“God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth while others live in abject deadening poverty,” said Martin Luther King in November 1956.

If Dr King could observe the United States in 2025, he would be in mourning for a lost dream: a billionaire president baying for the destruction of health, clean air and water regulations to better serve giant corporate interests, while the world’s richest man is put in charge of the job. Elon Musk’s personal net worth is greater than the combined wealth of many millions of Americans and more than a billion of the world’s poorest people. Superfluous inordinate wealth indeed.

America is a supersized nightmare of inequality but the human race generally has done a woeful job of sharing wealth fairly. Europe started to see the gap between rich and poor widen in the 1980s. The Office for National Statistics says that the wealthiest 10 per cent are estimated to hold around half of all wealth in the UK. Wealth inequality is a blight. It’s blindingly obvious that sooner or later, such injustice will lead to political unrest. A world of palaces and slums is always a powder keg waiting to go off.

Labour was going to bring back fairness, but, blown off course by events, it is adopting policies that no one anticipated on the campaign trail. Desperate to balance the books in an increasingly difficult global economic climate, with defence spending to be ratcheted up considerably, constrained by having already raised taxes and her own fiscal rules,

© Herald Scotland