IT WAS an American wit, probably Will Rogers, who liked to tell his

audiences that it's no crime to be poor, but it might as well be. In

Britain, as the obituaries for a lousy century are being put together,

we could probably add that it's no crime to be rich -- it just looks

that way.

Three useful things can be said about the Rowntree Foundation Inquiry

into Income and Wealth, published last week. The first is that its

findings surprised no-one; the second that no-one has questioned their

validity; the third that no-one in British politics has a blind idea

what to do about them.

The report said simple, devastating things: that since 1979 the bottom

10% of the population have become 17% worse off while things for the top

tenth have improved by 60%; that the number of people existing on less

than half of average incomes has tripled; that one in three children is

being raised in poverty; and that 30% of us have made no gains

whatsoever from economic growth. It did not add, though it could have,

that all of this took place amid an ''economic miracle''.

Inequality on this scale is no passing phase. It is a worm at the

heart of society. It is one thing to know that the bottom 50% of the

population owns only 8% of the country's wealth; quite another to hear

that the top 10% have locked up almost half of the total.

The Rowntree report amounts to evidence that government neither

represents nor cares for perhaps a third of Britain's citizens, yet

no-one who has drawn breath recently will find its conclusions

surprising. Poverty is on the streets, naked and foul, and it won't be

wished away by Ministers who believe all things are relative, as though

to say Richard Branson is relatively poverty-stricken when set alongside

the Duke of Westminster.

Laissez-faire Thatcherism perpetrated two vicious deceits during the

eighties. One was the myth that anyone can become rich. The second was

the delusion that the accumulation of wealth is at all times a blameless

pastime, good for the country and good for the soul. Wealth would

''trickle down'', as though from a golden goblet to a sewer.

Lacking any good excuses of their own, John Major's administration has

stuck to these lethal, rusty guns. In the Commons this week Peter Lilley

was again defending the idea that inequality means economic efficiency

and accusing anyone who thought otherwise of the politics of envy. Major

was boasting of how, ''on average'' and in ''real terms'', just about

everyone is better off than they ever were.

THE truth, as Rowntree demonstrates, is that wealth in Britain is

being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The power that this implies

is important, for only those in possession of such power are capable of

effecting change -- one reason why the poor are rarely of any political

consequence. None of this is denied by the Government, of course; only

its meaning is disputed.

Labour, conversely, knows what it all means but cannot bring

themselves to say what they will do about it. Donald Dewar was, by all

accounts, his passionate self in the Commons, enumerating the social and

economic consequences of Britain's biggest growth industry. Yet when

pressed on what, precisely his party proposed, he faltered.

Harold Wilson liked to say that if Labour is not a crusade it is

nothing. The trouble is, you do not embark on a holy war unarmed.

Confronting poverty, Wilson's successors look like naked pacifists

taking on tanks. All the arguments are on their side; all the artillery

is with the enemy.

Writing in one of the Sunday papers, shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown

laid out a convincing case for a reformed welfare state and for

investment in skills and people. He wrote of the need for a national

minimum wage and for the continuing education of 16 and 17-year-olds not

in work. The Dunfermline MP recognised the need to tackle unemployment

head on and ameliorate the effects of free-market policies. But he

denied himself one word.

Nowhere in his article did Brown mention tax. The idea that you can --

indeed must -- achieve redistribution through the tax system has, it

appears, been purged from Labour's thinking.

New Labour's problem is, in this matter, old Labour's problem --

wealth is economic power; share one and you share the other; duck the

challenge and you achieve nothing. Besides, as Peter Lilley knows, we

just aren't killing the poor off fast enough.