Foreword to: The Borders Within: Causes and fixes of Geographic Divides by Michael Donnelly

In 1973, Britain was the second most equal large country in Western Europe, and now it is the second most unequal of any country across the entirety of Europe. It has all of the hallmarks you expect to see in very unequal countries, including a life expectancy that has remains lower than in 2014 (other than briefly in 2019). There has been an explosion in foodbank use since the Conservative-led austerity programme began, high university tuition fees were tripled just over a decade ago and have risen twice since. Britain is now also one of the places in the world with the least affordable housing. What this has done is to raise impenetrably high walls segregating people and places – sometimes quite literally walls in the gated communities that shield the wealthy, who have mostly grown so much more wealthier, from the poorer, who are getting poorer. A polarisation has always existed – but the degree of polarisation has not been so wide as it is now for almost a century.

One of the compelling points made in this book is that the conventional wisdom and taken-for-granted assumptions that politicians draw on to try to fix the problem are often part of how the problems came about in the first place. It is clearly of little use to keep re-hashing the same old solutions that are based on flawed logics and will do nothing to fix these entrenched divides. A new way of looking at the problem, and a more radical set of solutions that gets to the heart of what reproduces division, is needed – which all necessitates picking apart some of the fundamental bases of how we live and function as a society and economy.

This book rightly shines a light on how inequality is spatially manifest, concentrating on the gaping chasms that exist between different geographic regions of the UK, but in doing so the work also acknowledges important divisions that exist within regions, towns and cities at a smaller scale – local divisions which I have myself written about at length. As inequality has grown in the UK since the 1980s, so too has the divides between people and places. My home city of Oxford has the same shares as in all of England of both the top 10% and the bottom 10% of the country’s families living together in the same city – or rather, more accurately, living very divided and segregated lives within the same geographic vicinity. They are segregated by where they live, where their children go to school, where they likely shop and spend their leisure time. They may as well be in different cities.

At whatever geographic scale we are talking about, one of the important contributions this book makes is to theorise why divisions between people and place are maintained and how the economic and social system contributes to that. In order for the capitalist economic regime to survive and thrive, it necessarily needs to create difference, to positionally order people and places. The problem comes when it is not tempered and so does this in the most unfair and unjust way – when it is the working classes, and former industrialised places, that are routinely and now for many decades positioned as of less value and importance. The young people described in this book clearly saw this from a very young age – the working classes in Liverpool knew and felt only too well how those in the south of England viewed them. It was often a painful set of negative, stereotyping judgements – the young girl from Liverpool quoted in the book who was subject to nasty comments about her accent, when at a concert in London, is testament to this. It is perhaps no wonder that people stay rooted in the places and people they know in a world of class-based positioning and judgement.

A real strength of the research reported in this book is its multi-sited case study design that spanned all of the UK – it enables you to see how young people in different parts of the countries of the UK viewed and looked upon other places, as well as how they perceived others looked upon them. This is not often done in qualitative research because of a lack of time and resource – it is more often the case that qualitative researchers select one locality and study it in-depth, or at most chose only a small handful of places to compare.

What this book underlines is how much the economy and society privileges the lifestyles, dispositions, consumption practices, and identities of higher social class groups – it is their culture and identities that are ingrained within understandings of what counts as a talented person, or what counts as a place where you’ll likely find a pool of talented people within. It is for this reason why the high growth start-ups set-up offices in places like London and the towns around the M4 corridor. We can see these positional logics reproduced not only in the boardrooms and minds of big business – we can also see them in every day and routine decisions; in so many of the interactions and behaviours of ordinary people. The middle-class parents who are choosing where to live and where to send their child to school, the small business-person looking for somebody who they think will engender trust in their clients, or the choice of what place you might go on holiday. Status and positionality is ingrained in the very fabric of our society and our economy – and this book makes a compelling case to take a long hard look at these underlying aspects of society in greater depth than is usual. We rightly need to question the foundations of how our society and economy functions and how that is stopping any meaningful change.

In the UK, Tony Blair’s goal of sending 50% of teenagers to university was a strong signal of what it was to be respected in society – going to university, and doing graduate level work is what we are told we should aspire to – it is that which holds value and affords people respect. This emphasis only heightened a lack of respect for work that did not require a degree – it sent strong signals that this kind of work, and those kind of workers are not to be respected, or at least respected less. As it turns out, there was not the plentiful supply of graduate jobs that Blair imagined – leading many graduates to feel their degrees were not worth it. The problem here was not a supply-side issue, but rather the respect we afford to different kinds of work and what people do with their lives.

There was no levelling up under the levelling up programme that began in the last decade, many people in the poorest parts of the country, cities and towns, are trapped in unproductive work that does not provide an adequate standard of living – or even enough money to cover the bare essentials, heating, electricity and putting food on the table. The Borders Within talks about the long history of regional policy-making and forensically examines why solutions have been doomed to fail because of their lack of ambition and flawed understandings about why regional inequality persists. No doubt there will be an entire series of postmortem analyses by academics into what impact levelling up funding had on places within the UK. One of the early studies has already shown that some of the most deprived regions of the UK lacked the institutional capacity to produce the bid documents they needed to secure the money – in other words, the Government’s process of allocating funds was to blame – a cruel irony if there ever was one.

In 2025, we see no light at the end of the tunnel in terms of the actions politicians are taking to solve the problem. We see no fundamental shifts in thinking, and at best we see the conventional logic prevail in countries like the UK, and at worst we see a worrying lurch to right-wing politics in countries like the US and The Netherlands that can only end in disaster. People are frustrated and angry at the lack of capacity to change, but they are also increasingly duped into believing those with the answers are those calling for a dismantling of civil society as we know it. Many Western countries, like the UK, find themselves at a critical juncture politically. For the British, the first people to leave the European Union, a key question now is could the situation become much worse. Might the political judders to the far right seen to occur from time to time across Europe be seen in Britain in the near future, but taking a more permanent hold? Could Brexit have just been the beginning of something worse, or could progressive politicians offer people an alternative – instead of so many turning towards voting for ‘anything but this’. If we want the Borders within our communities and between our regions to fall, we are going to have to offer and implement so much more than mere platitudes.

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