Income Equality and Sustainability

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, I hope that everyone now sees that we need to introduce policies that better balance what is good for “me” with what is best for “us”—the aspiration for the common good as opposed to only individual advancement. The cynic in me thinks it will not be a nanosecond before people forget their gratitude to those on the front line—before they vote for a party that offers tax cuts rather than tax rises to pay those in care homes and other front-line jobs a better rate of pay.

It is both the Government and we the people who need to change: we shop on credit, we drink, we numb ourselves by sitting in front of one screen or another. Church attendance is dropping and teachers’ authority is diminishing. We have had the scandal of MPs’ expenses, banks defrauding us, the Catholic Church and paedophiles, and sportspeople cheating. The media feed the frenzy of this downward spiral, cataloguing the cataclysm. Governments lie and cheat. This really has been a decline and fall.

We should be looking at policies to reduce stress and inequality, with less emphasis on status and more on co-operation and friendship. Status is based on pecking order, coercion and privileged access to scarce resources, while friendship is based on a more egalitarian basis of social obligations and reciprocity.

In the grand sweep of policy, there are obviously big picture items—tackling poverty, reducing social exclusion, increasing income equality, cutting crime, building more homes and saving our planet with radical action, individually and with policies. We all—Governments and the people—have a responsibility for behaviour change. This is social liberalism.