I don’ t do much politics on this site, but as the last surviving member of the Labour Party (alright, it only feels like that sometimes) one of the hardest things to stomach over the last few years is all the stuff about how the party has done nothing to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

Those of us who pay attention to the details of the statistics of these things kept pointing out that apparent lack of movement was an artifact of the time lag between action and the the collection of data.

Well, at last, and probably too late to do this government’s reputation any good, the statistics have started to catch up with the fact that Gordon Brown has overseen the only sustained attempt at using the tax system to achieve redistribution from rich to poor in the history of British politics. For all their other achievements, no Labour government - not Attlee, Wilson or Callaghan - ever attempted anything on the scale of Brown’s effort.

• The amount governments spend on taxation and redistributing wealth across developed countries and in the UK is higher than at any time in history.

• Income poverty - that is, a household with less than half the country’s median income - fell from 10% to 8% in the UK between the mid-90s and 2005
• For the first time since the 1980s, the UK poverty level is well below the OECD average
• The number of children living in poverty fell from 14% to 10% between the mid-90s and 2005 - the second largest fall, behind Italy, during this period. But child poverty rates are still above levels recorded in the mid-70s and 80s

Is the record perfect? No.

Could more be done? Yes.

Would anything like it have happened under the Tories? Would it fuck.

Of course the question is, can it be sustained now that the economies around the world have turned to shit. Well, at least one party would try.

Politics is slow and messy and takes ages - and most of the time, most of the people assume that the achievements happen by magic rather than through long, boring, slogs for justice by people who never make it on to the cover of Hello! But every advance won by working people over the last century has been fought for by organised labour - and for the most part that means it has been delivered by the Labour Party (for all its faults) and opposed by businesses and their mates in the Tory Party.

Anyway, here endeth the lesson.