How unequal is Scotland?

We all know the big picture. In recent decades the very rich have got richer and the very poor have got poorer.

But how geographical is this wealth gap? How much better off is the richest place in Scotland than the poorest?

Well, by about a third, according to the latest figures for gross disposable income, how much money you actually take home after tax and benefits.

This figure averages at just over £20,000 a year in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire and in Edinburgh, according to the UK's main number-crunching agency, the Office for National Statistics.

It averages at just under £15,000 a year in Glasgow and North Lanarkshire.

So people in Aberdeen city and shire are about 35 per cent better off, in take-home cash, than those in Glasgow.

Is that a big difference? Compared with Norway, yes.

Average disposable incomes Norway's richest region, the capital Oslo, are 17 per cent higher than those in its poorest, Nord-Trondelag.

But the gap between poor areas and rich ones in both Scotland and Norway pale in to insignificance compared with England's yawning gulf between rich West London and poor East Midlands.

Because Westminster, with an average gross disposable income of £43,000, is 270 per cent richer than Leicester, where the figure is just £11,700.

This, of course, is the London effect: the UK capital and surrounding areas providing incomes and economic activity way out of kilter with communities just an hour or two away by train. But even within western London there are huge gaps: Haringey and Islington, with average disposable incomes just a bit higher than Edinburgh and Aberdeen, are nevertheless stuck at half their Westminster level.

Now these relatively crude numbers, of course, will conceal huge gulfs in wealth within regions.

A benefit-dependent disabled person in a council house in, say, Middlefield in Aberdeen, will be on a fraction of the income of an oil executive with a stone-built villa on Royal Deeside.

Stephen Boyd, of the Scottish Trades Union Council, said: "These figures demonstrate once again the extremes of regional income inequality to be found across the UK.

"Despite all the rhetoric about rebalancing in the early days of the Coalition government, the UK is actually in danger of regressing on this measure.

"Of course significant variations are also to be found across Scotland; especially between and within our largest cities.

"The sad truth is that thirty years of supply side focused economic development policies have failed to address the structural deficit in decent work in too many regions and communities."

Last month The Herald revealed the super-poor in Scotland were now poorer than they were when Tony Blair came to power in 1997.

But more classic measures of inequality - the Gini co-efficient - are showing a gradual improvement as the recession depressed wages at the top of the scale. The UK, with its huge London effect skewing figures across the union, would rank 29th out of 34 members of the OECD by inequality, close to Israel and the United States. Scotland - if it was included - would be 20th, closer to France than to England.