The gap between Labour and Plaid is about the gap itself

Two vividly different visions of society appear today from Wales's two parties of government. Superficially at least Plaid’s vow to redistribute wealth claims the leftist mantle, while Labour exhort us instead to celebrate the filthy rich.

But is the picture this straightforward? Plaid condemn income injustice as too great for even the middle classes to tolerate, such is the gulf between them and the super-rich. The party proposes potential tax measures to narrow the gap. Labour, via John Hutton, meanwhile suggests that tackling poverty remains the goal, but such an end does not require capping wealth. These are not just different but contradictory visions. One measures the good society by the gap between its best and least well off. The other stresses that above an income floor there is no ceiling.

I welcome Hutton's vision and worry about Plaid's. Tackling inequality sounds such an axiomatically good thing that the British left have hardly ever stopped to really scrutinise its implications. Among those are that it will always be easier to reduce income inequality by tackling those at the very top than by helping those at the very bottom. The super-rich are few in number and do not support parties of the left. Soaking them reduces inequality but does little or nothing for those at the bottom. Ironically, given Plaid's focus on the "coping class", a wider redistribution within the system is needed to provided the resources necessary to do such a thing. That means taxing the very class the Nationalists now say they want to help. The other irony is that a strict focus on reducing the gap makes this less likely, since redistribution from other than top to bottom may not reduce the gap.

But the main trouble with a focus on closing the gap is that, perversely, overall levels of prosperity can quickly be forgotten; it hardly matters if everyone gets poorer, so long as those at the top get poorer at a faster rate. Since this is easier to achieve, perverse policy goals are almost inevitable.

Hutton meanwhile surely gets far closer to a modern conception of the good society. Its primary goal is to eradicate poverty, spreading the opportunity that greater prosperity provides as widely as possible, and far more widely than at present. The super-rich in this vision are not something to be put up with so that the rest can get a little richer – that belongs to discredited “trickle down” economic theory. No, super-rich people are examples of a society that, having put the floor in place treats people with dignity and does not seek to limit their potential. The rub, as Marcus points out, is that this true meritocracy does not exist, and does not looking like coming into being. I agree that we are a long way off that time. The point is that it could come about under this vision. Under Plaid’s it could not.

Update: Marcus has posted a well-argued reply on his blog.