A Look Inside the Book
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Introduction: Britain’s inequality crisis
Injustice concerns what is understood to be unfair. Among everything else that we now know is not fair, not just, is that a few have access to so much more of almost everything than the large majority of people, than the many. This injustice is felt especially acutely when inequalities are high and living standards are falling. No one doubts that the UK, and especially England, is in a deep inequality crisis. By 2024, child poverty had become more common in every region of England than in the whole of Northern Ireland or Scotland. It had recently risen by more in the UK – as a whole – than in all of the other countries around the world that were monitored by the United Nations (UN) in their Innocenti reports. (Ref 1, below) The latest of these reports, published in December 2023, was by far the most damning. It concentrated on children and the future. Collectively, we find the suggestion that we should continue to tolerate injustice, especially rising injustice, into the future – abhorrent.
We now know so much that we did not know until very recently. The average height of the UK’s children is now falling, and (on average) has been for all children born in the UK since 2005 – for almost two decades! More babies and children of all ages and in all areas now die before reaching adulthood than died a few years ago, despite lower birth rates overall. More children in the UK are now going hungry than were just a few years ago. More schools are now unfit for children to be taught in because the roofs might fall in at any time. And yet all the leading politicians in England, in the heart of the UK, continue to talk as if none of this is happening.
Despite the current crisis – the widespread bankruptcy of the country as a whole, the under-resourcing of the schools for the many, and the rising hunger of a group that is no longer small – we continue to persevere with – and, indeed, actively seek to preserve – an education system in which a very small proportion of our children are (privately) taught at great expense, as compared to what is spent on the large majority. The worse things get, the harder 7 per cent of parents try to segregate their children from others – partly because of how bad the outside world of the 93 per cent is becoming. By 2024, the UK spent more on private education, per capita, than any other country in the world.
Children, at least, are protected to some extent. Children are still almost always housed in temporary accommodation with their parents if they are made homeless. (Ref 2) Children have some recourse to the dwindling numbers of social workers assigned to protect them. It is worse for young adults, aged 18 and above, as the state offers them much less protection and imposes many more penalties on them if they do not behave exactly as expected in this unjust state. Even for better-off adults, living at home with their parents into middle age begins to look more and more like an inevitability – if there is any space, and if they get on at all with their parents in their increasingly overcrowded homes. But a few young adults are doing very well. Some of them own multiple properties. Britain has also never had as many spare empty bedrooms as it has today. Never have such a small group owned so much that is so often empty.
That is what an inequality crisis looks like. Not everyone is badly affected. A few prosper.
A tiny few even benefit from the desperation of others, such as from others’ need to be able to live independently from their parents and, eventually, to be able to start a family, even if they cannot get a mortgage. Landlords, including young landlords, increased rents for their tenants by more in the year to March 2024 than at any other time recorded in official statistics. It is the actions of the few people who today increase rents so quickly for so many others that clearly signal we are in an inequality crisis.
The old are doing well, you might think? But when we look carefully, we find that most older people in the UK are not doing well. In fact, they have been doing so badly that there are now fewer old people in the UK than were planned for. Life expectancy in Britain fell after 2014. It has been lower every year since then, except, briefly, in 2019. That moment was just before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, which was shortly after Brexit was ‘done’; and only a dozen years after the banking crisis had hit, and following a whole decade of post-banking-crisis austerity decimation.
What can you say? What can you do? How ridiculous it sounds to believe that it is even possible to think of solving Britain’s inequality crisis, given that the UK almost certainly now has the highest levels of income inequality in all of Europe. Money lies at the heart of injustice, and income inequality is the inequality that matters most of all – because it is about what you have to live on – this year, this month, this week, today.
This book is about what we have to accept before we are able to start addressing the series of crises that afflict the countries of this disunited ‘UK’ state and which have led to a level of overall injustice that is both utterly intolerable and – possibly, hopefully – now at a peak. Eventually, inevitably, a peak is always reached. We cannot credibly claim that a situation is getting worse if we are not prepared to acknowledge those times when, overall, it is actually improving in some ways.
In early 2024, the world inequality database (WID) released estimates that suggested that the take of the top 1 per cent within the UK had been falling rapidly since around the autumn of 2020. The WID was set up and is maintained by a great many very dedicated social scientists, including Thomas Piketty. Other affluent states had not yet reported the same trend, but some may have done by the time you read these words. If the WID estimates turn out to be true, then people in the UK may well today be some of the first to be on the cusp of a great transformation. (Ref 3) The extent to which this might be possible, might be about to happen, is the central question of this book.
The text that follows is a curated collection of writings produced over the past six years (2018–24). Each of the six sections of this book covers a different theme – relating in turn to hope and politics, poverty, housing, education, health, and how change comes about. Each section is prefaced with a new essay, then continues with a series of writings presented in chronological order to build a short case in support of why we might now be at a peak of injustice in relation to the set of issues discussed.
Much of the content of each section consists of arguments that have been made recently elsewhere, written by the author, often with colleagues, but here edited and arranged to better fit together and to try to build towards a more coherent whole. There is a sense, throughout the accounts in this book, that while at times we often now come to believe ‘it has got so bad it cannot possibly get worse, but it might’, there is also evidence to argue that hope has not died, and growing evidence that a turn is occurring. Peak Injustice begins with the question of hope, and a first section on politics. This is introduced with an essay titled ‘How did you not see me?’, based on the words used by the cyclist Keir Starmer hit, when Keir was driving his car in London in October 2020.
Sir Keir may be prime minister when you read these words or, if you are reading this many years from now, he may have been prime minister and have long since gone, his triumphs and failings etched into history. Or there may be some reason he did not last long in the post of prime minister, despite summer 2024 anticipation.
We cannot know the future (though we often fool ourselves that we can), but we can at least look much more clearly at the past, and especially at the most recent past. Because of this, the first chapter in the first section of this book concerns the former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and how we might better look back on his time in that position – now that we have the benefit of a little hindsight – if we want to have any chance of improving our current state and not remaining at a peak of injustice.
The second section of this book concerns the most basic of social evils: destitution; but also its opposite, happiness.
The third section deals with levelling-up, especially in relation to housing.
The fourth discusses education, and some of the eugenic beliefs of great inherent differences in ability – beliefs that remain in British society and help sustain such great injustice in this corner of Europe. Concerns over global population numbers and immigration are also touched on here.
In future, it will be hard to explain to our grandchildren that the Prime Minister of the day in the spring of 2024 really had stopping the ‘small boats’ as one of his five great priorities! Our grandchildren might ask: ‘What kind of a small-minded person would think that?’. And we will have to explain to them who Rishi Sunak was.
The fifth section of Peak Injustice concerns public health, austerity, the crisis in the NHS, but not the pandemic. The pandemic is only mentioned briefly in concluding this book. It is too large a subject to adequately address in these pages. As yet we do not know how great its impact might be in the long term, or whether it may be one of the reasons why injustices in the UK may, possibly, be at a peak now.
Possibly it was the pandemic, on top of everything else, and the cost-of-living crisis that followed it (and which was partly caused by global supply chain issues associated with the pandemic), which was the straw that broke the camel’s back of complacency in the UK.
The sixth and final section of this book returns to hope, the behaviour of the elite, and the possibilities for change. We cannot see the future. But we can influence it and choose not to accept particular scenarios as inevitable.
We live on a mountain of injustice in the UK today – stumbling around in the dark, we do not know if we have yet even reached the top, and often do not realise that we should be trying to get down, because we do not understand that this is not a good place to be. We are so unaware of how lost we have become and of how used to breathing the rarefied, oxygen-starved air up here that we often no longer think clearly. You cannot level mountains of inequality. You have to climb off them, to find a way down, and you do that when you are shattered.
At least we knew we were shattered by 2024. We now more desperately look out for signs of hope, such as those estimates of the income share of the UK’s top 1 per cent falling, and we should now constantly ask whether we are at the start of the way down. We can learn from our past. We are not doomed to repeat it. This matters because after 1918, the last time when income and wealth inequalities fell in the UK, we took a very slow and tortuous route down from the peak. We did not get to the bottom of the mountain until 1974.
There were 56 years between 1918 and 1974. I am 56 years old as I write these words. It took the equivalent of an entire lifetime for a person of my age now for the UK last to reduce income and wealth inequalities to a minimum and then begin to open up so many other opportunities. These were opportunities that can only be truly opened up once you come down from the mountain – greater freedoms for people to be who they wish to be and to tackle many other forms of prejudice as well as the key eugenic hatred and contempt for the majority that prevails at peaks of income inequality among a few who consider themselves ‘worthy winners’ when injustice is at a peak.
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.’(Ref 4)
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.
REFERENCES
1 For further detail on all the statements made in this opening paragraph, see Danny Dorling (2024) ‘Visualising the 2020s UK cost-of-living crisis’, Social Policy & Administration, 5 May, http://doi.org/10.1111/spol.13035
2 It is only in London that we have a count of children living rough on the streets; see Danny Dorling (2024) Seven children, London: Hurst, p. 178.
3 See https://wid.world/country/united-kingdom/
4 R.H. Tawney (1920) The Acquisitive Society, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Ch I, para 5; see: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33741/33741-h/33741-h.htm