Yes there’s always been inequality and always will be to an extent. But the key question is: to how much of an extent?

Inequality is significantly lower in wealthy nations with much better social and economic outcomes on many indicators. So just because some inequality will always be with us, it doesn’t mean that we can’t – or shouldn’t – take actions that will make the inqequality gap narrower than it is now.

Why not 70% median income? Good question. The work of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggests 70% median income is a more accurate proxy for where material deprivation becomes apparent in low income families.

Why not 40%? Read the slating that the Institue of Fiscal Studies has given to the attempts made by the Conservatives to use this as a proxy for ‘severe poverty’.

Absolute poverty is actually a relative concept anyway. The idea of where the benchmark for absolute poverty should be set would have been very different in 1709, 1809 or 1909 to what it is in 2009.

How to measure relative poverty? Why not 70% of median income or 40%? (If we used 50% instead of 60%, ‘child poverty’ would halve in the UK!

No, absolute poverty is easy to define, and that’s why we should ditch this relative poverty concept, which is much too slippery.

They’ve been met in Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands.

A moving target can be reached. It is based on median income, not on mean income. Come on Pete, this is GCSE maths – shape up!

The evidence now is overwhelming that the extreme levels of inequlity we see on the UK and the USA compared to other welathy countries are a major social and economic cost. Why should I , as a tax payer, have to put up with this combination of economic inefficiency and moral disregard for children?

John, you were in parliament in the 1980s when child poverty doubled under Thatcher. Whatever good things she might have done for the country, that was a disgrace. How will you ensure this doesn’t happen under the tories again.

1) No that’s not the economic position of the trades unions. Their economic position is to threaten employers with strikes. Your irrelevant characterisation gets your argument off to a very bad start.

2) I didn’t say workers are commodities – where did I say that? I didn’t. There a big element of demand and supply, but the point is people can improve themselves and their expectations. Where in your post do you say that people can improve themselves – I believe that you have a negative view of people by not making this a part of your position.

3) Yes I agree that (a) culture and (b) Government effect employment opportunity cost. I believe the Government has got so many things wrong with benefits, tax, credits, immigration, globalisation, lack of national protection and employment. They treat too many people too weakly. I believe global competition is incredibly tough and that this Government have not even recognised that we’re in a fight.

4) My economic understanding is very good thank you. The area of the bank I look after has been heaped in praise by the global press in the past year.

5) When you talk about the “unproductive unwilling” – I think you’re really saying working class benefit scroungers – but don’t have the courage to say it. I’m not saying that unemployed people can suddenly do a hugely demanding job – but everybody could move up the employment scale. I think the bottom of the employment pile have been neglected since about 1945. Not neglected in terms of money, but neglected in terms of expectations and cultural attitude to not working and not bettering themselves. I think socialism has destroyed the very people it was supposed to help by being too soft with them.

6) I believe in lower flatter taxes, but I also believe that the country has to shift everybody up the employment conveyor belt. There are 5 million unemployed. Faux-disabled people receive the same as genuine disabled. Graduates with high debts can’t get jobs. Mean while a million workers come from abroad to get jobs because people in the UK either don’t want them or can’t get them. It’s a mess because Governments don’t try and change culture and aren’t disciplined enough and tough enough with them.

You just summaried the economic position of trades unions. It is rubbish. Workers are not standard commodities that are arbitrarily used up in production like some chemical reagent. (Even if they were, any excess is usually irrelevant to the reaction.)

There are two conditions to be simultaneously satisfied that determine whether someone can get and keep a job:
(1) They want it; and
(2) The employer wants them.

(1) is frequently undermined by cultural factors and by government action that makes it undesirable, and often irrational, to make yourself very little better off or actually worse off by working.

(2) is where your economic misunderstanding comes in. An employer seeks to be better off, too. He therefore wants the gain from employing someone whose work will outweigh the cost of doing so. What’s critical to that is not the supply of workers but the productivity of the individual candidate. Even without a minimum wage or benefits to place a floor on the price of labour above starvation, there is a minimum administrative and supervisory and capital cost of employing someone: their productivity has to be sufficient that returns exceed the actual cost of employing them. Increasing the cost of labour means you need someone more productive, so decreasing the opportunities for the marginal, and putting the previously unemployable further beyond the pale.

What competition there is is between the productive and the unproductive willing. Restricting the supply of the productive is of limited help to the unproductive willing provided they are still worth their hire, but none at all if they are not. And by decreasing the productivity of businesses, restricting the supply of the productive, makes everyone worse off on average, and makes it a bit more difficult to support the unemployed.

Their war on class is confirmed by their recent action on the charitable status of private schools.

A Southampton Council is offering free curries to parents to cut truancy rates.