Stewart Lansley's Rich Britain is a thought-provoking and accessible account of how Britain became among the most polarised of the world's wealthy nations. The authors' insistence that the distribution of economic resources – rather than the plight of the poor alone – should be at the heart of sociological study is emblematic of a broader shift that has occurred in the contemporary social sciences. This study will therefore be of considerable interest to the social policy community.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, policy makers concentrated on the analysis of poverty as the foremost social problem as Orton and Rowlingson recently noted in the pages of this journal. That defined the terms of debate about the nature and purpose of government intervention, and the birth of Beveridge's welfare state. The problem of wealth disappeared rapidly from view as Western European societies appeared to have found a more egalitarian trajectory in the decades after the Second World War. That phase ended abruptly following the economic shock of the early 1970s.

The firestorm of Thatcherism led to spiralling wealth and income inequalities. Britain was in the throes of a social revolution in which the wealthy acquired fortunes on a scale not seen for over a century. During the Thatcher years, Britain moved from the ‘social democratic’ pattern of lower inequality that still prevailed in continental Europe, and towards levels of inequality associated with the United States. In the UK the gini co-efficient rose 10 decimal points between 1978 and 1990, reaching 0.34.

Lansley asks what has driven this new wealth explosion, and explores the character of the new ‘super-class’ that it has produced. He affirms that the rising concentration of wealth in Britain was driven by political choices – namely tax cuts and deregulation – but also reflected changing cultural norms including the celebration of entrepreneurship and ever-higher corporate remuneration. The virtue of Rich Britain is that it enables us to understand and conceptualise wealth and its distribution as a changing social reality – rather than a Darwinian force of nature beyond the regulatory capacities of national governments. Indeed, Rich Britain makes a further compelling claim: the size of the gap between rich and poor really does matter.

Lansley contends that New Labour's emphasis on alleviating serious poverty is untenable since it ignores the impact of the rich on the life-chances of poorer groups. The Blair Government sought to concentrate on raising the floor – improving the social and economic position of the poor both in absolute terms and relative to median income. New Labour sought to repudiate the traditional theme that the rich must have become so by exploiting others.

But as Lansley points out, the more affluent dominate the best education, housing and healthcare. In London, City salaries greatly distort the housing market, pricing out poorer groups. Rich Britain draws on a wealth of research showing that more unequal societies exhibit higher levels of ill-health, crime, and racial discrimination. Lansley even cites evidence that Greeks are healthier than Americans, even though American incomes are on average twice as high, drawing on the work of social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson. America is the richest country in the world, yet male life expectancy is lower in the United States than in Costa Rica, while the infant mortality rate is higher than Malaysia (Wilkinson, Reference Wilkinson1996). Ignoring the wealthy is not good enough, for the inequality that results from the widening gap between rich and poor hurts everyone. That is the defiant message of Lansley's book.

Where Lansley is on shakier ground is his assertion that the wealthy in Britain today are disengaged to the point of social exclusion. This ‘detached and insular super-class’, he writes, are ‘ring-fenced’ from the rest of society: many no longer pay tax in the UK. They live segregated lives in gated communities a world apart from the realm of social responsibility and citizenship, refusing to participate in the services and activities that define the lives of the great majority. Lansley acknowledges that the term ‘social exclusion’ is usually reserved to describe the effects of lasting poverty – but insists it should be applied to the new super-class who are ‘increasingly divorced from common experience’.

He quotes approvingly the American social historian Christopher Lasch who argues that Western societies are increasingly composed of business elites that monopolise money, education and power, ‘choosing to live in an exclusive world of their own’ (Lasch, Reference Lasch1996). Yet it is not at all clear that any coherent class of socially excluded wealthy individuals could be robustly defined and measured.

Social exclusion has been the leading metaphor deployed by the Government since 1997 in getting to grips with the multi-faceted character of deprivation. The category was invented because traditional notions of poverty did not capture the range of deprivations that prevent individuals from engaging in the wider society around them. Economic deprivation was only one form that concentrated under-privilege could assume. Yet research has shown that social exclusion is concentrated in very specific streets and neighbourhoods, rather than affecting a whole ‘class’ of people. One study by the Government's own Strategy Unit looked at the prevalence of four dimensions of social exclusion. It found that less than 1 per cent of the UK population were excluded on all four measures (Strategy Unit, 2004).

The very notion of social exclusion is problematic and contested. Lansley inevitably struggles to make the concept stick to the super-rich as he would like. While there is a mass of information about the lives of the poor, there is relatively little reliable research about the lives of high earning professionals, let alone the wealthy elite. In order to demonstrate that the rich are really excluded from mainstream society, Lansley would need to probe deeper, drawing on a wider array of quantitative and qualitative indicators.

Those who study the rich face a bigger problem: there is fascination and suspicion of the wealthy, but a lack of material in which the wealthy speak for themselves about the meaning of their lives. Unfortunately, Super-Rich raises many important questions, but it does little to fill the sociological void. As the American sociologist Paul Schervish notes, ‘The greatest temptation in regard to evaluating the wealthy is to adulate or attack them. But before we can critique anyone, we must first understand their morality’ (Schervish et al., Reference Schervish1994).