This may shock you: I am not as rich as Bill Gates. Lower the bar from the Olympian heights set by the Microsoft boss, however, and I am still not as prosperous as the average chairman of a large corporation managed to become even eight years ago. In 1999, when one of those endless surveys was done, someone's ultimate boss was pulling down £555,000 a year, 40 times the earnings of the ordinary someone.

It suggests a question. I know I am not even relatively poor. The most common definition involves 60% or less of median household income. Which is to say that if, in the tax year 2005-06, a couple with two dependent children had £301 a week after all taxes and housing costs, their income was, beyond question, "low". Many other people were and are worse off. Yet this is not my statistical category.

On the other hand, I cannot begin to match the take-home wedge of the chair of Britkill Weapons Systems plc. In terms of cash, the inequalities in sheer wealth separating us count as a gulf. Does that make me poor? Or rather, is there an actual connection between poverty and inequality?

The good people at the Joseph Rowntree Trust (JRT) report that wealth differentials - also described as a poverty gap - between rich and poor in Britain are as great as they have been for 40 years. The trust also says that the country is being Balkanised economically as a result: the notably wealthy in their enclaves, the rest elsewhere. Yet "absolute" poverty appears to have declined, during the 1990s, from 14% to 11% of households.

This sounds odd, given that the personal wealth of the richest 1% of Britons grew from 17% of "national share" in 1991 to 24% in 2002, but it reminds you how slippery this debate can be. Does it matter morally, politically or socially that 1% found themselves with 24% of, well, everything, if the number of the absolutely poor also declined? I don't count that as a tough question, but it is one the Thatcherites and the Blairites answered to their own satisfaction.

They said that it did not matter whether a few individuals grew stupendously rich if fewer people were grindingly poor. Sometimes the enthusiasts would add "as a result", explaining that only through "wealth creation" was there any hope of addressing real poverty. Taxing the rich could never be the answer, obviously. Voters disagreed in theory, but behaved differently in practice.

Yet if this neat trade-off has taken place - "if" being of some importance - why does the Rowntree Trust lay stress on a gap in wealth greater than it has been in four decades? Back to our original question. Why should poverty be defined in terms of inequality if the numbers of "core" poor have been declining?

Our couple with two kids and £301 a week provide one answer. If fortunate, and careful, with what they have, they might count as "breadline poor". They might have enough to live on, just, in a good week, but lack any access to the opportunities taken for granted by the rest of us. The spread of that kind of poverty has now claimed half of all households in some cities. In parts of southern Scotland, as we reported yesterday, 30% to 40% of the population is breadline poor.

This is new. It is not the picture for the rest of our country, and certainly not the picture presented by the rest of the UK, and least of all by south-east England. Why might inequality, of itself, therefore count as a problem? Because it represents apartheid, real and actual. That vicious little system has a spotty record, shall we say.

Health, education, housing, drugs, crime: we know about those. But loss of culture, self-worth, the family unit, the idea of what they once called "betterment"? Just as insidious, but far harder to eradicate. One adjunct to the JRT work, previously and widely reported, is that social mobility is less common in Britain now than for a very long time. Increasingly, people no longer get on and get out. Increasingly, they do not believe that such a thing is possible. Why?

In March we heard that, despite all the promises (and efforts) of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, child poverty in Britain had increased. Far from being "halved by 2010", there were 3.8m children in households existing on 60% of the median in 2005-06, an increase of 200,000. The Institute of Fiscal Studies, stuffed with people who chew numbers for a living, suggested that someone (possibly named Brown) had failed to increase benefit and tax-credit payments to match rises in average incomes.

If you had an axe to grind you could add that the tax credit scheme, a favourite of the former chancellor, has lost £9.6bn since its launch, thanks to fraud and "errors", and that some of the money might have been of use to help 3.8 million children. That's a point, but it may not be the most important point. If the JRT report needs a brutal summary, it is this: we have had 40 years of common, collective, cross-party political and public failure.

Failures of policy, failures of will, failures to think and failures to act. Failures, equally, to understand that so many actions have failed, and for so many years. Sometimes you even begin to wonder if the state and its agencies had just handed out cash from the backs of buses then the poor, breadline or core, would be less common.

Tax credits, the Child Support Agency, countless regeneration schemes, welfare-to-work, on-yer-bike, mass unemployment as "a price worth paying", job creation deals involving billions and endless "poverty initiatives". The list is a caricature, obviously. The sums of money involved down the years have been very real, and very large. Some who have spent the money have been well-intentioned, some not. Yet we are where we are: one in four households, breadline poor.

You may be wondering if I have a plan. Sorry about that. Or rather, I am sorry for what I know. It does not strike me as complicated to suggest that the very rich 1% could struggle by with half of 24%, to begin with. Their political friends reply that the sums raised would not be "significant", which seems odd, given the arithmetic. But the rest of us, non-poor or merely wealthy, could perhaps sweeten the pot.

We won't, though. That much I know. Redistribution through taxation has been beaten out of the body politic much as a subversive idea is beaten out of a dissident. Additional research from the JRT discovers that most of us are righteously disgusted by the amounts we think some people can earn. We are in favour, in principle, of higher taxes. But only 32% agree that "the government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well-off".

So much has been reflected in election results. It is a democratic choice. But it means that governments affecting to care about poverty need to be braver and more honest than the people they represent, and more clever than the people they employ. Anything else is mere chatter. Forty years of that is quite enough, surely.