Although 2018 was a year of peak income and wealth inequality in the UK, absolute deprivation has continued to grow since then, especially after the pandemic.
Peak Injustice follows up the best-selling Peak Inequality (2018), offering a carefully curated selection of Danny Dorling’s latest published writing with brand new content looking to the future, including challenges for a new government in 2024/25, the impact of Jeremy Corbyn’s legacy, and the implications of Keir Starmer’s many blind spots.
Find out more about what’s in the book…
Endorsements
“A sobering and poignantly written wake-up call. With his trademark deployment of meticulous statistical evidence, Dorling catalogues the causes of Britain’s decline and proposes solutions for real change and repair.”
David Olusoga, broadcaster, professor and television producer
“An urgent, accessible analysis of the genuine peril the UK is in, and what needs to change to get our country back on track.”
Melissa Benn, writer and campaigner
“Danny Dorling charts the contours of our society with a self-evident passion and creativity that not only explain its grotesque inequalities but inspire us to understand how we can radically change it.”
Rt Hon John McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington
“I hope we’ve not reached Peak Dorling – we need Danny’s wisdom and knowledge to help us root out injustice and work towards a better world.”
Kate E. Pickett, University of York
“In this book, a world-class scholar of inequality convincingly makes the case that, despite everything, and not just perfunctorily, it’s worth having hope.”
Marcos González Hernando, UCL Social Research, Institute and Universidad Diego Portales
“Danny Dorling embodies the conscience of the left in Britain, disappointed, angry but still hopeful. This book raises uneasy questions about prolonged social injustice. A new government should answer them.”
Guy Standing FAcSS, SOAS University of London
Adapted except from the book ‘Peak Injustice’
As one well-placed commentator observed in 2017: For the first time in a generation, a significant layer of younger people re-engaged with politics and felt hope – the hope of someone speaking up for them on insecure work, low pay, poor-quality housing. That just maybe there was a prospect of a government that would stick up for them against the companies and landlords ripping them off.
The temporary dashing of that dream might well have been part of the peak of injustice. Instead, Labour would go on to be led by a man who, in 2020, ‘was running late for an appointment with his tailor’ when he struck a cyclist. The cyclist was said by eyewitnesses to have been a food delivery rider for Deliveroo, who had to be taken to hospital (according to press reports at the time). The newspaper reports suggested that the new Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, was performing a U-turn when he hit the cyclist, who had shouted at Starmer, ‘How did you not see me?’. It is very possible that for a short time at least Keir Starmer may not see the people whose livelihood dependents on cycling the delivery bikes. He may not fully realise that they often have families to support too. He may not realise that the ‘benefit cap’ and the restriction on no third or subsequent child receiving child benefit is stunting our children. He may think that repeating, like a parrot, the two words ‘productivity’ and ‘growth’ will somehow be enough to placate the population. He may talk about trying to alleviate the very worse of poverty; but not realise that inequality matters as much, if not more. He may be surrounded by people who believe the same thing and that is why he thinks as he thinks. However, it is hard to believe that he will remain so cocooned for long. After all, even he, with his very high household income, has been relying on gifts from donors to cloth himself and his family.
Having begun with hope and the Labour Party, the remaining seven chapters in the book’s first section concern a wider politics of hope. The next five sections of the book then turn to chapters on poverty, housing, education, health, the elite and change.
Peak Injustice ends with a short conclusion concerning the mountain of pain we have created and proposes ten things an incoming government could do if led by people who care about the injustices documented in this book. However, what matters most – now – is accepting that where we are currently is a very bad place to be, and to understand that to continue to climb upwards would be foolhardy. As R.H. Tawney wrote in 1920 (two years after the last peak of inequality) of our political masters a century ago:
“...they repeat, like parrots, the word ‘Productivity’,
because that is the word that rises first in their minds; …
When they are touched by social compunction,
they can think of nothing more original than the
diminution of poverty, because poverty, being the
opposite of the riches which they value most, seems
to them the most terrible of human afflictions.” *
*R.H. Tawney (1920) The Acquisitive Society, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Ch I, para 5
Injustice is about so much more than poverty. Economic growth is no salvation for inequality. There is no need for us to learn this lesson afresh about the preferred parroted response of so many British politicians to injustice. We are not the same people today, as we were then, in the 1920s. Our great grandparents had usually left school in their early teens. Jingoism was the order of the day. The Empire was at its height. All that is gone. This time we could, we should, and we must, find a better, faster, safer, route off the mountain of pain.