How to build a public and political consensus for a fairer Britain
Fair Comment is a free weekly newsletter by Will Snell, Chief Executive of the Fairness Foundation. It is written for anyone who is interested in tackling inequalities in the UK, whether they are a politician, a researcher, a campaigner, a policymaker, a journalist, or in any other field. It’s designed to help them to make the moral, political and policy case for tackling inequality, with a particular focus on philosophy, public attitudes, and the evidence base on both the problems and the solutions. The last email of each month is a monthly roundup, which looks at what we’ve written about alongside what others are saying about the same issues. The other weekly emails alternate between opinion articles, report summaries, and interviews with key experts and thinkers.
Inequality in the UK is returning to levels last seen during Edwardian times. Rising child poverty is causing spikes in under-five mortality, while the richest 50 families have more wealth than the poorest half of the population, and derive much of it from speculation and from extracting rather than creating wealth.
It’s a time of crisis, but also of opportunity, because almost everyone now recognises that inequality has gone too far. 85% of the British public are concerned about inequality, and even those who are less worried about inequality in principle are concerned about its practical consequences: constraining opportunity and economic growth, threatening social cohesion and undermining faith in democracy. And fairness provides us with a language and a set of concepts that can build on this emerging consensus.
The Fairness Foundation’s mission is to identify and dismantle the remaining barriers to tackling inequality. We focus on two barriers in particular:
Correcting the misperception that the public are less concerned about inequality, less supportive of action by government to tackle it, and more divided in their views about inequality than they actually are
Challenging the idea that inequality might be morally wrong but isn’t a first-order concern, by promoting evidence of the various ways in which different forms of inequality not only reinforce each other, but also stand in the way of achieving a broad set of political and public priorities, such as (sustainable) growth
As such, we are trying to make the political and the policy case for tackling inequality, although the starting point must be making the moral case by setting out how high levels of inequality are unfair. We also develop and popularise practical policy solutions to tackling inequality and its spillover impacts on our economy, society and democracy. We aim to change both policies and narratives.
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