SINCE 1979, when trade unions numbered 13.5 million members, trade union numbers have halved and the inequality ratio between top and bottom has trebled or even quadrupled. 

This is no coincidence. 

Thatcher’s six anti-trade union laws were designed to incapacitate union influence by hobbling their ability to recruit and organise effectively. 

The destruction of the nationalised industries in the 1980s removed a major source of union power. 

Illicit paramilitary tactics were used by the state to break the two epic strikes of the miners and the printworkers at Wapping and to establish, both symbolically and physically, the dominance of the employers over labour. 

The welfare system was fundamentally altered from its Beveridge roots of assisting people in distress through no fault of their own, to be reconfigured as a means of pressurising people back into work and subsidising low wages.

And globalisation — the internationalisation of market forces — has further increased the power of employers over labour.

Where is this leading for the future? As it happens there is some highly relevant evidence on which to base an answer. The US went down the “flexible” (ie free-wheeling hire and fire) labour market route some time earlier than Thatcher and Blair subjected the Britain to it. 

What has happened in the US is therefore instructive. 

There has been a relentless squeeze on wages for decades to such a degree that average wages adjusted for inflation have not altered since 1980. 

Over the same period the benefits of growth have been almost wholly monopolised by the extreme rich — the top 1 per cent and proportionately even more by the 0.1 per cent and 0.01 per cent. 

What is disturbing for Britain is that these trends, which are now being played out here, have persisted in the US and show no signs of diminishing, indeed they show every sign of intensifying.

Of course it may be argued, and is being argued by the OBR and the Bank of England, that wages will recover in Britain as unemployment falls and productivity recovers. 

But both of those assumptions are distinctly dubious. 

Unemployment is falling very modestly from its peak of 2.5 million — it is still nearly 2.3 million — and productivity growth has been noticeably absent despite the economic upturn. 

It is nearly the lowest in the G7 and one of the lowest in the OECD — Britain remains a low-wage, low-skill and low productivity economy, and Tory policy is precisely aimed at keeping it there. 

What’s worse, even if productivity did recover its previous growth trend of 2 per cent a year, there is no guarantee it would be evenly distributed between capital and labour. 

Under today’s conditions it is all too likely that capital will pocket the lion’s share, if not almost all, of the proceeds.

Why is the injustice of the last decade persisting and why has the broken economic model that led to the 2008-9 crash not been discarded and a new model adopted? 

A big part of the answer is that the countervailing force to the power of capital has largely been eviscerated, and until the trade unions can be rebuilt to provide the foundations of that countervailing power, the trend of widening inequality will not be reversed.