Britain remains a country where the concentration of wealth is still one of the highest in the world. This is a fact that has significance for all societies of the capitalist type. After all, Britain has had one of the strongest Labour movements of any advanced capitalist country. The fifth Labour Government now enjoys office, while the British trade unions, unlike their counterparts on the continent, are not divided on political or religious lines. The experience of two world wars provided particularly favourable contexts for reformist action as did the general advance to prosperity of the economy. Yet the relative positions of the major social classes have not changed in this century. Britain today is not a significantly more equal society than when the Labour Party was brought into existence by the unions over sixty years ago. In the intervening period the Labour movement has succeeded in maintaining but not improving the relative economic position of those it represents. In certain favourable conjunctures it has been able to win particular, notable advances, such as the Health Service, only to see them eroded in the subsequent period.

The British labour movement has always drawn back from a serious confrontation with the power of private capital. Whether during the General Strike of 1926, or the Labour Government of 1945–51, at the decisive moment caution prevailed. Thus the forces making for social inequality remained, and remain, unscathed. Private property, installed at the heart of the productive system, survived to generate the inequalities displayed below.

Two recent investigations give us a picture of the distribution of private wealth in contemporary Britain. According to estimates published in The Economist the richest 7 per cent of the population owned 84 per cent of all private wealth, while the richest 2 per cent accounted for 55 per cent of the total.footnote1 Very similar conclusions were reached by J. R. S. Revell of Cambridge University who estimated that the top 5 per cent of the population owned 75 per cent of all personal property while the top 1 per cent own 42 per cent of all such property. The results of both studies are summarized in Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1; The Distribution of Personal Wealthin the U.K.footnote2

Table indicating the distribution of personal wealth in the U.K., comparing percentage of the population, percentage of total personal wealth in 1936 to 1938, in 1954, and in 1950, and percentage of personal pre-tax income from property in 1959. 1% of the population had between 56 and 42% of total personal wealth and 60% of personal pre-tax income from property in 1959. 5% of the population held between 79 and 75% of total personal wealth, and 92% of personal pre-tax income from property in 1959. Finally, 10% of the population had between 88 and 83% of total personal wealth, and 99% of personal pre-tax income from property in 1959.

Table 2; The Distribution of Personal Wealth in U.K. 1959/60.footnote3

Table indicating the distribution of personal wealth in the U.K. between 1959 and 1960, comparing the size of fortune, with percentage of taxpayers, percentage of total wealth, and average size of fortune. As size of fortune increased, from below £3000, or an average of £107, to £200,000 and over, or an average of £334,100, the percentage of taxpayers accordingly drops from 5.1% for those with a 3 to 10,000 fortune to 0.1 for those with 200,000 and more, but is 87.9% for those with a fortune below £3000. The largest percentage of total wealth was for fortunes sized between 10 and £25,000 and 29%, at an average of £15,200, followed by those with a fortune between 25 and £150,000 at 16.6%, or £36,250 on average, and then those with a 50 to £100,000 fortune at 15.1%, and an average of £68,250.

The following points are worth noting:

1. The vast majority of the population owns very little wealth at all. As shown above, according to The Economist the 87·9 per cent of the population who own less than £3,000 have an average holding of only £107.