Britain is a wealthy country, but the gap between our richest and poorest 10% is now, the US excepted, the highest in the developed world. Accelerating since the financial crisis, wealth inequality casts a shadow over all our lives, affecting health, housing, education, productivity, enterprise, the media and even the vitality of our democracy.

It has reached the point, a Fairness Foundation report last week argued, that the threat to our collective wellbeing means it should join climate change and terrorism on the government’s national risk register.

It is an eye-catching claim – as dramatic in its way as the “wealth defence industry’s” counterclaims that taxing wealth more will lead to an exodus of the rich overseas, a collapse of enterprise and the loss of valuable sources of philanthropy. The great merit of the Wealth Gap Risk Register report (full declaration: I chair its editorial advisory board) is that it makes the case for a more equitable distribution of wealth – not in terms of socialism or the superior morality of collective action; instead, it invokes the much more powerful and unarguable principle: fairness.

A fair society is one where the distribution of income, wealth, opportunity and risk is such that it would not matter where and to whom you were born. It is one where the quality of all our lives is closely and proportionally linked to the economic and societal contribution we make. Undermine those principles, and the ties that bind society into a functioning whole start to unravel. Britain is at that point, although few understand just how vast the wealth gap has become.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has to raise taxes, in particular on wealth, on 30 October of course to plug a fiscal gap. But she should frame the argument more fundamentally.........

© The Guardian