Inequality is Whitehall's fault? Don't be ridiculous The rich have been getting richer during the recession while the poor get poorer. Yes, indeed, it's become a sad truism, worth repeating but hardly news. Yet Channel 4"s Dispatches programme devoted Monday night's episode to identifying the alleged culprit. Guess what, it turns out to be the government. To be more precise, the fault lies with the last Labour government. So said the Dispatches programme's author and presenter, Fraser Nelson , who also happens to be editor of the Spectator during what is turning out to be one of its more ideological phases - as distinct from the High Tory scepticism of many decades. Since the programme was made in cooperation with Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) this is hardly surprising. IDS is seen in the programme explaining that he inherited a dysfunctional welfare system which penalised those working in low-paid jobs via Gordon Brown's tax credit top-up system. But it's going to be OK because IDS's universal credit system (UC) will gradually cure that (when they can make it work) and make work pay better. There's more going on than that. Nelson highlights the weaknesses of Britain's school system, the disproportionate power of the private sector, but also the way the better-off can manipulate the system - and catchment areas via the housing market - to make sure their kids get into good state schools too, many better than the paying kind. Crime statistics, marriage rates (welfare's "couple penalty" is a worthy target), strong families, everything stacks up against the poor, he says. Nelson is a clever chap and an interesting witness because he embodies the kind of social mobility that has been eroded. His dad grew up in a Glasgow council house - viewers get to see it as well as the handsome London homes of Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and George Osborne (all much more valuable than before the crash) - but moved up via the RAF. Young Nelson properly notes that he was sent to private school before Glasgow University. He can talk to struggling poor people - we see him doing so - as the officer class often can't. But he's a Thatcherite Tory - protege of another upwardly mobile Glasgow poor-ish boy, Andrew Neil - for whom it is an article of faith that a rising tide raises all boats. Trouble is, he concedes, that it clearly doesn't, not any more: too many boats are stuck in the mud. That's where blaming government failure fits into his ideological jigsaw puzzle. Tony Blair and Michael Gove tried to address educational inequality, he says in an accompanying article in the Sunday Telegraph, and look what happened to them. IDS has his UC - watch out Iain! This is all a bit glib. The Sunday Telegraph's front page highlighted Nelson's discovery - we knew this too - that the top 3,000 UK taxpayers pay more income tax than the lowest 9 million; that those with incomes above £2.7m a year contribute 4.2% of the income tax pot against 4% from the lowest-paid third. That's true, but it doesn't address two blindingly obvious points. One is that the poorest contribute a much larger share of their modest incomes in other taxes - VAT, sin taxes on booze and fags, possibly petrol tax, council tax and transport costs. The other, which Nelson does mention in a distant corner of the programme, is that asset prices, which have risen hugely since 2008 (some of that quantitative easing cash helped) as those with money have sought safe places to park it. Such assets may escape taxation because Britain has no wealth tax and many are easy to hide or shelter, even mansions in elite districts of the capital, legally. Legal tax avoidance is something even nice people make decisions about every day. Britain isn't Greece and many pay up - including the gallant banker (he wants no publicity so I forget his name) who pays half his £50m income in tax because he feels he owes the community. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, whose policies sanctioned the new inequality, would be puzzled. They naively rode the free market tiger instead of muzzling it. But being a rightwing kind of Tory, Nelson is keen to blame state interventions designed to ease distress: in this instance quantitative easing - the Bank of England's government-supported programme of money printing which kept the banks afloat but also boosted the asset price bubble. It has put £2m on the value of Osborne's family home and made all sorts of bling - cars and diamonds as well as houses - worth lots more. In respectfully filming a lot of vulgar stuff, the Glaswegian ex-poor boy in Nelson shows a weakness for this kind of porn, but doesn't mention the collapse of the last "safe" asset bubble: gold. It wouldn't suit his purpose. This is daft too, but illustrates a wider weakness, not wholly excusable by virtue of the fact that a 30-minute TV programme has, by its nature, to be pretty simplistic. Nelson treats Britain in isolation, as if consciously more egalitarian countries such as Sweden or France - communist China too, for God's sake - don't have similar problems of inequality. In his Sunday Telegraph article he suggests that, though America is very unequal too, low-paid US workers are "better off than ours." That's plain wrong, has been for decades, and a clever chap like Nelson should know it. There was an interesting study in contrasts in Sunday's Observer, an article - based on LSE research - suggesting that the poor had been hardest hit by post-2010 government policies: the lowest 5% losing nearly 3% of income against 1% for the top 5%, and modest increases for the top 50%. I'm as suspicious of such data as I am of Duncan Smith's. Researchers often leave the reader with the impression - immigration researchers on both sides of the argument regularly do - that they are marshalling their facts to suit their theories. So the LSE's supporters attacks Osborne's "we're all in this together rhetoric" while Nelson condemns Miliband's talk of a "zero-zero" economy which only benefits the privileged few. They're both a bit right and a bit wrong. It's our task to pick our way through the entrenched positions and support what works, both to make benefits a more effective support system for health, education and work and to ensure the rich only get tax breaks that will nurture more wealth creation, not rackets. Both sides might also like to consider French economist Thomas Piketty's unexpected 2014 bestseller Capital in the 21st Century. Though attacked from the right, it argues that the post-war Keynesian era of greater equality - by most measures - was an aberration, not the new norm. If capital accumulates at 2% a year and incomes at 1% then the historical gap will widen further, threatening democratic and accountable institutions with a reimposition of the old familiar oligarchies. Piketty suggests a global wealth tax, but don't hold your breath. I can see why this sort of talk might be a problem for the Spectator and the Telegraphs because, like most Fleet Street newspapers, they are owned by wealthy oligarchs of one kind or another, British and foreign, but mostly not resident here for tax purposes. The police officers who protect their lovely London homes and other assets (hotels, anyone?), their yachts at Cowes, their country estates, do so on the taxes paid by the rest of us. But for how much longer?