Many readers will be familiar with George Orwell’s presentation of the grinding poverty of northern industrial towns in The Road to Wigan Pier. Reflecting on the reasons for his journey, he concluded that it was part of his exploration of socialism, because before becoming a socialist ‘you have got to decide whether things at present are tolerable or not tolerable’.

The post-war welfare state has ensured that most people are relieved of the most extreme material ill effects of poverty and inequality. Beveridge’s evil of pure want has at least been confronted, while not eradicated. Yet our society remains drastically unequal. In Injustice: Why Inequality Persists, Danny Dorling observes that of the 25 richest countries in the world, the UK ranks as 4th most unequal when the annual income of the richest tenth of their population is compared to that of the poorest. In descending order of inequality the ratios are: Singapore 17.7, United States 15.9, Portugal 15.10, UK 13.8. London is now the most unequal city in the developed world, with the richest tenth of the population amassing an average wealth of £933,563 compared to £3,420 among the poorest 10% – a multiple of 273. The under 65 mortality rate of the poorest 10 per cent is still 30 per cent higher than average, while the rate for the richest 10 per cent is 30 per cent lower.

This in itself will not necessarily be seen as any problem at all. Indeed, Dorling’s central argument is that inequality persists because we do not do anything about it and that we do nothing about it because we tend to believe it is socially necessary. Elitism is efficient, exclusion is inevitable and greed is good, or at least OK. In other words, inequality is bound into a series of assumptions about how the world has to work and how human beings have to behave. Tolerable or not, we have no alternative.

Take the ongoing debate about the place of the City of London and the willingness or lack thereof to regulate or tax transactions or bonuses more heavily, in spite of significant public expenditure on bank recapitalisation. The City continues to be seen as the main engine of economic growth, whose place is absolutely non-negotiable. It’s not hard to see why. Before the banking crisis, the financial sector was contributing 25 per cent of the UK’s corporate tax revenues and 14 per cent of total tax, and employing approximately 1 million people. London’s rampant income disparities are seen as the necessary trade-off for dynamic growth in an important sector. They are the inevitable by-product of the only model that we can currently imagine will sustain both our consumptive appetites and our commitment to sustain a certain level of public services.

Few would now claim that the pursuit of profit can reliably be translated, through the alchemy of the market alone, into public good. So, as Karl Polanyi observed (in an argument latterly popularised by John Milbank and Philip Blond), the state steps in with welfare measures to ameliorate the failure of the market to deliver stable societies. It can only do so, however, in the light of a ‘productive’ economy which can continue to fund those services. Thus, any regulation will be prejudiced by the overwhelming need for the economy to continue to generate tax income (it should not become a ‘burden on business’) and any attempt to redress inequalities by the state has become seen as ultimately despairing, since it will in the long run only thrust us back into the arms of the market, which is a cause of inequality.

Inequality, then, is just part of a deal we have cut: accepting a system as a whole that tends, for instance, to force down wages and treat employees as a disposable human resource, while the periodically suffering proletariat is bought off with just enough welfare comfort to keep them quiet.

Such a social and economic vision could only ever have got off the ground because human life has been de-sacralised. If human beings have no inherent dignity, then why should they not treat or be treated as mere labour providing machines or, perhaps more to the point in present conditions, entities whose primary function is to consume whatever the economy produces (consider how low consumer confidence is almost viewed with moral opprobrium, as if humans were defying their purpose by not ceaselessly shopping)? In an economy grounded on self interest, moral debates like those around inequality are intelligible and irrelevant.

For the question ‘Does inequality matter?’ even to make sense – to know what we might find tolerable or not tolerable - we must first envision a resacralised economy.  This would demand a renewed anthropology: human beings cannot be reduced simply to profit maximising homo economicus, but are actors who are capable and should be expected to incorporate moral considerations into economic judgements. The prospect here is of firmer bonds than shared self-interest amongst employers and employees, partners and customers.

This might not ensure equality, but it would mean at least that that conversation would begin to be meaningful. We would no longer be satisfied with market and state that collude in allowing people to fall so far behind that economic or social participation is beyond them.

Paul Bickley is Senior Researcher at Theos.