But one question, as ever, remained neglected. What sustains inequality?

The answer is partly about empowerment and political education. So long as those who encounter inequality remain politically under-informed, they will also remain politically powerless, lacking the ability to tip the scales back in their favour. How many parents of disabled children know that they have a right by law to demand flexible working hours? How many women know that it is against the law for an employer to discriminate for any reason connected with maternity leave?

The victims of injustice need a political education which furnishes them with the knowledge of what power is already at their disposal, and an understanding of how to use it. Moreover, by helping to show inequality’s victims how they can employ the existing political system, their initial step towards empowerment will have greater longevity because it will be self authored.

Crucially, we need to consider the possible repercussions of a state which fails to politically educate and empower citizens who see themselves as inequality’s victims. Speaking at the Demos seminar, Jon Cruddas MP spoke about the rise in BNP popularity in his constituency of Dagenham. This should be a warning of what may happen if people turn to the political mechanisms and language which they find comprehensible and accessible in order to address their problems.

We need to provide people with a sense of agency and show them the roads by which they can act out that agency, so they can begin to achieve equality for themselves.

During the day and a half workshop we were able to look again at the Everyday Democracy Index for Europe and to explore what implications different cultures of democracy would have on extending the Index.

 A very hardworking group of LSE students, as part of the Capstone project for their MPA programme, presented their work on trying to  translate the EDI Europe to Latin America. Paul Skidmore was beamed in from Princeton, to interogate their findings and discuss the methodological concerns about the Index.

 During the afternoon, we switched to trilingual mode as the Avina representatives led the discussion on what benefits an EDI in Latin America would bring. Gilberto di Palma (Instituto Ágora de Defesa do Eleitor e da Democracia) and Guillermo Worman (Participación Ciudadana) delivered presentations about the work of their organisations and the potential benefits of an EDI in their particular areas.

 What became clear as the workshop progressed is that the look of an EDI for Latin America would very much be dependent on what it was intended to do.  This became the focus of the discussion on the second day as the group considered how an Index could be applied to the region and which indicators would be required.

 To get a taste of the workshop we have put together a very short video. If you are interested in getting involved in the next stage of the work on the EDI or finding out more about the workshop please contact sian.jones@demos.co.uk

Wallstrom heads up “Plan D for Democracy”, the Commission’s long-term plan for engaging citizens in the European policymaking process. (We’re now up to Plan D-3 as it happens). She took issue with our claim that the European democratic deficit is inherited from national governments, suggesting that this is a separate issue, requiring a different set of tools and solutions. She plans to respond to Paul's recent piece on the EDI in Esharp (see p48) in the near future.

There was a great deal of enthusiasm for EDI. One participant said “we talk about representative democracy, or participative democracy, but this could take us into a new debate”. Another person was surprised by the variation in levels of Everyday Democracy in Europe, and questioned the notion they had taken for granted – that there is a single european model of democracy.

This comparative perspective was brought into sharp relief for me  when we ran a workshop last week with a group of Latin American academics, NGOs and the Avina Foundation about expanding the EDI to Latin America.

There is huge potential for expanding the index to other regions, for drilling down into particular results or for local disaggregation of results.

Watch this space for progress. You can check out the presentation we did yesterday here. We look forward to receiving any comments and please get in touch if you would like to be involved.

Rather than relying solely on traditional democratic indicators like electoral turnout, the EDI also measures how good countries are at empowering their citizens in everyday spheres of life like neighbourhoods and communities, workplaces, public services and even the family.

If you want to see the geographical patterns in empowerment across Europe, or learn why Britain has the second biggest gap between personal and collective optimism (the ‘i’m ok – they’re not’ syndrome) you can read the pamphlet, but you should also check out our interactive website. It shows you how we made the index, and lets you pull it apart, put it together again and feed back to us what you did. The graphics are a bit fancy-dan, so you may need to update your browser or get a cheeky plug in.

If all that sounds too much like hard work, why not listen to a podcast interview with the authors  over on the podcast page.

This is just the beginning for the EDI, so watch this space...