Dominic Lawson: Tories used to condemn the politics of envy. Now they're seeing it from the other side

Here is an irony to be savoured: just as the Conservative Party has switched to the view that large disparities in income are a Bad Thing – and that relative rather than absolute poverty is the enemy – the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has produced a report which suggests that the Left (or at least the thinking bits of it) are now moving in precisely the opposite direction.

A couple of days ago the Rowntree Foundation produced a fascinating report, entitled A Minimum Income Standard for Britain. It has abandoned the stock government measure of poverty – which is defined as having an income of below 60 per cent of the national median – and instead attempts to define poverty in absolute terms.

In this, by the way, it is emulating the practice of US governments, which ever since Lyndon Johnson launched his "war on poverty" in the 1964 State of the Union Address, have based their definition of poverty on objective measures of the ability to purchase – not just food and shelter, but also consumer durables.

The Rowntree Foundation describes its "minimum standard" as "having what you need in order to have the opportunities and choices necessary to participate in society"; so it includes such items as a mobile telephone, occasional trips to the cinema, and meals out. On the other hand it does not – doubtless to the consternation of any readers who live in a rural area – include a car.

Anyway, car or no car, the Rowntree Foundation's figures for a "minimum standard" are £13,400 a year (pre-tax) for a single person, and £26,800 for a couple with two children.

These, as it happens, are higher than the current government definition of "relative" poverty, and would imply a significantly larger minimum wage than that currently imposed on employers; and of course this does not address the problem of how to incentivise people into seeking work, if they could gain such a living standard entirely through the enforced generosity of fellow-citizens who do work and pay taxes on the fruits of their labour.

Nevertheless, the co-author of the report is entitled to boast that "until now, poverty assessments have been largely based on rather arbitrary measures of relative income, which are helpful for monitoring trends, but leave unanswered the question of how much income is enough." What is most refreshing is that the Rowntree Foundation has attempted to define a policy on poverty entirely separate from the sterile debate over "excessive pay".

When the Conservative shadow minister for social enterprise, Greg Clark, launched his attack – backed by David Cam-eron – on what he called the "outdated Tory nostrum that poverty is absolute rather than relative", he cleverly cited Adam Smith in his defence. In The Wealth of Nations, as Mr Clark pointed out, Smith declared that while a linen shirt was not strictly speaking a necessity and "... the Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen, in the present times a creditable day labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can fall into without extreme bad conduct."

Yet Smith's words do not preclude the idea of the wealthy owning any number of silk shirts – as many as they could ever want, let alone need. Obviously, our idea of what constitutes absolute poverty changes – but that does not mean that we can't attempt to define it, and then base our public policy upon that definition.

That is distinctly different from an egalitarian policy, which regards extremes of wealth as being as morally objectionable as extremes of poverty. Adam Smith's description of "relative poverty" is in fact (as you might expect) entirely compatible with classical liberalism, which rejects redistribution aimed at reducing income disparity but admits the necessity of redistribution that guarantees a minimum standard of living.

It's true, admittedly, that the Conservatives have not gone so far as to propose specific higher taxes for the well-to-do, let alone (as some in the Labour Party still advocate) some kind of state control which would actually prevent companies from paying their best employees whatever they wish. Yet I was still a bit startled this week to receive a little homily from a very senior member of the Tory party about how divisive it was in a peasant economy if one farmer had three cows when all his neighbours had just two, and that this was part of the intellectual underpinning of the party's new thinking.

I think his point was not to emulate Pol Pot, but simply to observe that the farmers who had been happy with two cows, suddenly felt less happy when they saw their neighbour's three. It was "socially divisive". Well, maybe: but I had always thought that one of the fundamentals of Conservative thought, not to mention the market economy, was that the desire to better ourselves is a force for progress. In other words, one should encourage the other farmers in their desire to acquire more cows, rather than pander to any resentment of the most able or ambitious in their society – which ultimately leads only to mutual impoverishment.

This is, if you like, the distinction between envy and emulation. In practice, these emotions can seem very closely related, but it's socially and politically vital that a distinction is always drawn between them – as it always has been, by the best philosophers.

Aristotle, in the Rhetorica, put it very well, in his own unique way: "Emulation is pain caused by seeing the presence, in persons whose nature is like our own, of good things that are highly valued and are possible for ourselves to acquire; but it is felt not because others have these goods, but because we have not got them ourselves. It is therefore a good feeling felt by good persons, whereas envy is a bad feeling felt by bad persons. Emulation makes us take steps to secure the good things in question; envy makes us take steps to stop our neighbour having them."

Perhaps this is where even some Conservatives have fallen on the wrong side of the divide, although they would never admit it. Having chosen to go into the world of politics, they have been made privately miserable by the fact that those of their friends at university who went into the sphere of finance now live in the large Chelsea homes that they once thought they would be able to afford, but now know they cannot.

When they talk about the curse of "relative poverty" they are really thinking of themselves. Still, if in some strange displacement of their sense of loss they are thus inspired to consider the concerns of the genuinely poor, then that might at least reap them political rewards.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

More from Dominic Lawson