A study from the Institute of Fiscal Studies shows how Labour has succeeded in redistributing wealth from rich to poor in the past eight years.

The research claims that under Brown, the poorest tenth of households are better off by 10.8 per cent while the richest tenth have seen their situations decline by 4.4 per cent.

This contrasts with the last study undertaken in 1994, which found that Conservative chancellors in the previous 10 years had boosted the incomes of the richest tenth by 5.8 per cent, while cutting the incomes of the poorest by 2.9 per cent.