Inequalities

Baroness Osamor Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Osamor (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, and congratulate him on his maiden speech.

This debate is timely given the recent promises by a Tory leadership candidate to cut taxes for the richest in our society and for large corporations. He clearly had not read the Deaton report and/or had not recognised, as the IFS and Professor Deaton have highlighted, that we are at a moment of crisis for democratic capitalism.

I am from Tottenham in Haringey. Once upon a time in Tottenham it was the minorities and the working classes who were marginalised, but today it feels as though everybody is cut off, due to government cuts, apart from the very few with access to unearned income through sizeable property or shareholdings.

Given that we have only a short time to speak in this debate, I would like to highlight three key issues for the Government to respond to. The first concerns the regulating of international markets. Most expert commentators agree that the US is the least equal country in the world. The Deaton review refers specifically to a healthcare system that creates monopolies and delivers huge profits to private health providers while also creating significant public health issues, such as the tragic levels of opiate addiction across poorer communities in the USA.

Why, then, have the Government in recent weeks been trumpeting the idea of a trade deal with the US, a deal which many commentators are saying would simply entrench the monopoly position of superstar businesses and place an even greater premium on shareholder value? Will the Minister explain what consideration, if any, has gone into the questions posed by the Deaton report about the need to ensure that the private sector is not just taking without making? I am talking specifically about new taxes on unearned income, new incentives for longer term investment and new regulations to control private sector monopolies. Should not any policy-maker who is interested in tackling inequality be focused instead on continuing to support the good work of our colleagues in Brussels to develop incentives for longer term investment and to tame private sector monopolies?

My second issue is income disparity. Most of us in this Chamber will be aware of the Prime Minister’s high-profile commitment to tackling race and inter- generational income disparities. This is an issue that the IFS Deaton report will be picking up over the next five years, and which I raised on 11 March at the UK Voluntary National Review parliamentary event concerning the UK’s annual sustainable development goals report to the UN. I am particularly keen to ensure that we in this Chamber are updated on what the Government are doing to understand and address the extreme variations in attainment when broken down by ethnicity and region; what effect, if any, the Equality Act 2010 has had on reducing race income disparities in the workplace; and the current status of the SDG report.

My third issue is reforms to the social contract. Last November, Professor Philip Alston commented:

“British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous approach … elevating the goal of enforcing blind compliance over a genuine concern to improve the well-being of those at the lowest levels of British society”.


At the time, the Government rejected Professor Alston’s findings and said that they would lodge a complaint with the UN. Will the Minister update us on the status of that complaint and the ongoing discussions between the Government and the UN in relation to Professor Alston’s report?

I shall close on a positive note. The Deaton report reminds us that 200 years ago, democratic capitalism faced a similar crisis. Salaries, life expectancy and living standards were falling for everyone other than the landowning classes and the large industrialists. By the end of the 19th century, Parliament had passed a series of reforms to ensure greater democracy, improve the rights of workers and place restrictions on wealthy landowners and industrialists. These reforms also paved the way for the establishment of the welfare state under the Attlee Government. Let me be clear: our challenges now are quite different from those of the 19th century. Never before have we had a system which enables such vast wealth to be accumulated so quickly by so few people, and never before have we had a system that threatens the very existence of humans through global environmental destruction. I hope that this Chamber will pick up the baton from those previous incumbents of the two Houses. I implore us to establish a working group to work with Professor Alston and Professor Deaton so that we can take urgent action to initiate debate and legislation as their research develops.