‘Recapitalising the poor’ – a wider distribution of economic assets – is the totemic project of progressive conservatism. Labour’s policies such as the Child Trust Fund and Savings Gateway have shared this goal but have failed to reverse the inequality in ownership of wealth in Britain. An obvious benchmark for a progressive government must be that steps to redress this – to recapitalise the poor – have been taken.

The Test:

In 2003 the bottom 50 per cent of the population owned 1per cent of the nation’s wealth; by the end of the next parliament a progressive

government should have at least doubled this.

David Cameron’s progressive conservatism speech said: “With every decision government makes, it should ask: does this give power to people, or take it away?” All politicians are explicit in their desire to give people more control over their lives; what this means in practice is often more opaque. However the question of control at work is the crucial measure of power here and, given both Tory and Labour’s rush to embrace

mutualism, provides a real test of whether progressive political posturing will come to anything in practice.

The test:

Creating more equitable models of the firm is a key route to empowering people in the work place. If this was really a political priority, it ought to possible to quadruple the paltry 2 per cent of UK firms that are currently employee-owned. By 2014, a progressive government should use a range of tax incentives, advice support and venture capital funding to increase the current figure by at least four fold to 8 per cent of the economy.

The pledge to eradicate child poverty has been a source of great pride for Labour supporters but also some frustration, with dramatic progress in the wake of the 1997 election faltering badly more recently. David Cameron has committed the Conservatives to meet Labour’s new target of eradicating child poverty by 2020. But for MPs elected this year, 2020 may as well be in the next geological period and there is a danger that

the target will be warmly supported but progress toward it in the next Parliament will be negligible.

The Test:

With 2.3 million children in the UK still likely to be living in poverty at the time of the election, any government remotely serious about meeting the 2020 target of eradication will have to demonstrate significant progress during the next Parliament. So, by 2015, the absolute minimum requirement would be to reduce the proportion of children living in poverty in the UK (26 per cent in 1999) from 18 per cent now to 13 per cent (the missed 2010 target set in the optimistic days of 1999).

All the main political parties have a commitment to reduce health inequalities. The experience of the last decade shows how hard this will be to achieve. Life expectancy has risen, but the gap between richest and poorest has not narrowed. Any government committed to reducing the health effects of social and economic inequalities will have to find a new whole of government approach.

The Test:

It may take a generation for important social changes to show up as reductions in inequalities in life expectancy. The test, therefore, is the degree to which a new government puts in place a cross-department strategy to deal with the 6 major domains that cause inequalities in health: early child development, educational performance, employment and working conditions, sufficient income for healthy living, sustainable and healthy neighbourhoods, action on prevention across the social gradient. Reductions in inequalities in all of these should be monitored and show progress in the direction of greater fairness

Despite the debate over whether Britain is ‘broken’, all political parties now agree that Britain’s recent high levels of inequality have had profound negative social consequences. But whilst the left retains a faith in the state’s ability to improve the lot of the poorest and the right places its faith

in the family, the need to repair the social fabric through constraints on runaway top salaries and the bonus culture receives less attention.

The Test:

Compared to many other developed countries, Britain has a high level of income inequality, with the richest 20 per cent having incomes at least 7 times higher than the poorest 20 per cent, leading to our comparatively poor performance on levels of mental health, teenage births, imprisonment, drug abuse, social mobility and more. By the end of the next Parliament, the reduction of  inequality should be established as a national target and the ratio of the incomes of the top 20 per cent reduced to no more than 5 and a half times the incomes of the bottom 20 per

cent. This would bring our inequality down to levels currently enjoyed by Canada, France, Switzerland and Spain.