 Tony Blair, The Courage of our Convictions: Why Reform of the Public Services Is the Route to
Social Justice, Fabian Ideas 603 (London: Fabian Society, 2002), p. 2.
47 Cited in Tom Sefton and Holly Sutherland, ‘Inequality and Poverty under New Labour’, in
Hills and Stewart, A More Equal Society?
Blair:1996/7–2005/6
4
3
2
1
0
Poorest
2
3
4
Richest
Major:1990–1996/7
4
3
2
1
0
Poorest
2
3
4
Richest
Thatcher:1979–1990
4
3
2
1
0
Poorest
2
3
4
Richest
Figure 19.4. Real income growth by quintile group under Tony Blair, John Major and
Margaret Thatcher (% per year).
Source: Brewer et al., Poverty and Inequality in the UK: 2007, table 4.
Notes: Averages in each quintile group correspond to the midpoints, i.e. the tenth,
thirtieth, fiftieth, seventieth and ninetieth percentile points of the income
distribution. Incomes have been measured before the deduction of housing costs.
0.40
0.35
0.30
0.25
Thatcher
Major
Blair
0.20
1979
1981
1983
1985
1987
1989
1991 1993/941995/961997/981999/002001/022003/042005/06
Figure 19.5. The Gini coefficient 1979–2004/5
Source: based on figure 8 in Brewer et al., Poverty an
d Inequality in the UK: 2007; data
from Institute for Fiscal Studies website (www.ifs.org.uk).
Note: The Gini coefficient has been calculated using incomes before the deduction of
housing costs.
contrasts sharply to the situation under Margaret Thatcher, shown at the
bottom of the figure. While the average annual rate of growth was similar
(mean growth of 2.8% under Thatcher compared to 2.3% under Blair),
during the Thatcher years growth was skewed heavily towards the richest.
Under John Major the lower income groups did best in relative terms, but
growth was very low for everyone.
The pattern of growth under Blair meant, as we have seen, sharp
improvements in the real living standards of the poorest, especially for
children and pensioners, and more modest declines in relative poverty
for these groups. But overall income inequality remained fairly static.
Figure 19.5 shows the change in one summary measure of income
inequality, the Gini coefficient, which takes a value between zero (complete equality) and 1 (if one person receives all the income and the others
nothing). The Gini rose slightly during Blair’s first term to reach a record
level of 0.35 in 2000/1. It fell slightly in the second term, but by 2005/6 it
was back up to the 0.35 high.
Why has inequality not fallen, despite the many measures taken – successfully – to raise the incomes of the poorest? For one thing, this was
largely a time of strong economic growth, and in such periods inequality
tends to rise. Certainly tax-benefit changes have had difficulty keeping up
with rapid increases in median incomes, which is why relative poverty
indicators have fallen much more slowly than indicators using a fixed
income poverty line. But more importantly for the Gini measure, income
at the very top of the income distribution – in particular among the
richest 1% or even 0.5% of individuals – increased far more quickly than
average. The income shares of both the top 1% and the top 0.5%, which
had been falling throughout the century for as far as records go back, have
been on the increase since the early 1980s, with a particularly sharp rise
since 1998.48 This has not affected poverty indicators (measured against
the median) but has influenced inequality indicators which reflect the full
distribution, such as the Gini. The major contributor to income inequality is earnings inequality, and this continued to widen after 1997, particularly in the top half of the distribution: the ratio between the earnings of
those at the ninetieth percentile and those at the median reached an alltime high of 2.0 in 2003, although it dropped very slightly thereafter.49
Growing income inequality also contributed to rapidly widening disparities in wealth. Excluding housing assets, the share of wealth owned by the
richest 10% of the population rose from 57% to 63% in the two decades
to 1996, and then from 63% to 71% in the following seven years under
Labour; the share belonging to the top 1% also increased sharply.50
Micro-simulation by Tom Sefton and Holly Sutherland indicates that
the Gini coefficient in 2004/5 was significantly lower than it would have
been if the 1997 tax-benefit system had been left in place and only adjusted
for inflation: the reduction in the Gini compared to that scenario is about
one-third of the size of the rise of the previous twenty years.51 The Gini is
also lower than it would have been under a more generous scenario, in
which the 1997 system was adjusted for average income growth, though the
impact in this case is reduced by about half. In sum, while tax-benefit
changes under Labour were quite strongly redistributive, they worked
against the tide of pre-tax and benefit growth in earnings, and were only
sufficient to prevent further increases in inequality, not to reduce it.
48 Anthony B. Atkinson, Top Incomes in the United Kingdom over the Twentieth Century,
University of Oxford Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History 43 (Oxford:
University of Oxford, 2002).
49 Sefton and Sutherland, ‘Inequality and Poverty under New Labour’.
50 ONS statistics at www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?idϭ2. Housing assets are more
evenly distributed than other wealth, but the time trends are very similar.
51 Sefton and Sutherland, ‘Inequality and Poverty under New Labour’.
Of course, Labour could have taken measures to try to limit the growth
of earnings inequality. The government could have attempted negotiation to address rising rates of city pay and bonuses, which have grown on
Blair’s watch to levels unacceptable to many. Or it could have moved
beyond the quiet redistribution which has funded tax credits for the lowpaid through hidden measures such as the non-indexation of tax rate
bands (dubbed ‘redistribution by stealth’) and introduced a higher rate of
income taxation. This was ruled out in each of Blair’s three parliaments
by manifesto commitments not to raise either the basic or the top rate of
income taxation – a pledge first made in the nervousness before the 1997
election and repeated at each subsequent election. There would have been
clear pragmatic gains to be made from a higher rate, raising resources to
fund further reductions in child poverty, for example. But a real attempt
to tackle incomes at the top and bring income inequality down would
also have made an enormous difference in itself to the shape of British
society in 2007. Blair’s position that the incomes of the rich are of no relevance to the rest of the country other than as a source of envy is difficult
to defend. One manifestation of their importance is the annual contribution of city bonuses to record levels of house price inflation since 1997,
which have fast created a new wealth divide between those who already
own homes or stand to gain from a housing inheritance and those who do
not. Just in themselves, such wildly differing levels of remuneration, far
beyond anything which may be justifiable on meritocratic grounds, are
unfair and are seen as unfair, creating a sense of injustice which affects
individual morale and national solidarity.
Blair’s legacy: a more equal society?
It is undoubtedly the case that Blair’s Labour government took the levels
of poverty and social injustice plaguing Britain in the 1990s extremely
seriously – far more seriously than many would have expected when
Labour came to power on a fairly modest manifesto in 1997. The evidence sketched out in this chapter points to intervention across a very
wide range of areas – addressing child and pensioner poverty, worklessness and educational disadvantage, improving the opportunities available to very young children and their parents, and tackling the multiple
problems facing people living in deprived neighbourhoods. In many
cases policy has seen considerable success; in other areas less so. It is
always possible to argue that more could and should have been done, but
a look back to figure 19.1 reminds us of the scale of the task that Labour
faced. O
verall Britain is a fairer and more equal society in 2007 than it was
in 1997, and it is almost certainly far more equal than it would have been
after another ten years of Conservative government.
What was Blair’s personal contribution to these changes? Most obviously, his unexpected pledge to eradicate child poverty had an enormous
impact. Without such a pledge it is unlikely that benefit changes favouring children would have developed as far or as fast, or been given such
priority – although a committed Gordon Brown in the Treasury was
arguably more important in ensuring delivery. More generally, the
‘opportunity for all’ agenda, with its emphasis on the importance of tackling disparities in life chances from birth onwards, appears to bear Blair’s
stamp.
At the same time, however, it is difficult not to look back at the Blair
decade with a sense that the opportunity for even greater change was
missed. Early on, many who wanted to see Labour tackle overall inequality as well as poverty believed that Blair was holding back for fear of
upsetting the electorate, but as the decade progressed it became more
than clear that this was not a Prime Minister unwilling to take on an
unpopular policy and stick by it in the face of widespread opposition. It is
apparent now that there were limits to Blair’s commitment to social
justice, and his main priorities lay elsewhere. If his mission had only been
a different one – if it had led him to take on inequality as his enemy – he
might have left behind an entirely different landscape.
20
Culture and attitudes
After a decade in power most politicians’ popularity is in decline. Tony
Blair’s was no exception. However, focusing only on the popular and
media mood towards the end of his term in office risks missing the wood
for the trees. We should look back at the man and his standing with the
British public with respect – at least in the period 1994–2002. Ratings of
Blair’s performance in Opposition were virtually unprecedented in
polling history. Compare his performance as Leader of the Opposition
with the four Conservatives, including David Cameron, who followed
him in this role (Figure 20.1).
From the time he assumed leadership of the Labour Party, Blair’s
personal rating was one of the highest recorded. And after he became
Prime Minister, he was the most popular Prime Minister recorded in the
BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007 Page 69