Dear Polly - Please, do try to catch up

Polly Toynbee tells us that this world of ours is just so unequal:

Covid-19 has blown the doors off the way we live. The virus has been responsible for exposing – and increasing – levels of inequality, and that’s undeniable, politically. Families crammed into rabbit-hutch dwellings suffered proportionally many times the number of infections of those with airy gardens.

Recessions reduce inequality, they always do. It is profits that fall furthest and fastest and it is the richer among us who gain more of their income from profits. The poorest among us are hardly even in the market economy with respect to incomes, gaining such from benefits - there is no problem with this, it is simply an observation - and those don’t fall in a recession. Income inequality therefore reduces in a recession.

As to small dwellings, we agree. We have been shouting about how Britain builds the smallest new housing in Europe for decades now. The necessary solution being to blow up the planning system, that one that insists upon over 30 dwellings per hectare of land. You know, that reform that is happening and which you so oppose.

As the pages in which Polly writes point out, comment is free but facts are sacred. Perhaps a little more attention to the latter could be of use over there?