Just like in 1945, inequality, a craven, irresponsible elite and hope for a better future are at stake at this election

“Great economic blizzards swept the world in those years. The great slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men. These men had only learned how to act in the interest of their own bureaucratically-run private monopolies which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic State. They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation.”

This thundering statement is an excerpt from the Labour Party manifesto of 1945. Yet, sadly, it is equally relevant today.

It is seven years since bankers, unleashed from the bounds of social responsibility by a market fundamentalist revolution that was launched by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan decades earlier, triggered a global economic meltdown that most of us are still suffering from.

But, despite great anger at the time, we don’t seem to have fully learned its lesson and have continued along a path that is certain to lead to more misery for the majority while a few at the top grow ever more obscenely rich at our expense and continue to be absolved from any wrongdoing in wrecking the world’s economy.

Just like in 1945, when public debt stood at 215% of the national income and vastly eclipsed the 90% rate of today, the nation is being urged to “live within its means” by the allies of a craven and irresponsible elite, who do not rely on the schools, hospitals and other public services we do and are determined to hoard wealth and power at whatever the cost and maintain a system that disproportionably benefits them.

After the long depression of the 1930s and the Second World War, the incoming Labour government smashed the previous economic consensus of cutting during times of turmoil and chose to spend, invest and, yes, borrow, and then succeeded in getting the debt down by creating decades of prosperity that was shared like at no time before or since 1979.

Today, we have returned to repeating the false economic mistakes of the 1930s after being misled that Britain, a country that has never defaulted on its debts in 300 years, could end up like Greece.

The Conservative Party, having backed Labour spending plans penny for penny until the run on Northern Rock bank in 2007, seized an opportunity to dogmatically roll back the state and were able to convince enough people that the crisis had less to do with the faults of modern capitalism and more to do with government bookkeeping.

They – and their many allies among the all-too-often ignorant commentariat – conveniently ignored the fact that, until the banks went bust and were bailed out in 2008, the last Labour government had reduced the debt as a proportion of the national income (GDP) from the 42% they inherited in 1997 to 35%.

They also seem uninterested in the fact that, prior to the crash and the ensuing bailout, Labour never spent more than 41.2% as a proportion of GDP in a given year.

And, indeed, when Gordon Brown left office, having saved the banks and brought the economy back to growth with a stimulus package, the spending rate peaked at 47.7%, having averaged 39.8% during Labour’s 13 years in government.

This peak annual figure was still lower than it was for three long years – between 1981 and 1984 – while Mrs Thatcher wrought her so-called “economic miracle”.

And during the Conservatives’ 18 years in government, a period few have condemned for “reckless bookkeeping”, public spending averaged 43.6% of GDP.

Sadly, today’s Labour Party, having failed to defend their record sufficiently, have allowed the Tory bookkeeping narrative to dominate and let David Cameron’s party get away with a more concentrated form of Thatcherism that has widened inequality even further.

Under the last government, amid the longest slump in living standards since Queen Victoria reigned, the incomes of the poorest fifth of the population have fallen more than any other group while average wages are now the third lowest among the 15 pre-2004 EU members.

And it is not just those “shirker” families we have been cynically told to despise who are suffering.

Two thirds of the nearly three million children living in poverty are part of working families.

And, during the last year, a million people have been forced to rely on food banks – charities that barely existed before Mr Cameron came to power, used austerity to choke off the healthy 1% quarterly growth rate he inherited, plunged Britain back into recession and enabled the national income to now be an estimated £95billion-a-year less than if they had kept spending at previous levels.

At the same time, since the crash, the combined wealth of the richest 1,000 residents in Britain has doubled to £547billion.

Perhaps the most depressing statistic is the fact that during the seven years since taxpayers spent £133billion bailing out our still unreformed and failing banks, they have paid £100billion in bonuses.

Last year, one chief executive, Sir Martin Sorrell, was paid £43million - one thousand times more than his average employee.

Indeed, since 1979, pay at the top has quadrupled in relation to average incomes.

During what I hope will be his final Budget in March, George Osborne was positively gleeful that the top 1% of earners now accounted for a record 27% of tax receipts.

This is nothing to be celebrated: it reflects the fact that ordinary workers’ share of national income has shrunk considerably during the last three decades.

Millions are now so poorly paid that they pay no income tax at all, while our government is forced to spend ever more billions supplementing their dwindling earnings with tax credits and housing benefit.

This effect, in essence, further diminishes the voices of the poorest in arguing how taxes are spent and ensures the demands of the richest become ever louder.

And that is exactly what the Tories, who are largely backed by the super-rich, want.

Just like the inter-war slumps that Labour’s 1945 manifesto referred to, we have a situation today where the wealthiest in this country have and feel no responsibility to the nation.

Indeed, while their contribution to the Treasury is at an all-time high, they seem to view paying taxes as immoral and feel no obligation to the common good.

Hence we have obscene scenarios such as when Tory donor and TopShop boss Philip Green paid himself £1.2billion and then avoided paying £300million tax as the money was technically paid to his wife in Monaco.

And, having been allowed to hoard several hundred lifetimes worth of average earnings, men like him then live outside regular society, hiding away in gated communities, sending their children to private schools and being treated in private hospitals.

Defenders of the super-rich always want to credit individual entrepreneurialism as the sole reason for success, rather than the sweat and labour of the ordinary workers who made their fortunes possible, the market in which we are all spend our money and the infrastructure we all pay for via taxes.

They trot out the same, tired lines they have been rehashing since 1979 and fail to notice how their case is utterly diminished by what we have actually observed about free market fundamentalism.

For example, in Saturday’s Daily Mail Tom Utley worried about Ed Miliband talking “endlessly about redistribution of wealth (by which, of course, he means your family’s earnings and mine)”.

But, I would like to ask him, what about distribution from the rest of us to the rich that is the reality of the last 36 years?

Now, I can assume Mr Utley is one of the top 20% of earners who have benefited from Thatcherite policies and seen their incomes rise from three times greater than the bottom fifth to 7.2 times greater since 1979.

Wealth has not trickled down, as promised - it has bubbled up and free market fundamentalism benefits fewer and fewer people by the year.

By suggesting that ordinary middle-class people should have solidarity with the super-rich and vote Tory out of a “sense of duty”, he is ignoring how inequality has adversely affected even those on good salaries.

Most obviously, by allowing the wealth of the top 1% to explode, the result is a distorted housing market that, having also been exacerbated by a failure to build social housing, means that a first-time buyer in London needs to earn £77,000 to get on the ladder.

And that, I should point out, is the salary needed to get a mortgage for a basic home in the cheapest parts of the capital, not affluent West Norwood, where Mr Utley used his relatively modest journalist’s salary to buy a four-bedroom house for £152,000 in the 1990s.

Defenders also argue that, despite rising inequality, Britain’s economy has been so much more successful since Mrs Thatcher’s counter-revolution, making all of us richer than we would have otherwise been.

This is simply is not the case. In the 35 years before and after she took power, the cumulative economic growth was roughly the same – only what we gained in national income was much less equitably shared after 1979 and benefited the richest far more.

Furthermore, countries like Sweden, where taxes are higher, income is more fairly distributed and businesses are more tightly regulated, did not grow any slower.

And, if you don’t care that inequality leads to unhappier lives and greater social problems, you ought to at least care that it threatens our economic future.

The International Monetary Fund has identified inequality as “the greatest economic risk of the next decade” because restricting ordinary incomes and allowing the richest to disproportionately prosper shuts off a vital engine of growth.

Even Mark Carney, governor of a Bank of England that has showered billion of pounds of free money to financial institutions in the form of quantative easing, argues that “unchecked market fundamentalism can devour the social capital essential for the long term dynamism of capitalism itself”.

And that is why this is general election – with the starkest choice between the two main parties since 1992, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies - is so important.

Because, like 1945, we are at the crossroads and have the opportunity to once again take the route towards a fairer, happier country and an economy that better serves the majority of people and not just handsomely pay a privileged few.

Of the two main party leaders, only Ed Miliband seems to grasp the problem of our inequality – the greatest of any big country, bar the U.S. - and wants to finally reverse a three-decade-long trend.

Meanwhile, Mr Cameron is content to shrug away the yawning gap between rich and the rest, and, like UKIP leader Nigel Farage, only have plans to exacerbate the problem by cutting taxes for the richest and continuing to roll back the state and punish ordinary people –you or your neighbours - with massive further cuts to the social security budget.

Labour plans to raise the top rate of income tax to 50%, introduce a mansion tax, so that those living in expensive homes contribute something back for the vast sums of unearned wealth they have accrued, and scrap the non-dom status so wealthy men like the owner of the Tory-supporting Daily Mail pay tax on the same basis as the rest of us, would go a long way towards restoring fairness.

Mr Miliband, who has grown in stature during this campaign, has been defiant in his wish to “break the consensus rather than succumb to it”.

He, unlike Mr Cameron’s constant mantra of fear, provides a message of hope and talks about values of community and engagement and seeks to unite rather than to divide between old and young, rich and poor, “skivers” and “strivers”, England and Scotland, Britain and Europe, immigrants and the rest.

For too long we have been in hock to a rapacious, corporate elite and, of the two major leaders, only Mr Miliband has diagnosed that this requires greater regulation, more just taxation and redistribution of wealth – and hence power - back to ordinary people.

His principled stand against the vested interests of major corporations is not so much “anti-business” as about ensuring that smaller firms, helped by a state investment bank and cuts to business rates, can help rebalance an economy in which some big private institutions have become too big to fail and required a massive injection of public funds to stay afloat following the crash.

Above all, of the two men likely to be the next prime minister, he is the only one who has learned the lesson of what went wrong during the banking crisis.

Of course, Labour does not have all the answers, but at least it is willing to listen.

The Conservative Party, just as they were in 1945, are still dangerously stuck in the past and still wedded to failed economic policies and a reckless and greedy elite who only want to “save Britain” for themselves.

It is time to seize the lesson from that landmark election, put ordinary people before the privileged few and vote Labour on Thursday.