The injustice of Britain’s wealth inequality is matched only by the lack of ambition in tackling it. According to the Commission on Economic Justice, which was set up by the IPPR thinktank, the wealthiest 10% of households own 45% of the nation’s collectively created wealth. For the bottom half, the figure is a paltry 9%. The richest 1,000 individuals can boast a combined fortune greater than the wealth of the poorest 40%, and in 2016 their wealth jumped by £82.5bn – which, as the Equality Trust points out, is the equivalent of £2,615 per second. Only an economy as dysfunctional and rotten as our own can produce insecurity and stagnation for the majority but boom-time for so few.

Much is made of income inequality, and rightly so. Labour’s 2017 manifesto, which proved the tombstone for a neoliberal political consensus that has prevailed for a generation, pledged modest rises in income tax for the top 5% and in corporation tax. Those proposals, while welcome, did not go far enough. On taxing wealth, there is a far greater lack of ambition. This may smack of a lack of gratitude: “Come back when you’ve written a manifesto that buried New Labour’s acquiescence to neoliberalism,” a Labour staffer could justifiably respond. But even if it was the most radical manifesto of my lifetime, that does not mean it was radical enough, given the multiple social crises confronting us. It was a start. Wealth inequality, after all, is about twice as great as income inequality. While wealth inequality fell in the decade following 1995, that trend has since shuffled into reverse. And, according to the Resolution Foundation, while wealth has more than doubled as a percentage of the economy since the 1980s, we still raise only 4% of our tax from it.

There are multiple reasons for Britain’s grotesquely unequal distribution of wealth. One is home ownership: in the 20 years following 1997 it surged from 63% to 77% among the over-65s but collapsed from 54% to 34% among younger Britons. Not all homeowners are abounding in wealth: the most recent statistics suggest that half of households below the poverty line actually own their homes. But the surge in house prices has self-evidently benefited the most affluent.

As the economist Jonathan Portes puts it to me, the same goes for rising stocks and shares: few in the bottom 90% of households have much money invested in them, after all. This represents a profound redistribution of wealth from the majority to the elite. Over the past seven years, average wages have increased considerably more slowly than the rest of the economy has, explains Portes – and if incomes are not going up as fast as what we all collectively produce, then by definition, somebody else is getting what we produce. The beneficiary? Capital. Or, as Karl Marx would have described it, those who own the means of production.

There’s another factor, too: pensions. Many older middle-class people in Britain have a defined benefit pension, a secure income that increases each year and to which employers contribute to ensure a worker has an adequate standard of living. But employers are increasingly withdrawing from these schemes: just 19 companies listed on the FTSE 100 index still provide access to them.

One of the many tragedies of Thatcherism was the shameful waste of North Sea oil revenues

So what are the solutions? The first is a radical overhaul of property tax. When a mass movement of civil disobedience and protest in the early 1990s succeeded in defeating the poll tax – in which all adults paid the same amount set by their local authority regardless of their economic circumstances – a new council tax came into force. Not only is council tax calculated on valuations that are now more than a quarter of a century out of date, but it is also profoundly regressive. According to the Resolution Foundation, in some areas it has become almost a flat rate, like the despised poll tax. Labour did, in fairness, pledge to review council tax and business rates and to consider a land value tax, but with no firmer commitment than that. The party needs to commit to either a land value tax or at least to an overhauled property tax – one levied as a percentage of current property values, for instance.

Then there’s inheritance tax. The inheritance tax paradox is that it is the most progressive and fair tax of all – arguably it is a tax on the class system – and yet is the most reviled, probably because it is hard to separate from the loss of a loved one. One suggestion floated by the Green party is to replace it with a levy on the recipient, rather than the deceased donor – that would make it harder to caricature the charge as a “death tax”. Portes goes further: why not replace inheritance tax with a principle that any money received from any source is treated as income unless it can be proven otherwise, whether it’s a £10,000 gift from a grandfather or £10,000 left in his will.

And then there’s capital gains tax: Labour promised to reverse Conservative cuts to it, but why not go even further? The IPPR’s commission floats other possible game changers, such as establishing a British sovereign wealth fund, much like Norway’s. One of the many tragedies of Thatcherism was the shameful waste of North Sea oil revenues as it built a fractured society, in contrast to the more prosperous and equal social-democratic Norway, where the state owns nearly 60% of wealth and 76% of non-household wealth. There’s also the proposal to give workers stronger shares in the ownership of companies, and the creation of workers’ ownership funds – as well as a monthly pay cheque employees would also get an annual dividend. We should go even further: why not an annual wealth tax on the top 2% or 5% of households?

Yes, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour marks a dramatic rupture with the Thatcherite consensus of privatisation, deregulation and an ever-falling tax burden. But the danger of becoming besotted with this accomplishment is that we treat the last manifesto as the most radical offer available. It isn’t.

The party made a strategic decision to commit to freezing the tax of the bottom 95% at the last election. It paid off, and the continued polling stalemate – if polls are accurate, of course – may discourage greater political boldness. But if Labour wishes to enact a truly transformative programme it may have to raise wealth taxes on, say, the most affluent quarter of society. This is certainly fraught with political risk. Yet consider the challenges: a struggling NHS, public services under strain, an ageing population, a national housing crisis, creaking infrastructure. If a new Britain is to be built, Labour will surely have to be more ambitious.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

• This article was amended on 29 March 2018 to correct a reference to the how the poll tax was levied.

