Blue Labour and One Nation were not the only ideas that Ed Miliband considered. Pre-distribution was another, but it had less of a public profile compared to the previous two. Pre-distribution was an idea developed by the Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker (2011) with his essay the Institutional Foundations of Middle-Class Democracy. Yet, the theoretical groundwork for the idea came from his joint work with fellow political scientist Paul Pierson (Hacker, 2015) in a book they co-authored entitled Winner-Take-All Politics – How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (Hacker and Pierson, 2010). This was an investigation into why the gap between the incomes of the richest and the poorest in society (income inequality) had grown markedly after the Second World War in the US. What is more, they posed the question of why this trend was continuing despite the financial crash in 2008, particularly in light of the financial sector in the US still earning $140 billion ‘the highest number on record’ in 2009 (Hacker and Pierson, 2010: 1). This book, as the authors acknowledge, was published in a climate where inequality, particularly income inequality, was high on the political and academic agenda. This was largely as a result of the financial crash, which had opened the narratives about the inadequacies of the banking system, the profligacy of bankers, the extent of their remuneration and the growing disparity between the average income of workers and the top 1 per cent.

Their work had been spurred on by the pre-crash work of Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (2003), and others, on income inequality in the US which ‘uniquely show[ed] how sharply our economy has tilted toward … the top 1 percent’ (Hacker and Pierson, 2010: 14). Hacker and Pierson searched for answers as to why. Their conclusion, broadly, was that successive American governments and the political process in general had played a significant role in creating a winner-takes-all economy. Critically, they asked: how ‘can government influence what people earn before they pay taxes or receive government benefits?’ (Hacker and Pierson, 2010: 43).