Why Wealth Matters
A write-up of a recent joint event with the Policy Lab at University College London about republican political theory, featuring Stuart White, author of 'The Wealth of Freedom'
In February 2026 a group of academics, policymakers and campaigners met to discuss Stuart White’s new book, The Wealth of Freedom.
Co-hosted by the UCL Policy Lab and the Fairness Foundation, the roundtable set out the republican idea of freedom as non-domination and asked what follows when that ideal is taken seriously in an economy marked by large and persistent concentrations of wealth.
The public have competing views on the subject of wealth inequality, and so the discussion also asked how a republican account could make wealth inequality more politically salient in the UK.
A better frame for thinking about wealth disparities, and for raising awareness of its negative spill-over effects, could be less of a focus on quantitative differences, and more on the nature of those differences, especially an emphasis on dependency, domination and freedom.
Below are some reflections from Stuart White. You can read an extended write-up of the roundtable on our website or download a PDF.
Wealth is power. Those who lack wealth are more dependent on others for many of the resources they need, and this can make them vulnerable to domination by those on whom they are then dependent – employers, landlords, creditors, spouses, or state bureaucrats. Those who hold at least some wealth have more capacity to avoid these relationships of domination. On the other hand, those with wealth can use this to buy political influence. They might make donations to parties which get them favours, seats in the House of Lords, or even use extreme wealth to buy social media platforms which they can redirect to suit their own political agenda. In this way, the rich can start to dominate the rest of us through their outsized influence on policy. A distribution of wealth, then, is not just an inequality as measured by, say, a Gini coefficient. It is a particular configuration of social and political power with direct and substantial implications for our freedom.
This is why a democracy requires a robust economic floor and a robust economic ceiling. The job of the floor is, in part, to protect people from being too dependent on the will of others, from being vulnerable to domination by those on whom they are otherwise dependent. The job of the ceiling is, in part, to limit the power of the very rich so that they do not dominate the rest of us in our political life. In my book, The Wealth of Freedom, I explore some of the ways we might try to institute a robust economic floor and ceiling. I discuss, for example, the potential role of a universal basic income in helping to set the floor, and the role of inheritance and wealth taxes in helping to set the ceiling.
As these policy ideas suggest, however, setting a robust floor and ceiling will require concerted action by the state. One problem highlighted in the roundtable discussion on the book is that people today often lack trust and confidence in politics to do the kind of heavy lifting which this implies. Given the oligarchic skew of our supposedly democratic politics, this is not unreasonable. So we appear to be in a bind. We need action to limit wealth inequality in order to protect - or create - democracy. But we need a functioning democracy to do what is necessary to limit wealth inequality.
There is no easy solution to this. But a constructive response must be to combine a reform programme focused on building an economic floor and ceiling with a political reform programme. This political reform should aim at once to push back against oligarchic power and to rebuild popular trust and connection with the democratic state.
In part this has to involve new and much more effective measures to cut down the power of money in UK politics. This includes a review and overhaul of electoral funding and party donations; of the rules that allow MPs and former MPs to take employment such as paid advisory roles; and of the rules around lobbying. I suspect that reforms in these areas, of a radical kind, would be popular with the general public. They would speak to the concern about corruption which the discussion at the roundtable raised.
To get meaningful reforms of this kind, however, we need to look to other ways of empowering citizens to have more influence on the political agenda and to increase the responsiveness of politicians to popular concerns. This may connect to some long-standing issues with the UK political system such as electoral reform. But we should also think creatively about how new forms of representation might contribute. Imagine, for example, that we have the right to initiate Citizens’ Assemblies (CAs) in chosen topics, such as the rules around lobbying and money in politics. What would a properly resourced CA recommend in this area? How might a CA help to set a fresh agenda on this topic and help build public interest in reform that overcomes inevitable resistance? What could a CA similarly contribute to setting a policy agenda around public broadcasting or the control of social media platforms?
Political influence is also crucially affected by the degree of popular association in society. Trade unions, for example, matter not only because of the benefits they can deliver for their members. They matter also because of the way they shape wider power relations. A democratic society with strong and encompassing trade unions will have a force capable of pushing back against the power of the very rich that a society with a weak trade union movement does not. It will, in this respect, be a much more democratic society. Here economic and political reform agendas come together. Reforms to labour law to promote wider trade unionism help simultaneously to build a more robust economic floor and a counter-weight to the excessive power of business corporations and the very rich.
The project of building a robust economic floor and ceiling should not be approached, then, as a technocratic policy-making exercise. It must be approached as part of a wider, deliberately anti-oligarchical project that combines economic and political reform to shift the balance of power in our society – and thereby to help rebuild public confidence in the capacity of the democratic state to address our problems.
Stuart White, Nicholas Drake Tutorial Fellow in Politics and Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford