Notes & References
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1. The Roundabout
2. Growing Divides
3. Hunger
4. Precarity
5. Waste
6. Exploitation
7. Fear
8. A Failing State
9. Conclusion
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1. The Roundabout
1 Barry White, ‘Old ways win at ailing Belfast shipyard’, New York Times, 9 February 1975.
2 Danny Dorling, ‘How much does place matter?’, Environment and Planning A, vol. 33, no. 8, 2001, pp. 1335–40.
3 There were 1,500 places offered in 2020 in Oxford. They are now often better hidden so the local council cannot identify them so easily. See David Lynch, ‘Oxford landlord banned from letting out house via Airbnb’, Oxford Mail, 19 August 2020.
4 John Burn-Murdoch, ‘Britain and the US are poor societies with some very rich people’, Financial Times, 16 September 2022.
5 The Mini car plant used to contribute as much as a whole percentage point to the UK’s industrial export earnings. In late 2022 it was announced that production of the electric Mini will move to Leipzig and to China. The Oxford factory will continue, mainly automated, to produce petrol Minis for seven years, until 2030. See Sophie Zeldin-O’Neill, ‘BMW to axe UK production of electric Mini and relocate to China’, Guardian, 15 October 2022.. However, after the UK government offered ‘support’ worth £75m to BMW in March 2023, those plans were altered: BBC, BMW invests in Oxford plant as it plans more electric Minis, BBC News, 9 March.
6 Danny Dorling, ‘Houses, Not Homelessness’, European Journal of Homelessness, vol. 15, no. 3, 2021, pp. 87–96.
7 John Lanchester, ‘Fraudpocalypse’, London Review of Books, vol. 44, no. 15, 4 August 2022, p. 3.
8 As I write, this policy has not yet been overturned, although speculation it might be. See Justin Cash, ‘Banker bonus cap may still be scrapped despite Jeremy Hunt’s U-turn on most of UK mini- budget’, Financial News, fnlondon.com, 17 October 2022.
9 Danny Dorling and Annika Koljonen, Finntopia: What We Can Learn from the World’s Happiest Country, Newcastle: Agenda, 2021.
10 Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson, Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire, London: Biteback, 2019.
11 Danny Dorling, Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration – and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
12 Conor Burns, ‘Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement: New Labour’, Conservative Home, 11 April 2008.
13 The Conservatives had only nineteen MEPs at the time, but UKIP had twenty-four, aligned with another small far-right European parliamentary group that included the Danish People’s Party and Italy’s Lega Nord.
14 New Labour also took the UK into the Iraq War of 2003 as an enthusiastic partner with the United States. The only other European nation involved was Poland. By 2020 Poland had the highest number of far-right members in the European Parliament of all EU countries, replacing the UK in that position.
15 Lorenza Antonucci and Simone Varriale, ‘Unequal Europe, unequal Brexit: How intra- European inequalities shape the unfolding and framing of Brexit’, Current Sociology, vol. 68, no. 1, 2020, pp. 41–59.
16 Ben Zimmer, ‘The roots of the ‘what about?’ ploy’, Wall Street Journal, 9 June 2017.
17 Lydia Stephens, ‘British diplomats told to call UK one country instead of a union of four nations’, Wales Online, 6 June 2021.
18 Select your local area, BBC webpage, accessed 16 August 2022.
19 Tim Davie, ‘The BBC across the UK: the BBC 2022–2027’, bbc.co.uk, March 2021.
20 Mark Sweney, ‘BBC appoints insider Tim Davie as director general’, Guardian, 5 June 2020.
21 [Between 2022 and 2025 the BBC will produce two new long- running dramas. One will be based in the North of England, the other in a yet to be specified ‘nation’. Another hundred one-off TV shows will ‘reflect the lives and communities of audiences outside London’. See Jon Creamer, ‘BBC unveils nations and regions plan’, Televisual News, 18 March 2021.
22 ‘Slough Borough Council faces assets sell- off after bankruptcy’, BBC News, 25 May 2022.
23 Danny Dorling, ‘The share of people working in public service’, Public Sector Focus, May/June 2022, pp. 12–15.
24 Danny Dorling, ‘Public spending in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, 1980–2026’, Public Sector Focus, July/August 2021, pp. 16–19.
25 The UK still has an unelected House of Lords and a first-past-the-post electoral system.
26 Not including Ireland and Switzerland, because in both cases their GDP is inflated due to firms locating their headquarters there to benefit from low taxes or to be at the heart of Europe while avoiding being in the EU. Because of their small populations this can make public spending in both countries look low in GDP percentage terms, when it is actually quite high. Switzerland spends some of the highest sums in Europe on healthcare. Like in the rest of the EU, universities in Ireland are almost entirely publicly funded.
27 ‘YouGov Jubilee results – public views on the monarchy’, YouGov, 16–17 May 2022.
28 Eir Nolsoe, ‘Young Britons are turning their backs on the monarchy’, YouGov, 21 May 2021.
2. Growing Divides
1 ‘Hovis “boy on bike” advert filmed at Gold Hill back on TV’, Bournemouth Daily Echo, 3 June 2019. The original advert can be found on YouTube.
2 See the Wikipedia entry for Ridley Scott.
3 The New Economics Foundation, ‘Chasing progress: beyond measuring economic growth’, 2004.
4 Although other countries were catching up on Britain’s record health improvements at this time (see Chapter 7).
5 Danny Dorling, ‘The trickle up of fear’, Public Sector Focus, March/April, 2022, pp. 12–15.
6 See the Wikipedia entry for ‘Gold Hill, Shaftesbury’.
7 See vis.oobrien.com/booth, the work of cartographer Oliver O’Brien. It shows the deprivation map of England, but you can click an option on the webpage to see Scotland instead, or look at the method O’Brien used in the detailed maps of household deprivation from the 2021 census on the ONS census maps webpages.
8 Daniel Dorling, Jan Rigby, Ben Wheeler, Dimitris Ballas, Bethan Thomas, Eldin Fahmy, David Gordon and Ruth Lupton, Poverty and Wealth across Britain 1968 to 2005: A Look at How the Geographical Distribution of Poor and Wealthy People in Britain Has Changed in the Last 40 Years, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2007.
9 Tim Nudd, ‘Ridley Scott’s classic 1973 Hovis ad “Boy on a Bike” has been beautifully remastered’, MuseByClio, 3 June 2019.
10 George Monbiot, ‘Our quality of life peaked in 1974 – it’s all downhill now’, Guardian, 31 December 2002.
11 As one review of his next book explained: ‘Sandbrook is not an isolated figure. Alongside such figures as David Starkey and Tom Holland, he has secured a conservative ascendancy in British public history which is not reflective of the research produced by university departments.’ Ewan Gibbs, ‘We’re still living in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain’, Jacobin, 5 May 2020. May,
12 The 5th Viscount Ridley went to Eton, is an expert on the mating system of the common pheasant, and was chairman of the UK bank Northern Rock when it experienced the first run on a British bank in 130 years.
13 Chris Haynes, ‘Cracked open Britannia Unchained in light of the looming prospect of PM Liz Truss, and boy is this book densely researched’ – tweeting ironically on 20 July 2022.
14 Nicholas Henderson, ‘Britain’s decline: its causes and consequences (leaked document not published in full)’, Economist, 2 June 1979. Available in full on margaretthatcher.org.
15 Although, to be fair, he was only repeating almost word for word remarks made earlier by the prime minister, James Callaghan, in 1976 in the Ruskin College speech referred to in Chapter 6 of this book.
16 Much of his missive was a lament about Britain having earlier failed to join the European Community and the negative effects of that decision. Once the UK had finally joined, he recommended that its politicians should behave ‘as though we were fully and irrevocably committed to Europe’ (paragraph 28, emphasis added). Those two words ‘as though’ were telling, and partly explain why the memorandum was marked confidential.
17 Mark Green, Danny Dorling and Richard Mitchell, ‘Updating Edwin Chadwick’s seminal work on geographical inequalities by occupation’, Social Science and Medicine, vol. 197, 2018, pp. 59–62.
18 These ratios are as calculated from Table 2 of Green et al., ‘Updating Edwin Chadwick’s seminal work’.
19 Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson, Rule Britannia, Brexit and the End of Empire, London: Biteback, 2019 Figure 9.1, derived in turn from Valentina Romei, How wages fell in the UK while the economy grew, Financial Times, 2 March 2017.
20 See the Wikipedia entry for ‘List of Scottish National Party MPs’.
21 Morwenna Ferrier, ‘Nicola Sturgeon says Liz Truss asked her “how to get into Vogue” ’, Guardian, 10 August 2022. Torcuil Crichton, ‘Liz Truss as PM makes Scottish independence more likely, poll finds’, Daily Record, 21 August 2022.
22 See the Wikipedia entry for ‘List of Plaid Cymru MPs’.
23 ‘Council tax triples for holiday home landlords (Wales)’, Guild of Residential Landlords, 3 March 2022.
24 Claudia Savage, Brexit fallout is driving conversation on Irish unity, says Sinn Féin MP, Breakingnews.ie., 2 April 2023.
25 Bethan Thomas and Danny Dorling, Identity in Britain: A Cradle- to- Grave Atlas, Bristol: Policy Press, 2007.
26 Danny Dorling and Bethan Thomas, Bankrupt Britain: An Atlas of Social Change, Bristol: Policy Press, 2011.
27 Danny Dorling and Bethan Thomas, People and Places: A 21st-Century Atlas, Bristol: Policy Press, 2016.
28 Rory Scothorne, It’s our turn, London Review of Books, vol. 44, no. 15, 4 August 2022, pp. 33–6.
29 Ipsos Mori, ‘8 in 10 dissatisfied with how the government is running the country’, 30 September 2019.
30 Danny Dorling, ‘Voting intention Autumn 2019: what do we know of what the public think?’, Public Sector Focus, October/November 2019, pp. 18–19.
31 ‘Guidance: UK Shared Prosperity Fund: prospectus’, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, 1 August 2022.
32 Alex Wickham, ‘Sunak under fire over boast he moved funding from deprived areas’, Bloomberg News, 5 August 2022.
33 Danny Dorling, ‘Counting words in the manifestos’, Public Sector Focus, November/December 2019, pp. 14–15.
34 This included two national newspapers, The Guardian and The Mirror, several now online- only affairs such as The Independent, and a couple of magazines of dubious loyalty to the left, such as the New Statesman.
35 Daniel Finn, ‘The Sun is going to get people killed’, Tribune, 9 December 2019.
36 Incidentally, that constituency contains the Roundhay ward and the school Liz Truss attended.
37 Danny Dorling, ‘Brexit: the decision of a divided country’, BMJ, 6 July 2016.
38 Michael Ashcroft, ‘Why I’m for Brexit’, lordashcroftpolls.com, 22 June 2016.
39 Danny Dorling, ‘Would you let this man drive your daughter home?’, Public Sector Focus, August/September 2019, pp. 14–17.
40 Adam Bienkov, ‘ “The Brexit Party rebadged”: Boris Johnson expels 21 Conservative moderate MPs, including 2 former chancellors and Winston Churchill’s grandson’, Business Insider, 4 September 2019.
41 See the four maps given in Danny Dorling, ‘So, how did we end up with this government?’, Public Sector Focus, January/February 2020, pp. 14–17.
42 Julian Coman, ‘Broken Heartlands by Sebastian Payne review – a tour of the red wall’s ruins’, Guardian, 12 September 2021.
43 See Figure 2.12.2 in Danny Dorling, Peak Inequality, Bristol: Policy Press, 2018.
44 ‘Election results 2019: analysis in maps and charts’, BBC News, 13 December 2019.
3. Hunger
1 The Trussell Trust, ‘Our Story: How We Got to Where We Are Today . . .’, trusselltrust.org.
2 Bethany Dawson, ‘Many in the UK face a grim choice this winter between eating and heating as a cost-of- living crisis grips the nation’, Business Insider, 9 October 2022.
3 Oya Celasun, Dora Iakova and Ian Parry, ‘How Europe can protect the poor from surging energy prices’, blogs.imf.org, 3 August 2022.
4 OECD, Income Inequality online statistics, data.oecd.org, 2022.
5 Department for Work and Pensions, ‘Households below average income: an analysis of the income distribution FYE (Financial Year Ending) 1995 to FYE 2020’, gov.uk, 25 March 2021. Relying in turn on the Institute for
Fiscal Studies. See section 11 on long- term trends (data prior to FYE 1995 are not National Statistics).
6 In Bulgaria income inequality has been higher than in the UK since 2013, although it fell in the most recent year recorded. In Lithuania it was lower in the latest year reported (2019) than in any year since 2014. In Romania it reached a high point in 2017, but has fallen since. Moreover, like in Lithuania, Romania’s inequality was still below the level the UK reached in 2017. Similarly, in every other Eastern European country inequality is also lower, sometimes much lower, than in the UK. In October 2022 the UK reported that there had been a fall in its income inequality in 2020, but it was still higher than that of any other European country reporting at that time. See: OECD, Income inequality, online statistics, data.oecd.org.
7 Michael Savage and Dulcie Lee, ‘ “I regularly see rickets”: diseases of Victorian- era poverty return to UK’, Guardian, 23 December 2017.
8 The UK has been the most unequal Western European country since 2007, when it became more unequal than Portugal by income inequality, as reported by the OECD.
9 Mubin Haq, ‘Nearly 60% increase in UK households in serious financial difficulties’, Financial Fairness Trust, 11 July 2022. Five months later there had been a: ‘huge increase (77%) in people with no confidence in their financial futures’, Karen Barker, Financial Fairness Trust Tracker, 14 December 2022, financialfairness.org.
10 J. Neumann and John Kington, Great historical events that were significantly affected by the weather: Part 10, crop failure in Britain in 1799 and 1800 and the British decision to send a naval force to the Baltic early in 1801, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 73, no. 2, 1992, pp. 187–99.
11 Figure 12 in Torsten Bell, Emily Fry, Gavin Kelly, Louise Murphy, Greg Thwaites and Daniel Tomlinson, ‘Stagnation nation: navigating a route to a fairer and more prosperous Britain’, The Economy 2030 Enquiry, 13 July 2022.
12 Levi Winchester, ‘Three million households not paid the £150 council tax rebate – how to claim your payment’, Mirror, 24 August 2022.
13 Rupert Neate, ‘Over £5.5bn of Covid support funds lost to fraud or error’, Guardian, 4 November 2022.
14 ‘Marcus Rashford: government changes decision on free school meals’, BBC Newsround, 8 November 2020.
15 Katie Grant, ‘Free school meals: vouchers for summer holidays cut to as little as £1.66 a day for millions of children’, Inews, 16 July 2022.
16 See the Wikipedia entry for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
17 Michael Jacobs, ‘Thatcherite mythology: eight Tory leadership candidates in search of an economic policy’, LSE British Politics and Policy Blogs, 13 July 2022.
18 Nikoleta Kalmouki, ‘Price ceiling for products sold in beaches’, Greek Reporter, 30 July 2014. British newspapers took a long time to realise what was happening in Greece and sometimes reported the protection of prices with criticism: Helena Smith, ‘The fixed- price shopping basket: Greece’s answer to cost of living crisis’, Guardian, 8 December 2022.
19 E.K.POI.ZO, Canteen prices: consumer rights, ekpizo.gr, 11 January 2022.
20 ‘Children can eat for just £1 at Asda cafés across England and Wales this summer’, Asada corporate news release, 7 July 2022.
21 Olaf van Vliet and Koen Caminada, ‘Unemployment replacement rates dataset among 34 welfare states, 1971–2009: an update, extension and modification of the Scruggs’ welfare state entitlements data set’, Leiden Law School, Department of Economics, NEUJOBS Special Report no. 2, 2012, table 2, p. 7.
22 See page 16 of Brigid Francis- Devine, National Minimum Wage Statistics, House of Commons Library, research briefings files, 13 June 2022.
23 David Webster, ‘Briefing: benefit sanctions statistics’, Child Poverty Action Group, 24 August 2022.
24 Danny Dorling, Inequality and the 1%, 3rd edition, London: Verso, 2019, p. 188.
25 Patrick Butler, ‘Spending cuts breach UK’s human rights obligations, says report’, Guardian, 28 November 2018.
26 Danny Dorling, ‘Economics and compassion’, in Matt Hawkins and Jenifer Nadel (eds.), How Compassion Can Transform Our Politics, Economy and Society, Abingdon: Routledge, 2021; Robert Schultz and Anna Stansbury, ‘US economics PhDs are less socioeconomically and racially diverse than other major fields’, Working Paper 22- 4, Peterson Institute for International Economics, 31 March 2022.
27 The exact ratio was 9.3 to 1. This is a fraction above the ratio of the next most privileged social science: geography, with a ratio of 8.7 to 1, although human geography alone has a ratio of 12 to 1 (compared to physical geography at 6.4 to 1). In social policy undergraduate degrees the ratio is 1 to
1; in sociology it is 1.2 to 1; in maths 4.7 to 1; in medicine 7.2 to 1 – all less elitist than economics. See Table 8.1 in Danny Dorling, ‘The post- pandemic provision of education in the UK’, in Patrick Allen, Suzanne Konzelmann and Jan Toporowski (eds.), Return of the State: Restructuring Britain for the Common Good, Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda, 2021, and Table 3 in Danny Dorling, ‘Where are we heading? The example of generational change in British academic geography’, Environment and Planning F, 19 March 2022.
28 Patrick Butler, ‘Millions forced to skip meals as UK cost of living crisis deepens’, Guardian, 18 October 2022.
29 Mary Reader, Jonathan Portes and Ruth Patrick, ‘Does cutting child benefits reduce fertility in larger families? Evidence from the UK’s two- child limit’, largerfamilies.study, 6 April 2022. see also:
30 Scottish Environment Protection Agency, ‘99% of Scotland’s bathing waters passed environmental water quality standards this summer’, sepa.org.uk, 13 December 2021.
31 Olivia Marshall, ‘Wage woe: pay cut for millions as real wages fall by record 3% – what it means for your money’, Sun, 16 August 2022.
32 Assuming they were internet savvy and had online access. See gov.uk/winter-fuel-payment.
33 Danny Dorling, ‘A letter from Helsinki’, Public Sector Focus, July/August 2022, pp. 12–15.
34 Calculation made using the Household Below Basic Incomes data series, after housing costs were deducted and income equivalised for household size, benefits received and taxes paid: DWP, ‘Households below average income: for financial years ending 1995 to 2020’, Department for Work and Pensions, 25 March 2021.
35 See page 8 of Eurostat, Regional GDP per capita ranged from 31% to 626% of the EU average in 2017, ec.europa.eu, 26 February 2019.
36 Louise Everett, Reply of the Deputy Director, Policy and Performance, Disability and Health Support Directorate, Department for Work and Pensions, to Mo Stewart, 15 August 2022, personal correspondence.
37 See ‘Informing the Disability Unit’, independentliving.co.uk, 22 August 2022.
38 Mo Stewart, ‘Shaping future support: the health and disability green paper. A briefing’, Preventable Harm Project, citizen- network.org, September 2021.
39 Mo Stewart, ‘The public health crisis created by UK social policy reforms’, Justice, Power and Resistance, 28 July 2022.
40 Danny Dorling, Injustice, Bristol: Policy Press, 2010.
41 HMRC, Tax Credits: 2 child limit policy, revenuebenefits.org.uk, 1 July 2022.
42 Trussell Trust, ‘Our story: How we got to where we are today . . .’
43 See the Wikipedia entry for ‘Seebohm Rowntree, Third York study (1951)’.
4. Precarity
1 ‘Taking action on cost emergency: Scottish Government Resilience Room convened’, gov.scot, 11 August 2022.
2 Maps from a decade ago look very similar to more recent ones. Compare Olly O’Brien’s maps of 2013 (at oobrien.com), the 2022 Scottish census (when released) and the most recent release of the SIMD (Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation).
3 ONS, People in households by housing tenure and combined economic activity status of household members, 29 September 2022, Table 1.
4 Becky Tunstall, ‘The deresidualisation of social housing in England: change in the relative income, employment status and social class of social housing tenants since the 1990s’, Housing Studies, 19 April 2021.
5 Simon Lambert, ‘The average home in the UK cost £1,891 in 1952: How much would it be now if house prices had only risen in line with inflation?’, This Is Money (Daily Mail), 17 June 2022.
6 The 2021 census data on dwellings became available at the time of writing. However, even if the number of additional bedrooms built had been lower than expected, it would still be higher than the increase in people. The 2010s were the first decade since records began in which the average newly built British home had slightly less than three bedrooms. See Aaron O’Neill, ‘Average number of bedrooms in new British houses 1930–2020’, statista.com, 21 June 2022.
7 The first UK census was held in 1801 just as the new state was formed. The 2021/22 census could be the last. See David Martin, ‘Looking to the future of the UK censuses’, blog.ukdataservice.ac.uk, 21 June 2022.
8 Danny Dorling, All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster, London: Allen Lane, 2016, pp. 196–7.
9 Citizens Information, Housing Taxes and Reliefs, citizensinformation.ie.
10 Liam Geraghty, ‘Social housing tenants should get compensation for living in homes “unfit for human habitation”, say MPs’, Big Issue, 20 July 2022.
11 Abigail O’Leary, ‘Homeless single mum in one room B&B with three children says lockdown is “unbearable”’, Mirror, 14 April 2020.
12 Sarah Wilson, ‘Revealed: at least 30,000 people have waited 10 years for social housing’, Big Issue, 12 July 2022.
13 Danny Dorling, ‘The price we pay for housing is too high’, Public Sector Focus, September/October 2016, p. 72.
14 Richard Ault and Hannah Cottrell, ‘London property: over 1,000 renters and families thrown out onto streets with huge rise in landlord evictions’, My London News, 16 August 2022.
15 Callum Cant, ‘Taking what’s ours: an ACORN inquiry’, Notes From Below, 16 August 2018.
16 A few very nasty people might even argue that some people do not deserve to have toothpaste or soap.
17 The UK delivery and courier market is estimated to be worth £13 billion. It is made up of almost 10,000 businesses which employ around 112,000 people in total. See Mark Dean, ‘UK delivery and courier industry statistics’, shiply. com, 19 August 2022.
18 Katie Collins, ‘What the US can learn from Europe about broadband affordability (and what it can’t)’, CNET, 23 June 2021.
19 Candice Cyrus, ‘Failed UK energy suppliers update’, Forbes, 18 February 2022.
20 The Rothschild Archive, ‘Exhibition – “If you see Sid . . . tell him!” ’, rothschildarchive.org.
21 ‘Rail travel in Germany increases by 42% following introduction of €9 train tickets’, Schengenvisa News, 12 July 2022.
22 Claudia Hille and Matthias Gather, ‘Study proves: 9-euro ticket strengthens the social participation of people with low incomes’, Institute for Transport and Space, Erfurt University of Applied Sciences, 24 October 2022.
23 Joshua Manning, ‘Pedro Sanchez announces free Renfe train tickets at Spain’s National debate’, EuroWeekly News, 12 July 2022. And Dale Peterson, ‘You can travel through Spain for free by train for all of 2023’, Travel Off Path, 15 October 2022.
24 Roselyne Min, ‘Free public transport in Europe: Is the social experiment working or is it just a gimmick?’, Euro News, 17 September 2022.
25 Nicole Kobie, ‘The case for making public transit free everywhere’, Wired, 29 July 2022.
26 Richard Partington, ‘Labour explores plans to ban private jets from UK airports from 2025’, Guardian, 4 November 2019.
27 Christian Brand and Brenda Boardman, ‘Taming of the few: the unequal distribution of greenhouse gas emissions from personal travel in the UK’, Energy Policy, vol. 36, no. 1, 2008, pp. 224–38.
28 Mary Shepperson, ‘Why hasn’t there been a single new reservoir built for over 30 years in the UK? We used to build loads’, Twitter, 29 July 2022.
29 Joseph Baines and Sandy Brian Hager, ‘Profiting amid the energy crisis: the distribution networks at the heart of the UK’s gas and electricity system’, common-wealth.co .uk, 14 March 2022.
30 David Hall and Vera Weghmann, ‘Nationalisation would save UK billions’, Greenwich research reveals, gre.ac.uk, 15 November 2019.
31 See preface to the third edition of Danny Dorling, Inequality and the 1%, London: Verso, 2019.
32 The data is in Inequality and the 1%, third edition, in the section titled ‘New Figures in the 3rd edition’, at dannydorling.org.
33 Paul Kiel and Hannah Fresques, ‘Where in the US are you most likely to be audited by the IRS?’, ProPublica, 1 April 2019.
34 Anoosh Chakelian,’ You’re 23 times more likely to be prosecuted for benefit fraud than tax fraud in the UK: yet tax crimes cost the economy nine times more’, New Statesman, 25 July 2021.
35 Danny Dorling, ‘Top “remuneration”: have we reached peak inequality?’, Public Sector Focus, January/February 2018, pp. 54–5.
36 Danny Dorling, ‘Peak inequality: the gap between the very rich and the rest is wider in Britain than in any other large country in Europe, and society is the most unequal it has been since shortly after the First World War. But is great change coming?’, New Statesman, 4 July 2018.
37 High Pay Centre analysis of FTSE 350 pay ratios, highpaycentre.org, 23 May 2022.
38 ‘CEO pay survey 2022: CEO pay surges 39%’, highpaycentre.org, 22 August 2022.
39 Andy Hoffman, ‘Swiss watch exports to China slump again as US stays strong’, Bloomberg News, 21 June 2022.
40 According to the Sunday Times Rich List, their wealth fell in 2020, and after that the Rich List excluded them!
41 Danny Dorling, ‘Britain is a segregated society – the isolation of the richest’, Public Sector Focus, May/June 2018, pp. 16–17; Theresa May, ‘Integrated communities: strategy green paper’, DHCLG, March 2018.
42 Ajay Singh Chaudhary, ‘We’re not in this together: there is no universal politics of climate change’, Baffler, no. 51, April 2020.
43 Jack Monroe, ‘The curse of the poverty hangover, ten years on’, Cooking on a Bootstrap Blog, 31 July 2022.
44 Leo Schulz, ‘Housing as a human right’, letter to the editor, Times Literary Supplement, 12 August 2022.
45 Danny Dorling, ‘Twelve facts you may have missed as the UK missed its first Brexit deadline’, Public Sector Focus, March/April 2019, pp. 12–14. See Figure 7 of this ONS release, click here
46 See Figure 19b in ONS, Detailed assessment of changes to sector and financial accounts, 7 September 2020 (note, this change was realised by the ONS when they included better new estimates of the value of pensions).
47 Danny Dorling, Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
48 ‘UK workers’ pension funds now own just 6% of UK listed shares’, tuc.org.uk, 6 January 2022.
49 Ibid.
50 ‘Immediate freeze on rent increases plus eviction ban’, Scottish Association of Landlords, 6 September 2022.
51 Part I and Schedule 17 of the Housing Act 1988; see also Danny Dorling, ‘Lessons from more equitable European countries: rent regulation’, Public Sector Focus, March/April 2017, p. 54.
5. Waste
1 Sean Illing, ‘Bullshit jobs: why they exist and why you might have one. And why this professor thinks we need a revolution’, Vox, 9 November 2019.
2 ONS, ‘Regional gross value added (balanced) by industry: UK and all ITL regions’, 30 May 2022. To compare years use Table 1c: current price estimates and share of total economy within each year.
3 ONS, ‘Changes to national accounts: imputed rental’, 23 March 2016.
4 Usually attributed to Napoleon but first mentioned in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. See Sita Balani, ‘Britain: a history of shopkeeping, empire and racial tensions’, Media Diversified, 7 October 2013.
5 Some 6 per cent more (excluding the motor trade). See ONS, ‘JOBS03: Employee jobs by industry’, 14 June 2022.
6 If you want to know what is in each industry see ONS, UK SIC 2007, 24 January 2022.
7 Kevin Peachy, ‘Funeral costs drop for first time in 18 years’, BBC News, 17 January 2022.
8 The cut is undoubtedly huge, but hard to quantify. For just one ‘player’, the Financial Times explains: ‘Tracing the finances at Four Seasons is all but impossible; the company’s sprawling structure consists of 200 companies arranged in 12 layers in at least five jurisdictions, including several offshore territories.’ Gill Plimmer, ‘Private equity and Britain’s care home crisis’, Financial Times, 8 February 2020.
9 Lucy White, ‘Loss- making care home firm HC- One pays £1.8m dividend to its private equity owners’, Daily Mail, 11 July 2022.
10 Automation does not in itself reduce the amount of useful work people can do, but when it comes to automated factories being moved to other countries, which can better look after and service the robots, the UK does have a significant problem. See ‘BMW to move electric Mini production from Oxford to China’, ITV News, 17 October 2022. In other economic activities, such as car washing, what was once automated has become increasingly now done by hand by very cheap labour, on otherwise disused urban land.
11 This comparison relies on Table 1b from the ONS 2022 source referred to in note 2 above, Regional gross value added (balanced) by industry (chained volume measures in 2019 money value, pounds million).
12 Peggy Hollinger and Sarah Neville, ‘Drug wars: how AstraZeneca overtook GSK in UK pharma’, Financial Times, 7 May 2020.
13 The figures are 0.783 million in December 2019, 3.1 million by 2039 and 15.7 million by 2059. Although entirely fanciful and impossible, by March 2022 there were 0.896 million people in these jobs – so the figures were still rising quickly.
14 Minouche Shafik, Clive Cowdery, Adam Tooze, Dani Rodrik, Carolyn Fairbairn, Frances O’Grady and Nicholas Stern, ‘Stagnation nation: navigating a route to a fairer and more prosperous Britain’, The Economy 2030 Enquiry, Resolution Foundation, 2022, p. 8.
15 British workers putting in longest hours in the EU, TUC analysis finds, tuc.org.uk, 17 April 2019.
16 Mo Stewart, ‘The public health crisis created by UK social policy reforms’, Justice, Power and Resistance, 28 July 2022.
17 ‘Peter Dowd MP calls for four-day working week without pay cut’, BBC News, 18 October 2022.
18 The nominal GVA worked in both Oxford and Blackpool was £28.7 per hour in 2018, the last year for which hourly rates were published by local authority districts as I write (in late 2022). These were the rates used to identify areas for ‘levelling up’ from: ONS, ‘Subregional productivity in the UK’, 28 February 2022.
19 ONS, ‘Regional gross value added (balanced) per head and income components’, 20 May 2022.
20 Marcus Johns and Ryan Swift, ‘Levelling up was business as usual, but that has to change’, Institute for Public Policy Research North, press release, 26 July 2022.
21 Danny Dorling, ‘Brexit – the Ides of March’, Public Sector Focus, January/ February 2019, pp. 14–16.
22 Martin McKee and Lucinda Hiam, ‘Britain’s not working’, BMJ, 29 July 2022.
23 Figure 17 in Molly Broome and Jack Leslie, ‘Arears fears: the distribution of UK household wealth and the impact on families’, Resolution Foundation, 20 July 2022.
24 Pip Murrison, ‘Boris Johnson says he “can’t live” on £157,000 a year – PM’s salary woes exposed’, Express, 12 January 2022.
25 See ‘How much does the poverty premium cost your constituency?’, 2022, fair bydesign.com.
26 Boris Johnston, resignation speech, 7 July 2022, youtube.com (recording and transcript differ slightly, see note 27 for transcript).
27 Boris Johnson, ‘Full text: Boris Johnson’s resignation speech’, Spectator, 7 July 2022.
28 Paul Fitzpatrick, ‘Situationism and rock’, furious.com, October 2000.
29 Danny Dorling, ‘Please sir, can I have more?’, Public Sector Focus, November/ December 2020, pp. 14–16.
30 Danny Dorling, ‘Income inequality in the UK: comparisons with five large Western European countries and the USA’, Applied Geography, vol. 61, 2015, pp. 24–34.
31 Danny Dorling, The Equality Effect: Improving Life for Everyone, Oxford: New Internationalist, 2017.
32 See Figure A.2.2., p. 74 in Robert Manduca et al., ‘Trends in absolute income mobility in North America and Europe’, IZA Discussion Paper 13456, July 2020.
33 ONS, ‘UK standard industrial classification of economic activities 2007 (SIC 2007)’, 2009.
6. Exploitation
1 William Makepeace Thackeray, The Book of Snobs: By One of Themselves, London: Punch, 1848.
2 Enter ‘snobbery’ as a search term into the Google Books Ngram Viewer.
3 ONS, ‘OBS03 Employee jobs by industry’, Table 5 (UK female), 13 September 2022.
4 To see when we began pulling apart, see Figure 3 in Danny Dorling, Public sector spending and living standards in the long run, Public Sector Focus, November/December 2021, pp. 12–14.
5 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-being , London: Allen Lane, 2018.
6 Jenny Colgan, ‘Book clubs are nothing to do with reading. They are just get- togethers for sad middle- class women’, Guardian, 3 May 2002.
7 Enter ‘reverse/inverted snobbery’ as a search term in the Google Books Ngram Viewer.
8 Entirely free again from 2008 when the SNP scrapped what was called ‘the graduate endowment’. See Sturgeon’s claim that SNP scrapped tuition fees is mostly true, theferret.scot, 6 August 2017.
9 Jim Knight, ‘England is bottom of the league when it comes to deep learning. And top for drill and practice. It’s no coincidence’, Times Educational Supplement, 8 March 2016.
10 Martin Armstrong, ‘The world’s highest and lowest tuition fees’, Statista, 17 September 2022.
11 Edel Blake, ‘New research reveals the cost of international education around the world in 2021’, International Schools Database, 6 December 2021.
12 PISA 2018 ranking summary – available from many sources, but it is most simply laid out in Wikipedia.
13 They may be higher now; type ‘Edinburgh overseas student fees’ into Google to find out.
14 In medicine, dentistry, science, engineering, technology and subjects with a studio, laboratory or fieldwork element (including maths and modern languages). University of Manchester website, as of November 2022.
15 Manchester Metropolitan University, ‘Tuition fees for international students, as of November 2022’.
16 ‘Eight reasons why Manchester is a great place to be a student’, British Council, Study UK, n.d.
17 Jessica Shepherd, ‘Academies to become a majority among state secondary schools’, Guardian, 5 April 2012.
18 Liz Lightfoot, ‘Nepotism, fraud, waste and cheating . . . welcome to England’s school system. A Nottingham professor has collated 3,800 examples of bad practice she says go to the heart of government. Now she has written a book’, Guardian, 8 September 2020.
19 ‘Open academies, free schools, studio schools, UTCs and academy projects in development’, Department for Education, open data, last updated 21 October 2022.
20 ‘Key UK education statistics’, British Educational Suppliers Association, 2022.
21 James Callaghan, ‘A rational debate based on the facts’, Ruskin College speech, 18 October 1976.
22 Eversheds Sutherland, ‘Articles of Association of Ruskin College: A Private Company Limited by Guarantee’, Ruskin College website, March 2022.
23 Richard Adams, ‘Oxford Brookes doing worse than University of Oxford on state school admissions’, Guardian, 13 February 2020.
24 University of Oxford, ‘Undergraduate admission statistics current’, ox.ac.uk.
25 Christine Farquharson, Sandra McNally and Imran Tahir, ‘Education inequalities’, chapter in the IFS Deaton review of inequality, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 16 August 2022.
26 Charlotte Lynch, ‘ “She’s lying through her teeth”: Leeds residents blast Truss over tough upbringing claims’, LBC, 29 July 2022.
27 ‘41% of young adults hold a tertiary degree’, Eurostat, 24 May 2022.
28 OECD, ‘Population with tertiary education (indicator)’, data.oecd.org, November 2022.
29 Ashley Cowburn, ‘Liz Truss cabinet has highest proportion of privately educated ministers since John Major’, Mirror, 7 September 2022.
30 Luke Sibieta, ‘School spending in England: trends over time and future outlook’, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2 September 2021.
31 Jim Dickinson, ‘Yes, international students are displacing home students’, WonkHE, 19 August 2022.
32 Sian Griffiths, ‘Universities push for “vital” tuition fee rise: UK students must pay closer to £24,000 a year or lose their places to foreigners, argue bosses’, Sunday Times, 21 August 2022.
33 Amar Mehta, ‘Exam regulator to review why some students are still waiting for their BTEC results. Exam board Pearson apologised for the delays, which has meant that students have been unable to confirm university places’, Sky News, 22 August 2022.
34 Scott Beasley, ‘And here’s that chart – showing the change in real terms per pupil funding for state and private schools’, Sky News on Twitter, source: Institute for Fiscal Studies, 27 March 2022.
35 Luke Sibieta, ‘The growing gap between state school and private school spending’, Observation, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 8 October 2021.
36 Patricia Sanchez, ‘Getting a university degree might make people more socially liberal and economically conservative’, PsyPost, 26 June 2022.
37 Ralph Scott, ‘Does university make you more liberal? Estimating the within- individual effects of higher education on political values’, Electoral Studies, vol. 77, 26 April 2022.
38 Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez- Toledano, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin left versus merchant right: changing political cleavages in 21 western democracies, 1948–2020’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 137, no. 1, 2022, pp. 1–48.
39 ‘Invariably the reason why the person has the antisocial behaviour injunction is because of their mental health and if they come [to prison] for short periods of time, we don’t have them long enough to stabilise them [and] their antisocial behaviour becomes worse. They can become very psychotic when they come into prison and we do not have the facilities to manage them. Putting people in prison for short periods of time for a civil offence is just crazy.’ Maeve McClenaghan, ‘Sent to jail for feeding the pigeons: the broken system of antisocial behaviour laws’, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 21 August 2022.
40 There were 600 playgroups in 1966; thousands more started in the years that followed, but private nurseries later increased greatly in number in their place. See the Wikipedia entry for ‘Pre-school Learning Alliance’.
41 Paying a weekly fee to attend a state grammar school for example (in my grandparents’ time), keeping the school leaving age lower than it need be (in my parents’ time), or endorsing corporal punishment in schools (when I was at school). None of these policies were missed as soon as they were ended. In British states schools corporal punishment was ended on 22 July 1986, thanks to the European Court of Human Rights. In English and Welsh private schools, it was banned in 1998, but not until 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in the North of Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland, corporal punishment has prohibited since 1982.
42 Natasha Hinde, ‘ “Complete devastation”: this is the real-time impact of nursery closures’, Huffington Post, 19 August 2022.
43 Jack Fifield and Helen Pidd, ‘Manchester electronic ad boards each use electricity of three households’, Guardian, 9 January 2022.
7. Fear
1 Registrar General, ‘Birth- and death-rates for 1936 in England’, Nature, vol. 139, 1937, p. 189.
2 Lu Hiam and Danny Dorling, ‘The end of great expectations? The pandemic inquiry must account for stalling life expectancy before the pandemic’, editorial, BMJ, 6 May 2022.
3 No estimate has been made for Northern Ireland. See Patrick Butler, ‘Over 330,000 excess deaths in Great Britain linked to austerity, finds study’, Guardian, 5 October 2022.
4 See Deborah Harrington, ‘Aneurin Bevan’s 1952 essay on the NHS – Chapter 5 of “In Place of Fear” ’, Public Matters, 5 February 2019.
5 Richard Partington, ‘Life in the home counties brings 16 more years of good health’, Guardian, 15 September 2019.
6 Google Books Ngram Viewer of ‘illness’ and ‘disease’ 1500–2019.
7 Poor nutrition and health care matter, but polio also returns because of effluent in waterways. See Ian Sample, ‘National incident declared over polio virus findings in London sewage’, Guardian, 22 June 2022.
8 Sebastien Peytrignet, Jay Hughes, Ellen Coughlan, Josh Keith, Tim Gardner and Charles Tallack, ‘Waiting for NHS hospital care: the role of the independent sector’, Health Foundation, 22 July 2022.
9 Denis Campbell, ‘Far more NHS contracts going to private firms than ministers admit, figures show’, Guardian, 25 April 2015.
10 Denis Campbell, ‘Private firms handed £15bn in NHS contracts over past five years’, Guardian, 29 November 2019.
11 See the Wikipedia entry for Aneurin Bevan.
12 David Walsh, Gerry McCartney, Jon Minton, Jane Parkinson, Deborah Shipton and Bruce Whyte, ‘Deaths from “diseases of despair” in Britain: comparing suicide, alcohol-related and drug- related mortality for birth cohorts in Scotland, England and Wales, and selected cities’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, vol. 75, no. 12, 2021, pp. 1195–201.
13 Lucy Johnstone et al., ‘Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF)’, bps. org.uk, 2022.
14 Sanah Ahsan, ‘I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health’, Guardian, 6 September 2022.
15 Christopher Snowdon, ‘No, life expectancy is NOT falling’, Institute for Economic Affairs, 19 December 2019.
16 There are many studies in press and the figure continues to rise. An estimate in 2019 of 130,000 was given by the IPPR in terms of preventable deaths not being avoided since 2012. See Dean Hochlaf, Harry Quilter- Pinner and Tom Kibasi, ‘Ending the blame game: The case for a new approach to public health and prevention’, ippr.org, June 2019.
17 ONS, ‘National population projections: 2016- based statistical bulletin’, 26 October 2017. Danny Dorling, ‘120,000 additional premature deaths in the UK 2010–2017’, Public Sector Focus, November/December 2017, pp. 14–15.
18 Statement on visit to the United Kingdom, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, ohchr.org, 16 November 2018.
19 CIPFA, Adult Social Care Performance Tracker, Institute for Government, 2019.
20 Danny Dorling, ‘Public inquiry into rising mortality in England announced’, Public Sector Focus, July/August 2018, pp. 14–15.
21 Public Health England, A Review of Recent Trends in Mortality in England, London: Wellington House, 2018.
22 See the Wikipedia entry for ‘List of countries by past life expectancy’.
23 The figures through to 2015 are available from the same UN source as those for 1950–55.
24 The ranking is thirty-fourth if countries not included in the early data are also excluded.
25 John Burn- Murdoch, ‘The NHS is being squeezed in a vice: excess deaths not related to Covid are rising in a system under almost intolerable strain’, Financial Times, 22 August 2022.
26 [The UK’s 2021 life expectancy was the tiniest fraction above Germany’s because of men still doing poorly in eastern Germany. That will be the next milestone to be passed.](https://twitter.com/EditorJRSM/status/1636273644807548928
27 ONS, ‘UK drops in European child mortality rankings’, 13 October 2017.
28 WHO, ‘Neonatal mortality rate (0 to 27 days) per 1000 live births (SDG 3.2.2)’, who.int, 18 January 2022.
29 [WHO, ‘Under-five mortality rate (per 1000 live births) (SDG 3.2.1)’, who. int, 18 January 2022.](https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/under-five-mortality-rate-(probability-of-dying-by-age-5-per-1000-live-births)
30 Lucinda Hiam and Danny Dorling, ‘The end of great expectations?’, BMJ, 6 May 2022.
31 Sarah Knapton, ‘Excess deaths are on the rise – but not because of Covid’, Telegraph, 5 July 2022.
32 You can find this data in the World Health Organization Global Health Observatory, November 2022.
33 Toby Watt, Ann Raymond and Laurie Rachet- Jacquet, ‘Quantifying health inequalities in England’, Health Foundation, 15 August 2022. The quote was from the press release of this report, titled ‘Major study outlines wide health inequalities in England’ and released on the same day by the foundation.
34 Louise Marshall, David Finch and Jo Bibby, ‘Mortality and life expectancy trends in the UK: stalling progress’, Health Foundation, 14 November 2019.
35 Veena Raleigh, ‘What is happening to life expectancy in England?’, King’s Fund, 10 August 2022. The Internet Wayback Machine can be used to see the original if that version is updated.
36 Commission on the Future of Health and Social Care, ‘The UK private health market’, King’s Fund, 2 April 2014.
37 How the Health Foundation is funded, health.org.uk.38 The history of The King’s Fund, kingsfund.org.uk.
39 Mo Stewart, Cash Not Care: The Planned Demolition of the UK Welfare State, London: New Generation Publishing, 2016.
40 See the Wikipedia entry for ‘List of countries by past life expectancy’.
41 Mary Shaw and Danny Dorling, ‘Who cares in England and Wales? The Positive Care Law: cross- sectional study’, British Journal of General Practice, vol. 54, no. 409, 2004, pp. 899–903.
42 Ruth Green, ‘Harriet Agerholm and Libby Rogers, Full extent of NHS dentistry shortage revealed by far-reaching BBC research’, BBC News, 8 August 2022.
43 Lucy White, ‘Loss- making care home firm HC- One pays £1.8m dividend to its private equity owners’, Daily Mail, 11 July 2022.
44 Josh Layton, ‘Care home operator calling for state aid put on spot over boss’s purported £800k salary’, Coventry Telegraph, 22 May 2020.
45 Brian Bell and John Van Reenen, ‘Extreme wage inequality: pay at the very top’, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE, occasional paper 34, February 2013.
46 OECD, ‘Health spending: total, government, compulsory, voluntary, out- of- pocket, % of GDP, 1970–2021’, data.oecd.org.
47 Hannah Brown, ‘Tony Blair’s legacy for the UK’s National Health Service’, Lancet, 19 May 2007.
48 Kalyeena Makortoff and Jasper Jolly, ‘How the UK government lost £4.9bn to Covid loan fraud’, Guardian, 29 January 2022.
49 Clare Dyer, ‘Covid- 19: Government’s use of VIP lane for awarding PPE contracts was unlawful, says judge’, BMJ, 13 January 2022.
50 All these figures were derived from the OECD health spending data referenced in note 46 above. Choose out-of- pocket expenses, data as a percentage of GDP, and data back to 1970 to download the table to find that data.
51 Which would include many Guardian readers. See Andrew Gregory, ‘Millions of UK patients forced to go private amid record NHS waiting lists: 10% of adults turned to private sector or independent healthcare in past year’, Guardian, 11 September 2022.
52 John Burn-Murdoch, ‘Chronic illness makes UK workforce the sickest in developed world. Every country saw economic inactivity spike during Covid but only in Britain is a rise in worklessness continuing’, Financial Times, 21 July 2022.
53 Adrian O’Dowd, ‘Fifth of coalition MPs have links to private healthcare firms’, BMJ, 19 November 2014.
54 Danny Dorling, ‘Why are the old dying before their time? How austerity has affected mortality rates’, New Statesman, 7 February 2014.
55 Danny Dorling, ‘How quickly might we forget the lessons of Covid-19 ?’, Public Sector Focus, March/April 2020, pp. 14–16.
56 Danny Dorling, ‘So what do we know now about Covid- 19 in the UK?’, Public Sector Focus, May/June 2020, pp. 12–15.
57 What would the alternative have been? Would people have welcomed strangers – discharged, unrelated, elderly, frail and confused patients – into their homes in 2020 in the same way and number that some took younger and much more able refugees from Ukraine into spare rooms in 2022?
58 Maggie Baska, ‘Third of employees asked to work while furloughed, survey finds’, People Management, 18 June 2020.
59 Danny Dorling, ‘COVID-19: The rise in destitution and inequality in the UK’, Public Sector Focus, July/August 2020, pp. 14–17.
60 Danny Dorling, ‘Who should be vaccinated before others?’, Public Sector Focus, January/February 2021, pp. 12–15.
61 Danny Dorling, ‘The ever ending never ending pandemic’, Public Sector Focus, January/February 2022, pp. 12–14.
62 Saima May Sidik, ‘Heart disease after COVID; what the data say’, Nature, 2 August 2022.
63 All these figures are from the United Nations World Population Prospect dataset released in July 2022.
64 Kat Lay, ‘Antidepressant use in England rises by a fifth’, The Times, 8 July 2022.
65 Jonathan Cribb, Tom Waters, Thomas Wernham and Xiaowei Xu, ‘Living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK: 2022’, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 14 July 2022.
66 Deborah Dwork, War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England 1898–1918, New York: Tavistock Publications, 1987.
67 DWP, ‘Households below average income: an analysis of the income distribution FYE 1995 to FYE 2020’, 25 March 2021, section 11: long-term trends.
68 A couple of other small Eastern European countries are also worth watching: OECD, ‘Income inequality’, online statistics, data.oecd.org.
69 See Table 4 and supplementary material in Thomas Crossley, Paul Fisher and Hamish Low, ‘The heterogeneous and regressive consequences of COVID-19: evidence from high quality panel data’, Journal of Public Economics, vol. 193, 2021. And also Danny Dorling, ‘Who is being hurt the most?’, Public Sector Focus, November/December 2022, pp. 12–15.
70 David Finch and Adam Tinson, ‘The continuing impact of COVID-1 9 on health and inequalities’, Health Foundation, 24 August 2022.
72 ‘Timeline: Covid contracts and accusations of “chumocracy” ’, BBC News, 15 March 2021.
73 Pippa Medcalf, ‘Helping homeless people in hospital’, Royal College of Physicians, rcplondon.ac.uk, 26 October 2020.
74 Haider Warraich, Pankaj Kumar, Khurram Nasir, Karen Joynt Maddox and Rishi Wadhera, ‘Political environment and mortality rates in the United States 2001–19’, BMJ, 7 June 2022.
75 Theo Rashid, James Bennett, Christopher Paciorek et al., ‘Life expectancy and risk of death in 6791 communities in England from 2002 to 2019’, Lancet Public Health, vol. 6, no. 11, 2021, pp. 805–16.
8. A Failing State
1 Vere Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself, London: Watts, 1946.
2 Mark Honigsbaum, ‘Revisiting the 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics’, Lancet, vol. 395, 2020, pp. 1824–26.
3 See ‘country data’ at fragilestatesindex.org.
4 See ‘indicators c2’ at fragilestatesindex.org.
5 ‘Bulgaria gov’t falls after losing confidence vote. Bulgaria now faces the fourth national election since April 2021 amid disagreements on budget spending and the EU’, Al Jazeera News, 22 June 2022.
6 Ibid.
7 Reporters without Borders, Press Freedom Index, rsf.org. and
8 Reporters without Borders, ‘2022 World Press Freedom Index: a new era of polarisation’, rsf.org.
9 Ibid.
10 [Jessica Shepherd, ‘Michael Gove: public school domination “morally indefensible” ’, Guardian, 10 May 2012.](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/may/10/michael-gove-public-school-domination
11 Chloe Chaplain, ‘Boris Johnson pictured running with Sun editor Tony Gallagher’, Evening Standard, 2 October 2017.
12 Owen Gibson, ‘Most leading journalists went to private schools, says study’, Guardian, 15 June 2006.
13 Jonathan Haidt, ‘Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid’, Atlantic, 11 April 2022.
14 Ezra Klein, ‘Why a middle-class lifestyle remains out of reach for so many’, New York Times, 17 July 2022.
15 See the Wikipedia entry for ‘Michael Gove Journalistic career’.
16 Danny Dorling, ‘The changing political shape of the UK: May 2019’, Public Sector Focus, May/June 2019, pp. 14–17.
17 Sutton Trust, ‘Elitist Britain 2019: the educational backgrounds of Britain’s leading people’, published jointly with the Social Mobility Commission, 2019.
18 Michael Savage, ‘Just one in 100 Tory MPs came from a working-class job, new study shows’, Guardian, 24 July 2022.
19 Will Black, ‘Michael Gove’s brave new world’, Huffington Post, 23 January 2014.
20 Craig Meighan, ‘Giles Coren slammed for “sickening” comment after death of journalist Dawn Foster’, National, 21 July 2021.
21 Martin Williams, A quarter of Tory MPs are private landlords, Open Democracy, 22 July 2021. It is also thanks to our MPs that today ‘the UK is the world’s biggest regulated online gambling market, with British players having lost more than £14 billion on online casino games, sports betting, and other forms of gambling over four of the past five years.’ Gavin Finch, ‘How the UK got hooked on online gambling’, Bloomberg News, 1 December 2022.
22 And of the donors who own key addresses. See Tom Bawden, ‘The address where Eurosceptics and climate change sceptics rub shoulders’, Independent, 10 February 2016.
23 Deputy PM Nick Clegg suggested ways businessman could split donation, Channel 4 News, 21 March 2015.
24 ‘Unprecedented leak exposes inner workings of UK Labour Party’, Al Jazeera Investigative Unit, 23 September 2022.
25 Martin Forde, The Forde Report, paragraphs C1.8 and C1.32, fordeinquiry.org, 2022.
26 See the Wikipedia entry for ‘55 Tufton Street’. It is also closely associated with the Institute of Economic Affairs, located very nearby at 2 Lord North Street.
27 [55 Tufton Street, desmog.com](https://www.desmog.com/55-tufton-street/ See also the entry for Tufton Street at wikiwand.com.](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/55_Tufton_Street)
28 There are some that do tend towards the right, and Poland has had an Adam Smith Centre since 1997.
29 For examples of how and why far- right think- tanks in the US work so well to direct others’ thinking, including influencing politicians in the UK, see the far- right Heritage Foundation: heritage.org/solutions.
30 Nancy Kwak, A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
31 Adam Peggs, ‘What is housing policy for? And why we need a radical approach’, Labour List, 21 September 2022.
32 Jane Mayer, Dark Money: How a Secretive Group of Billionaires Is Trying to Buy Political Control in the US, London: Scribe UK, 2016.
33 Jamie Grierson, ‘Priti Patel appoints ex-Taxpayers’ Alliance head as new aide’, Guardian, 12 August 2021.
34 Hamish Morrison, ‘Nadhim Zahawi appoints TaxPayers’ Alliance member as new special adviser’, National, 16 August 2022.
35 Guy Shrubsole, ‘Matthew Sinclair, former head of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, has been appointed Truss’ chief economic advisor’, Twitter, 6 September 2022.
36 BBC, ‘Tom Scholar: former top civil servants hit out at Treasury boss sacking’, BBC News, 11 September 2022.
37 Basit Mahmood, ‘The think tanks closely linked to Liz Truss who cheered the disastrous mini- budget’, Left Foot Forward, 30 September 2022.
38 Kristian Niemietz, ‘Politically active left- wingers are the equivalent of the tribal football fan’, 1828.org.uk, blog (managed by IEA Forum), 31 August 2022.
39 Aris Roussinos, ‘Britain needs Macmillan, not Thatcher: none of the Tory candidates inspires hope for the future’, UnHerd, 13 July 2022.
40 Danny Dorling, ‘A tale of three elections’, Public Sector Focus, September/ October 2022, pp. 12–15.
41 Nick Schifrin and Phoebe Natanson, ‘Ferrari crackdown: Italy declaring war on tax cheats’, ABC News, 22 May 2012.
42 Mo Stewart, ‘Influences and consequences, Centre for Welfare Reform’, citizen- network.org, November 2019.
43 Social Mobility Commission, State of the Nation, 2022, Chapter 2, Figure 2.5 in data tables.
44 Figure A.2.2., on page 74 of Robert Manduca et al., ‘Trends in absolute income mobility in North America and Europe’, IZA Discussion Paper 13456, July 2020.
45 Danny Dorling, ‘Things fall apart: Brexit, immigration, crime, health and wages’, Public Sector Focus, November/December 2018, pp. 20–1.
46 Here’s where Polish people are buying houses in the UK, Kafkadesk, 12 June 2020.
47 ONS, Population estimates for UK, England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland: mid- year estimates 2016, 22 June 2017.
48 Bobby Duffy, ‘Perceptions and reality: ten things we should know about attitudes to immigration in the UK’, LSE Politics and Policy blog, 26 November 2014.
49 ONS, ‘Changing trends in mortality: an international comparison’, 2000 to 2016, 7 August 2018.
9. Conclusion
1 Simon Jenkins, ‘The United Kingdom is broken. It’s time for a new British federation’, Guardian, 5 July 2022.
2 Basit Mahmood, ‘Telegraph issues jaw-dropping correction for printing falsehood about National Trust’, Left Foot Forward, 20 October 2022.
3 Susie Boniface, ‘Sorry Rishi Sunak, but it’s time to vilify the UK and its fundamental values: The way those in charge are doing things is just flat wrong . . . We need change’, Mirror, 15 August 2022. And Jeremy Hunt, The Autumn Statement 2022 speech, His Majesty’s Treasury, 17 November 2022.
4 Jim Knight, ‘England is bottom of the league when it comes to deep learning. And top for drill and practice. It’s no coincidence’, Times Educational Supplement, 8 March 2016.
5 [Noah Robinson, ‘UK prison population third highest in Europe and suicide rate twice the average’, The Justice Gap, 13 April 2021.](https://www.thejusticegap.com/uk-prison-population-third-highest-in-europe-and-suicide-rate-twice-the-average/ There are many rankings of imprisonment rates, and they tend to be very similar to each other; see the Wikipedia entry for ‘List of countries by incarceration rate’.
6 Georgina Sturge and Richard Tunnicliffe, UK prison population statistics, House of Commons Library, 29 October 2021.
7 ‘Joe Biden is determined that China should not displace America’, Economist, 17 July 2021.
8 Ipsos MORI and Agnes Nairn, ‘Children’s well- being in UK, Sweden and Spain: the role of inequality and materialism’, ipsos.com, June 2011.
9 Bobby Duffy, ‘The public is shockingly wrong in its perception of Brexit – and there’s a simple reason why’, Independent, 28 October 2018.
10 Not least his brother- in- law, R. H. Tawney, who in turn was influenced by many others at a time when, among a large majority of the rest of the elite, it was widely presumed that there was no good alternative to the status quo.
11 Conservatives do not like to admit that good ideas can come from others. Here is one Tory take on this which suggests that the NHS was entirely Willink’s idea: Andrew Grimson, ‘Profile: Henry Willink, the Conservative who proposed a National Health Service before Bevan created one’, Conservative Home, 5 January 2018.
12 Pensioners’ Incomes Series: financial year 2019 to 2020, Department for Work and Pensions, 25 March 2021.
13 Danny Dorling, ‘Austerity led to twice as many excess UK deaths as previously thought – here’s what that means for future cuts’, Conversation, 6 October 2022.
14 Josh Ryan- Collins, Richard Werner, Tony Greenham and Giovanni Bernardo, ‘Strategic quantitative easing’, The New Economics Foundation, July 2013.
15 Economic Affairs Committee, ‘Quantitative easing: a dangerous addiction?’, House of Lords, 1st Report of Session 2021–22, 16 July 2012.
16 Danny Dorling, ‘House prices: should we welcome a crash?’, UK in a Changing Europe, 24 July 2012.
17 Danny Dorling, ‘The “mini-budget” will make the UK the most unequal country in Europe’, BMJ, 26 September 2022.
18 Robert Skidelsky, ‘Where has all the money gone?’, Project Syndicate, 15 September 2021.
19 Kaye Wiggins, Harriet Agnew and Daniel Thomas, ‘Private equity and the raid on corporate Britain’, Financial Times, 11 July 2012.
20 Oxford’s new free school temporarily excluded 11 per cent of its pupils in the most recent year, or a quarter if multiple exclusions are counted, more than any other school in the county. It had a particular ethos of discipline and cannot be much influenced by the community around it because it is a free school. Sophie Perry, ‘Revealed: Which Oxfordshire school excludes pupils most often’, Oxford Mail, 14 September 2022.
21 Danny Dorling, A New Social Atlas of Britain, London: John Wiley and Sons, 1995, Chapter 5: Health.
22 John Burn- Murdoch, ‘How US life expectancy fell off a cliff ’, Financial Times, 26 August 2022.
23 The overall falls were slight, but did not happen in any other affluent country in the world. In the US, life expectancy fell from 79.02 years in 2014 to 78.99 years in 2018, and in the UK from 81.16 to 81.13 years. UN global data, July 2022, accessed from population.un.org in August 2022.
24 Stuart Wilks-Heeg, in a tweet on 22 August 2022.
25 Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, World Inequality Report 2022, wir2022.wid.world, pages 191 and 227. By other measures the take of the UK 1 per cent is nearer 16 per cent.
26 Tim Gore, ‘Confronting carbon inequality’, Oxfam International, 21 September 2020.
27 In one version of the story there are three mountains: education, healthcare and housing, but that is a very different telling of the story from the translation used here. For that version see Jonathan Cheng, ‘To achieve “common prosperity”, Xi Jinping seeks to scale China’s “three big mountains” ’, Wall Street Journal, 2 February 2022.
28 Branko Milanovic´ ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics for the young person’, Brave New Europe, 15 August 2022.
29 John Burn-Murdoch, ‘The Tories have become unmoored from the British people’, Financial Times, 30 September 2022.
30 Danny Dorling, ‘Let them eat growth?’, tribunemps.org, 29 September 2022.
31 Chris Mason, ‘Anguish at conference that should be Truss’s victory lap’, BBC News, 3 October 2022.
32 Dharshini David, ‘U- turn will only counter some mini-budget criticism’, BBC News, 3 October 2022.
33 Stuart Masson, ‘Endless growth in car finance threatens household budgets’, Car Expert, 12 October 2022.
34 Anna Fazackerley, ‘Exclusive: 90% of UK schools will run out of money next year, heads warn’, Guardian, 22 October 2022.
35 Hannah Devlin, ‘Maternal mortality rises by nearly 20% in UK, report finds’, Guardian, 10 November 2022.
36 See Figure S1: Home truths: every indicator of mental distress is higher for renters than for homeowners, in Tom Clark and Andrew Wenham, Anxiety Nation? Economic Insecurity and Mental Distress in 2020s Britain, York: Joseph Roundtree Foundation, November 2022.
37 D. Clark, Voter turnout in general elections and in the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom from 1918 to 2019, Statista, 22 June 2022. or other sources such as Wikipedia
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