Against the domestic backdrop of the UK reaching the tragic, depressingly avoidable milestone of 100,000 deaths from coronavirus, this week saw the release of a flagship report from Oxfam—The Inequality Virus—which lays bare the socio-economic turmoil the coronavirus has exacerbated, compounding the fissures of an already intensely unequal global economy. Put succinctly, this crisis has made the rich orders of magnitude richer, whilst millions of the poorest globally have been pushed further into poverty.

For the richest, this crisis is effectively over – and in record time. It took five years, following the 2008 crash, for billionaire wealth to reach its previous peak, but this time round it has taken only nine months for the richest 1,000 billionaires globally to recover all the wealth they lost in the early lockdowns. Indeed, as Oxfam’s report notes, a telling indicator of where we are heading is the news that we are seeing record sales of private jets.

For the poorest, there is no end in sight: estimates suggest between 200 and 500 million people globally have been pushed into extreme poverty; it could take over a decade for the world’s poorest to recover from this crisis. Indeed, as an epidemiologically incoherent and morally abhorrent vaccine nationalism takes hold, even getting access to the vaccine is now a matter of intense inequality.

The World Health Organisation has already warned that we face a ‘catastrophic moral failure’ as vaccine inequality at the international level deepens, with recent research suggesting developing nations may have to wait until 2024 to achieve full vaccination. Some of these nations may never reach this point.

All of this speaks to a political economic settlement which is profoundly broken: delivering the goods for an ever-smaller group at the top; offering ever-increasing immiseration to those at the bottom. While equitable access to the vaccine should not be premised on the self-interest of rich nations, it is nevertheless striking that—by failing to support developing nations in vaccination efforts—richer nations are set to hit their own economic recoveries.

Delving into the details of Oxfam’s report, the findings are stark. The increase in wealth of the ten richest billionaires since the crisis began is enough to both prevent anyone from falling into poverty due to coronavirus and to pay for a vaccine for everyone on the planet. Jeff Bezos—who made $13 billion in a single day last year, when Amazon’s stock price surged—could have paid every single Amazon employee (876,000 people) a bonus of $105,000 and still remained as wealthy as he was before the pandemic. Between 18 March and the end of 2020, the wealth of billionaires globally increased by $3.9 trillion. To put this into perspective, their total wealth—almost $12 trillion—is equivalent to the amount G20 governments spent in total responding to the pandemic.

As part of their research, Oxfam surveyed close to 300 economists from 79 countries: a majority thought that income, wealth, race, and gender inequality are all set to increase. These are naturally interconnected and self-evidently at their most extreme at the global level.

Among developed economies, however, the UK increasingly feels like a petri-dish for an almost accelerationist attempt to drive up inequality to a nearly unbearable level. As contributors to Tribune have noted throughout this crisis, Britain’s political economy is wracked by deep, entrenched, and profoundly damaging levels of inequality which are being exacerbated at every turn by a toxic mix of government ideology and intransigence.

Of course, these trends—both at the global and the domestic level—are not inevitabilities. A precondition for their opposition, however, is that knowledge about the scale of these inequalities—as found in Oxfam’s report—needs to be disseminated, and methods to undo them popularised. Of course, in the UK this is easier said than done: I have written before for this magazine that Britain’s politics are uniquely bad – the forming of a journalistic praetorian guard to protect poor, sad Boris from any consequences of the UK’s disastrous death toll and the increasingly deranged invocations that all of this would have been much worse with Jeremy Corbyn at the helm represent only the latest nadirs of a media increasingly dedicated to defending the Conservative Party.

It is in this context that we must seek to formulate strategies and narratives which extricate us from this crisis, prepare us for coming crises, and lay the foundations for a genuinely democratic and equitable economy. Tawney termed Britain the ‘toughest plutocracy in the world’ in the 1930s – responding to these challenges is far from a novelty for the British Left. What is new, however, is a Labour leadership responding to a generational crisis with such tepidity.

After the Second World War, Labour were unapologetic in arguing that interwar economic turmoil was a result of the ‘concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men’. Indeed, even under Blair, Labour implemented a Windfall Tax on privatised industries – something, crucially, that the party had been making the case for over the five years leading up to the 1997 election.

Comparing the proposals from Labour today with the recommendations called for by Oxfam to ensure an equitable recovery from coronavirus is an exercise, however, in disappointment. One of the measures Oxfam note is a wealth tax like that recently introduced in Argentina: research released in December shows that such a tax in the UK could raise £260 billion. It is unclear, however, where Labour stand on this issue. On some occasions the party has rejected such a course; on others it has given what can generously be read as tepid support, but lacking any real conviction: ‘We are saying to the government look at the idea of the wealth tax […] But, at this stage, four years before an election, I’m not going to start setting out [our] tax regime.’

The contours of a contemporary social democracy devoid of content are necessarily grim and tepid: flag and family may resonate in focus groups, but—contrary to the ‘adults are back in charge’ narrative—it remains a fundamentally risky strategy to pit a lawyerly capitalist realism against nationalist fantasy in a time of intense crisis.

What Oxfam’s report makes clear is the magnitude of this moment – a period with the ‘potential to lead to an increase in inequality in almost every country at once, the first time this has happened since records began.’ Labour needs to respond accordingly. Anything less is not just a moral dereliction, but also a disastrous strategic error which allows the terrain for the post-pandemic period to be defined by an insurgent and increasingly brazen Right.

By focusing its attacks thus far on competence, Labour have left themselves hostages to fortune. Forensic attacks on a bungling Prime Minister may earn plaudits when the nation is plunged into repeated lockdowns, but this line of attack looks decidedly less convincing at a point when the UK is a genuine world-leader at vaccinating its population.

The inequalities portrayed in Oxfam’s report cannot be derided as leftist abstractions or Corbynite flights of fancy: this is the reality of the world that neoliberalism has shaped and coronavirus has exacerbated. Failing to set out a response for the inequalities both global and domestic this crisis has preyed upon and progressed would represent a historic failing.