{"id":4863,"date":"2015-09-07T07:30:28","date_gmt":"2015-09-07T07:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/?p=4863"},"modified":"2022-09-22T21:42:17","modified_gmt":"2022-09-22T21:42:17","slug":"britains-inequality-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/?p=4863","title":{"rendered":"Britain\u2019s Inequality Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Danny Dorling speaking at the Edinburgh Book festival<\/em><\/p>\n

On Tuesday, A.L. Kennedy described her ideal audience. It would be, she said, like the one she recently read to at a Doctor Who convention, all long scarves and innocence and so much so like benign visitors from another planet that she worried how they\u2019d get home.<\/p>\n

Inside the tent for Danny Dorling\u2019s event yesterday, I found my own version. They were all a bit like me, with enough grey hairs to pass for wisdom but not yet calamitously ruined. The sort who came of age in the more equal Britain of the Seventies, when both social mobility and mullets were at their height. The kind who listen to the news these days with a mounting sense of incredulity. What do you mean, we\u2019d all have shouted at the radio last week, even the poorest teenagers in England aren\u2019t to get any grants to go to university? What do you mean, 1,000 libraries have shut in Britain in seven years? Who asked us?<\/p>\n

In Dorling, us angry oldies have a spokesman of eminent reasonableness to explain where it all went wrong. His thesis is all there in his new book\u2019s title \u2013 Inequality and the 1%. I should warn you that I\u2019m biased, because it makes perfect sense to me.<\/p>\n

In the 1970s, he said, the top one per cent took a third less of the national income than their successors do today. Back then, their number included head teachers and doctors and they were spread all over the country. No more. These days, said \u00adDorling, you wouldn\u2019t even get make the grade if you had a salary of \u00a3160,000, and even those earning more could find themselves struggling to live comfortably in London (where, of course, they nearly all live) and paying their private school fees. The French upper middles, despite paying much \u00adhigher taxes, end up with much more disposable income than our lot.<\/p>\n

One statistic Dorling unveiled sounded so improbable that his audience winced when they heard it. Drag salaries of the top 10 per cent back to what they were in the Seventies, and it would be enough to pay for jobs for a million of our young \u00adunemployed not just once but 15 times over. Ah, said chair Allan Little, but what about a rising tide lifting all boats? Really? countered Dorling. Then explain why in the whole of Japan there are fewer people earning more than \u00a31 million than in the Canary Wharf alone. Imagine how many cashiers\u2019 jobs a banker increasing his salary from, say, \u00a34m to \u00a36m would create. Incidentally, he added, the argument for heavy taxes on such preposterous levels of income wasn\u2019t to raise money for the Treasury, but by curbing such greed, to save the bank and the country from its consequences.
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