Margaret Thatcher used to carry a well-thumbed scrap of paper around in her handbag during her early years as Conservative leader. On it were written a few words by Abraham Lincoln: "Don't make the rich poorer, make the poor richer."

If she had pursued the latter half of that injunction with a fraction of the vigour she directed towards policies that made the rich richer, the sentiments might have been more acceptable. As it was, she presided over the largest redistribution of income and wealth from the poor to the rich in Britain since the enclosures. So far, the evidence for the New Labour economic regime is that it is doing no more than continuing the slight shift towards a less unequal income distribution that occurred (mainly as a result of falling unemployment) in the later years of John Major's government.

It is a sign of the times that Abraham Lincoln's aphorism could just as easily be adopted as a motto for the Blair government today as by Thatcher in the past. The belief that you do not tackle poverty by redistributing existing resources from the rich to the poor is part of the unchallenged political consensus of the moment. The leaders of the Labour Party have lost all sense even of the moral imperative towards more equal distribution of income and wealth, let alone any concern with how practically it might be achieved.

And so the publication of the Sunday Times "Rich List" last weekend (omitting any mention of its proprietor's £2.4 billion personal wealth on the grounds that he doesn't live and work in Britain) passed off with barely a murmur as to what alternative uses these vast fortunes might be put. The wealthiest 1,000 people in Britain are now worth a total of £108 billion. That sum has increased by £10 billion over the last year alone -- enough, to give just one measure of the possibilities that might be opened up by the reallocation of such resources, to provide an income sufficient to meet the entire cost of the overseas aid programe operating at its current level not just for one year, or even one parliament, but forever.

And this is but the tip of the global iceberg when it comes to the concentration of wealth in a tiny number of hands. The ten richest men in the world, according to the latest Forbes list, are worth a collective £146.5 billion, with Microsoft's Bill Gates and the Sultan of Brunei competing for first place with £23 billion and £25 billion fortunes respectively. This is broadly equivalent to the £179 billion debt that has so crippled the economies and social programmes of sub-Saharan Africa.

Overall, according to the UN's Human Development Report, the combined wealth of the world's 358 billionaires equals the combined incomes of the poorest 45 per cent of the world's population. In other words, 2.3 billion poor people must get by on the same amount of money as 358 incredibly rich ones. As a Channel 5 documentary pointed out last month, the world's seven richest men between them have enough money to put an end to global poverty.

None of this prevented one of Tony Blair's aides briefing the press in February with the complaint that: "Tony and Peter [Mandelson] are fed up with Labour MPs who are obsessed with welfare and think wealth is a dirty word. We expect it from the old guard but the new MPs ought to know better."

It was pleasing, therefore, to see Peter Mandelson putting his name to the Jubilee 2000 petition urging the government to "cancel the backlog of unpayable debts of the most impoverished nations" and to "call upon the leaders of lending nations to write off these debts by 2000". It seems that Mandelson may have upset the Treasury by backing such a demand. But if Gordon Brown wants some hints on how to fund any cancellation of outstanding loans to third-world countries, he could do a lot worse than to make a start by looking at the list of the super-rich published in last Sunday's edition of a paper published by one of the world's super-super-rich.

In the meantime, it would be encouraging to hear the Labour Party again taking up cudgels against the gross maldistributions of income and wealth that reduce half of the world to penury while a tiny minority hold more than they could ever hope to spend. In an indication of how much ground has been surrendered on the basic principle of "fair shares for all" since Margaret Thatcher first came to power, Lord Rees-Mogg felt able to make the unargued assertion earlier this year that the City "Superwoman", Nicola Horlick, was "absurdly underpaid" on an income of more than £1 million a year. Horlick is some way removed from the Forbes list of the world's super-super rich, or even from our home-grown Sunday Times list of the merely super-rich. But the suggestion that anyone can be "absurdly underpaid" on £1 million a year is about as daft as the belief that the only way we can do anything about making the poor richer is by forgetting about any policies that make the rich poorer.