The Joseph Rowntree Foundation reports that the UK's rich/poor divide is wider now than it has been in forty years. 

Sort of. In fact there are fewer people in really abject poverty, though rather more just a rung above. Meanwhile, the rich are getting richer.

 Less real poverty? Well, about time too. The whole point of welfare is to spare people from it. The fact that it exists at all shames our politicians who run the system. As James Bartholomew noted in The Welfare State We're In , the old pre-welfare-state system of friendly societies, charitable foundations and local welfare was probably better at alleviating real poverty than the centralized, bureaucratic system we have today. Particularly when Gordon Brown made it too complicated for many needy people to understand. It's quite easy, Gordon: if people are poor, give them cash. Then they're not poor any more.

 And should we worry about the rich getting richer? Economists say that if some people get better off while nobody else get worse off, that's good. But maybe there are limits. “No society can surely be flourishing and happy," wrote Adam Smith , of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable." Or think they are: big divides in wealth, power and status can lead to unrest and disruption.

 Divides of wealth, though, are the easiest to overcome. It's hard to break through class barriers, or into the charmed circle of those with political power. But in an open economy, anyone with some drive can improve themselves, making the free market the most egalitarian system imaginable. Yet our politicians load it with all kinds of burdens, from regulation to spiralling taxation. Is their failure to eliminate poverty any real surprise?

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