Labour MP Liam Byrne begins his unexpectedly peppy new book, The Inequality of Wealth, with a brief tour of the world of the super-rich. In Sussex, he visits Rolls-Royce, where a luxury car may be customised according to any whim, its interior made to look as the night sky did on the day its owner proposed to their partner, its paintwork matched to the same shade of green as an Amazonian tree frog. In Cornwall, he calls in at Pendennis shipyard, one of Britain’s biggest builders of superyachts, where he learns that some vessels come with radar systems so advanced, Royal Navy captains “would probably cry with jealousy”. He also talks to writer James Crabtree, an expert on India’s mega-wealthy, who tells him of the £1bn Mumbai home of Mukesh Ambani, currently the richest person in Asia. The 27-storey building boasts a snow room as well as the usual spa, cinema, indoor pools and parking garage. Bigger and better than any hotel, there’s no reason ever to leave.
All this is a far cry from the leaky, crumbling Palace of Westminster, even if Byrne does have one of the better offices in Portcullis House – an eyrie with windows on two sides, it amply accommodates the three (or is it four?) staff who listen in on our conversation – and at moments, he does sound a touch credulous, quoting Tatler with no less gusto than he does the leftist French economist Thomas Piketty. But don’t be fooled. Far from being impressed, he’s really rather disgusted.
“Where that chapter started is with the deluge of what you’d call wealth porn,” he says. “I’m talking about shows like Succession and Below Deck [a reality series about the crew of a superyacht]. Our culture is trying to tell us something. Yes, the way that human beings have always dealt with upstart-ish behaviour is through a choreographed mockery. We try to comfort ourselves with such ridicule. But it’s not enough, is it? Actually, we should be drawing no comfort at all.” The cars, the boats and the houses are only so much window dressing. The power and influence of the super-rich concern him at least as much as their conspicuous consumption, however vulgar or rapacious. What part do these people play in the way the world runs, and what on earth can be done to stop them?
But we’ll come back to these neo-pharaohs. First, we must talk about the atmosphere here in the Commons, where he has sat as the Labour MP for Birmingham, Hodge Hill since 2004. Byrne, a man who may be the very definition of a New Labourite, advised the party before its landslide victory in 1997. In Tony Blair’s government, he served as a minister. Most notoriously, after Gordon Brown lost the election in 2010, it was Byrne who left a note for his successor as chief secretary to the Treasury that read: “I’m afraid there is no money.” How, I wonder, do things look from the perspective of someone who may feel they’ve seen it all before?
Byrne flashes me one of his slightly manic, rather stretched smiles. “It is febrile,” he says, not at all reluctantly. “But the strange thing is, it also feels pretty determined. This was what was interesting about [the last] Labour conference. There was lots of sizzle. It felt quite 96-ish. That was the first conference I worked for Blair, and it was a lot like that: you know, young men in suits, running around. But what was really striking was the jaw-set mood. They were determined about winning… and that reflects a degree of self-confidence that, actually, they can do a lot better [than the current government].”
And yet, I say, so far the electorate has so little sense of what Labour will do. Forget sizzle, out in the real world, there’s no excitement whatsoever. “Well, there are always risks in policy development,” he goes on, with surprising honesty. “This late in the cycle, there isn’t much choice, frankly, because of the way the economy has deteriorated in the past two years. But it’s a tricky balancing act: what you do on this side of an election versus what you do on the other, when you’ve got a clear-eyed view of the books.” He talks of a council of realism, born of the fact that the present economy is “the worst inheritance” for a Labour government since 1945.
“The electorate is weary, angry and cynical about the possibilities of change. The truth is that if Rachel [Reeves, the shadow chancellor] offered some all-singing, all-dancing electric circus, people would just think: you guys aren’t living in the real world.” What’s his prediction for the result? “You’re in the territory of a majority of 30 to 40. Not huge, but that’s a giant swing. We need more of a swing than we had in 1997 to get a majority of just one.” A lot of people will stay at home: “And when you’re into the politics of abstention, things become quite unpredictable.”
Does he secretly long for a job in the new government? He insists not. He likes being the chair of the business and trade select committee, a forum in which he gets to drag the bosses of companies such as Wilko and Asda over the coals. But yes, people do ask for advice “all the time”. Are they likely to nick ideas from his mildly radical book? He suspects not. “My book is a three-term project,” he says. “There’s a new story Labour can tell about freedom in the 21st century – the left hasn’t talked about freedom since the early 1970s – but it has to be underpinned with security, which you create by rebuilding the welfare of democracy. [The trouble is] that’s a big and bold thing, and if you look at Labour’s change manifestos – 1945, 64, 97 – on average, they use the word radical only once. It tends to be only the third manifesto that’s bold and reforming.”
His book ranges over various problems: diagnosis, and then his ideas for a cure. “The inequality of wealth is toxifying our politics and our society. It’s destroying our economy, and it’s about to get 10 times worse.” The feeling is, he notes, very last days of Rome. “The average wealth of a Roman aristocrat was about one and a half million times that of the average income of the Roman citizen. But in the last Sunday Times rich list, the wealth of the [Indian-born, London-based billionaires] Hinduja brothers was about 1.2m times the average earnings in our country.” Tax evasion concerns him: “It’s wrong that someone who [thanks to capital gains on investments as well as his salary] makes £2m a year, like Rishi Sunak, is paying half the rate of tax of a senior teacher, and I hope Labour says so going into an election.” (Though he admits there’s only a 50% chance, at best, of Keir Starmer reforming it.) But the bigger worry is that the rich are increasingly politically active behind the scenes, lobbying parliamentarians and funding dubious thinktanks.
Lower down the scale, assets such as housing are just too expensive for the majority – and Byrne believes passionately in home ownership. “If you don’t have assets now, you’re screwed. You’ll never be able to afford them.” The unfairness will shortly increase dramatically. “The baby boomers are about to die. Five and a half trillion pounds of wealth is going to get transferred down the generations. Some people are going to inherit millions, and others are going to inherit care bills. Generation Z is about to become the most unequal generation for half a century, and we would be naive to think it isn’t going to have political consequences. Wealth inequality is at the heart of the new populism.” Among Byrne’s fixes for this would be a £10,000 payment to “every young person”, a boost to their savings made, possibly, through a tax break. This would be funded via the establishment of a sovereign wealth fund: a state-owned investment fund that, in turn, would be financed by, among other things, fairer taxation.
So far, so good. Somewhere in the course of this discussion, however, Byrne brings up former Tory MP Rory Stewart, whose politics podcast he admires – at which point, I can’t help but note that while Stewart now despairs of party politics, Byrne simply can’t give it all up. Why? What on earth is wrong with him? “Well, that’s my mum and dad, right?” he says. “They were child radicals in the 1960s. They came together in the anti-apartheid movement, and went into public service. They gave their lives to it, and it was hard. In the 1980s… my mum taught in tough comprehensive schools, my dad was running a council [in Harlow, where Byrne and his younger brothers grew up]. It was bloody awful at times, but if they taught me anything, it was that you just keep marching on…” But his father ended up an alcoholic, didn’t he? Marching on, it seems to me, didn’t do him any good at all. “No, it didn’t… My mum died when she was my age on Boxing Day morning in 1996, and that was the beginning of his fall off the precipice. But you know, even then, he would still say to me: if you don’t do it, who else will?”
What happens next is so sudden and so unexpected, I wonder at first if he isn’t pulling a Matt Hancock. But no, the tears he wipes away with the middle finger of each hand are real. “Sorry,” he says, his voice cracking (though the smile still hasn’t left his face). He tries to change the subject, introducing me to yet another aide, who’s just arrived. But quite soon, we’re back to it. He pulls out a lovely old black and white photograph of a young couple, the woman in a pea coat and fancy tights, the man with a pipe in his mouth. “This is my parents. In the Gorbals [in Glasgow]. Early 1970s. They’d both come from these traumatic backgrounds. My mum’s father died when she was 16, her mum was schizophrenic and was in and out of hospitals, her brother came home with an axe when he was 18 and smashed the place up and was in a psychiatric ward, her sister had cerebral palsy. My dad was from a family of alcoholics: his mother, his brother, his father. But they found salvation with each other: these star-crossed lovers who loved each other so much.
“After my dad died in 2015, I was in a really dark place. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I couldn’t stop my mum from dying. But I couldn’t stop my dad from drinking either. [It was as if] I was propping up a wall, and the wall fell, and then the prop went too. I just collapsed. Extreme depression. So I started therapy, and then I had a vague memory of this movement in America called Children of Alcoholics. I Googled it, and I realised there was an office in Bristol, the National Association of Children of Alcoholics [Nacoa UK]. I got on a train, knocked on the door, and there was this woman, Hilary Henriques, who set the charity up. I said: I’m an MP, and I think I sort of need some help, and maybe there’s a way I can help you too.”
He went on to make a speech in parliament: “And I was completely knocked out by everybody who then got in touch and said, ‘Me too.’ I’d say about a quarter to a third of MPs are the children of alcoholics.” Really? This seems a lot. “Yes, but all the pathologies you develop to survive it are the same as those that take you into a place like politics.” I must look alarmed, because he adds quickly: “The children of alcoholics are kids who are trained to try to put things right; who build armour plating so things can’t hurt them. They’re perfectionist and very driven.”
Byrne has tried something called “radical acceptance”, but found it “very challenging”. Is he angry? “No, I just feel sad. Your rational mind tells you that it’s not your fault…” And he still thinks, on some level, that it was? “Yes.” At this, the staff all sit quietly; no one rushes to find him a handkerchief. But perhaps such behaviour isn’t entirely unusual. His emotions seem to me to be perilously close to the surface; he only stops smiling to weep, and sometimes not even then. I find myself wondering if this doesn’t go some way to explaining – though it does not excuse – his bullying of a member of his staff (in 2022, he was suspended from the Commons for two days for “a significant misuse of his power”).
Certainly, he’s no stranger to shame. Anyone who recognises his face on the jacket of The Inequality of Wealth, and remembers his infamous note, will wonder how he has the gall to advise anyone on the state of our economy, whatever he says about Treasury traditions (“Good luck, old cock… Sorry to leave it in such a mess,” wrote Reginald Maudling, a departing Conservative chancellor, to his successor James Callaghan in 1964). But the two things are, he insists, intimately related.
“The book is the note I wish I’d left,” he says. “I’ve always burned with shame at it, and ever since, I’ve been under a moral obligation to set out an argument about how things could be different in the future.” As his new email friend Thomas Piketty likes to tell him, we’re at a tipping point when it comes to wealth and inequality: “The top 1% have so much, and it’s going to snowball exponentially over the course of this century. We’re at a fork in the road, a time of real jeopardy. If we don’t do something, it’s going to strain the bonds of society.”
The Inequality of Wealth: Why It Matters and How to Fix It is published by Head of Zeus (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
