Recognising wealth inequality's harmful effects, and mindful of the need to increase its public and political salience, social change actors are increasingly engaging with wealth inequality as centrally implicated in reproducing unjust systems – systems marred by poverty as well as gender, racial, economic and environmental injustice. This renewed drive to tackle wealth inequality led to a need to understand how the way we talk about it affects public and political mindsets, and how these mindsets need to be taken into account in the design of campaigning strategies.

We've found that people have strong pre-existing opinions about wealth inequality. The majority of people already think the gap between the richest and the poorest is too large, would like to see wealth more evenly distributed, would like to see higher taxes on rich people, and want to see more spending on welfare benefits.

People hold more mixed views about the role of wealth in society more generally, and are fairly pessimistic about politicians and the political system. There are systematic variations within these public attitudes: grouping by income, voting history and sex reveals different attitudes to wealth, redistribution and politics more generally. But this report shows you that the way you talk about wealth inequality can demonstrably shift attitudes and opinions.

This resource is for you if you work in social change and want to know ‘what works’ to make people view wealth inequality more critically, and be more supportive of redistribution. The key aspects are summarised here: