WE must be grateful to the Resolution Foundation, a non-partisan think-tank in London, for putting flesh on the bones of the widespread perception that the present generation of young Scots are getting a raw deal.

In a report just published, the foundation found the total wealth of Scotland had now reached £1 trillion (12 noughts). That works out at £237,000 per household, about 10% less than the British average. The difference is largely explained by lower Scottish house prices. For myself, I believe the deliberate inflation of English house prices by UK governments has been a bad thing rather than a good thing, because it diverts scarce resources from better investments.

But to get re-elected, these governments set out to create a feelgood factor, which they reckon to have most to do with the price people expect if they sell their home. No other European country finds a need to resort to the blatant sort of manipulation we see in buy-to-let, and in most of them the rate of investment is higher than here.

It is not only an economic but also a social blunder. The Resolution Foundation point in particular to the exclusion of youngsters from the housing market because they cannot afford it. When I was their age I bought my first flat as soon as I possibly could – in fact not long after leaving university, with the help of a £1000 loan from my father for the deposit. There’s a glimpse of ancient history for you: nowadays, given the vastly greater sums involved, the recent graduate might need to wait 10 years or more before being able to plant a foot on the housing ladder.

In 2000, according to the foundation, one-half of Scottish families lived in a home they had bought or were buying. Today the proportion is down to one-third. And the widening social gap threatens to become entrenched. The wealth of the next generation will depend on how much its members inherit from their parents rather than on how much they can earn and save during their own lifetimes.

Don’t weep too many tears for the bourgeoisie when we also need to ask: “What about the workers?” A quarter of Scots have savings of less than £500, and 7% have savings of zero, or their current accounts are in the red. Yet our distribution of income between rich and poor is about average for the industrial nations of northern Europe. Whatever the variety of socio-economic forces that come to bear in this quarter of the globe, they all somehow end up with the same kind of result. Since no general political revolution in these prosperous nations is to be expected, I wonder what policies can sensibly be chosen to correct their disparities of wealth.

Perhaps there are none. I always advise my many Marxist friends that their reasoning needs to start not from threadbare theories but from observed facts in the real world, following the example of Das Kapital. The unintended European unity of social structure (with a new class system of wealthy, comfortable, aspirant, skilled, unskilled, destitute) points to deep forces at work that no government can withstand.

In the UK, we had a third of a century from 1945 to 1979 when governments of every hue followed egalitarian policies, yet the distribution of income remained much the same at the end as at the start of the period. Then gaps opened up again under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, with his sidekick Peter Mandelson saying he felt “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”.

But New Labour brought on the banking crisis of 2008 which squeezed incomes so hard (except for bankers) that otherwise blameless citizens no longer felt so keen to pay their taxes. Now we’ve gone into a fresh phase where two Tory Prime Ministers, David Cameron and Theresa May, have told us they are once again in favour of fairness.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. But the point is that none of these twists and turns has actually made a great deal of difference to the long-term social structure, as the Resolution Foundation inconveniently shows.

The worst problems arise out of reactionary and racist fissures in the society of status-ridden England, but in Scotland too they should give us pause for thought. After all, our government talks more about equality than any other government in the world I can think of, or at least with more apparent sincerity.

There is no dispute that we should all have the same political and legal rights but the government goes a step further and aspires to economic equality, or at least a greater degree of it. The government acts in the same spirit as well – in matters of female emancipation, of university admissions, of tax (a tiny wee bit) and so on. But these actions have not given us equality, and some seem to have made no difference at all. You just need to read certain of my fellow columnists in The National to see how much closer they think we remain to the hell of Somalia than to the heaven of Sweden.

I blame the airy-fairy, arty-farty, softly-softly character of this ruling caste in Scotland, who are not really socialist but are not much of anything else either.

I give them credit for wanting to be eternally nice to us, though not for the authoritarian methods they employ to pursue this obligatory benevolence. They so much want to be loved by the Scots working class, yet end up with a defective understanding of it.

The fact is that this working class is not especially interested in equality. OK, they are happy to see some toff getting screwed, but our average proletarian lives in a world of hierarchical differentials created not by any government and not by the bosses but by generations of his own ancestors going back to the craft associations in the Scots burghs of old. Remember that in the bright, almost revolutionary dawn of Red Clydeside during the First World War, the struggle was not for equality but for differentials.

I had a conversation the other day with Jim Sillars, who reminisced about his days as a trade union organiser in Ayrshire before he became an MP. Woe betide him if he tried to resolve some demarcation dispute with money into the hands of the men. The gap between the wages of a boilermaker and of a shipwright was sacrosanct, possessing an existential social value beyond any filthy lucre. The system is weaker today, yet persists.

Scots workers are still rewarded according to age, qualification and experience. Through their careers they can progress from apprentice to time-served craftsman, to foreman, to manager, even to boss. And they all accept it is right and proper for regular inequalities in wages to exist along the way. A man or a woman is an equal within a small circle of his occupational peers but not with anybody else, and this keeps them all happy. As ever, the basis of social harmony is the little platoon.

The sole way for equality to be achieved on a mass scale would be through the compression of differentials.

The Scottish Government which tried to legislate for that would be a rash one indeed. It should do something else: waste no more time on equality but concentrate instead on making the economy grow faster. Only once we are as a nation richer can we realistically talk about redistribution.