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Something is afoot. Recently, the economist Guy Standing invoked Thomas Paine’s old adage, that we are living in times that try men’s souls. Standing’s reference to Paine�� revolutionary statement of Christmas 1776 was offered as a way of potentially understanding just how important what is currently happening, worldwide, is. That statement of Paine’s was made as the United States of America was being formed. Guy Standing quotes those words today as the cohesion, and the power, of the USA appears to be failing rapidly. A United States once again dominated by men, but today it appears to be less and less dominant, less respected, more often ridiculed, and also increasingly feared.

Thomas Paine was one of America’s founding fathers. The men currently in charge over the water in the land he and others re-christened could, in future, be seen as those who most helped accelerate the demise of the USA as a superpower. The USA was a place that until so recently has held so much influence over the rest of the world and so greatly influenced public policies in states like Britain, especially in the last half century.

Standing makes great play of American tech-billionaire Peter Theil’s 2009 article ‘The education of a libertarian�� and the huge influence Theil has had over who is now at the top of American politics, including Theil’s advocacy for the current Vice President. Theil illustrates the kind of views held by many of the billionaires who stood behind Trump when he was elected. Standing uses the 2009 article to show that these people see democracy as being incompatible with freedom; believing that people who receive welfare payments and/or women (in general) are prone to more often vote for income and wealth redistribution and to have greater support for public services. The solution suggested is not to allow them, and perhaps others, or anyone, to vote in future. writing “…that ‘competition is for losers��, which is why he favoured monopolies. He was anti-free trade, advocated a dismantling of the federal bureaucracy, and for good measure, opposed multiculturalism in universities and all forms of ‘affirmative action��.�� []

Writing from Los Angeles, one journalist recently told me that in the UK she thought that: ‘Labour are completely failing to meet the moment. I almost spit out my lunch yesterday when I saw their plan for change nonsense. Charts/ statistics/ wonkish and total lack of passion or overarching vision. The Right will clean up unless they [Labour] drastically change course. Immigration is amplified by the erosion of quality of life and easily exploited as a threat to already dislocated and struggling people. �� something the Left is ignoring �� is the Trans issue. This has a slightly different texture in the US but as the Supreme Court case this week shows, the Right have also tapped into deep concern about the push for children being given puberty blockers etc�� and the (also irrational) defence of males in women’s and girls�� sport as a ‘Left gone mad��. It’s working. The Right know they have a strong case on this one. Farage as you know, mirrors Trump in that he is a media concoction. Without its help initially he’d be a side show. They cultivated a monster and the closed world of London media/political and think tank class remain detached from reality. Democrats here are making the same mistakes. Both parties need a bruiser and a gifted storyteller to stand a chance. If they haven’t got an inspiring narrative allied with policies that shift the dial they’re fucked. �� In the US taxing the super-rich is popular �� and at least Dems talked about that. Labour is afraid of their own shadow. Plus, if they don’t immediately ban all and any foreign contributions to elections, they are enablers, pure and simple. Sorry for the rant. The whole thing is terrifying.�� [2]

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Starmer meets Trump

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It is mostly women who are speaking out from within the ruling Labour party in the UK. from the Labour Party, explained in the autumn of 2024: ‘Since the change of government in July, the revelations of hypocrisy have been staggering and increasingly outrageous. I cannot put into words how angry I and my colleagues are at your total lack of understanding about how you have made us all appear. How dare you take our longed-for victory, the electorate’s sacred and precious trust, and throw it back in their individual faces and the faces of dedicated and hardworking Labour MPs?! The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale. I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party. Someone with far-above-average wealth choosing to keep the Conservatives�� two-child limit to benefit payments which entrenches children in poverty, while inexplicably accepting expensive personal gifts of designer suits and glasses costing more than most of those people can grasp �� this is entirely undeserving of holding the title of Labour Prime Minister. Forcing a vote to make many older people iller and colder while you and your favourite colleagues enjoy free family trips to events most people would have to save hard for �� why are you not showing even the slightest bit of embarrassment or remorse?�� []

When government minster Anneliese Dodds resigned in February 2025 : ‘These are unprecedented times, when strategic decisions for the sake of our country’s security cannot be ducked. �� You have maintained that you want to continue support for Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine; for vaccination; for climate; and for rules-based systems. Yet it will be impossible to maintain these priorities given the depth of the cut �� the reality is that this decision is already being portrayed as following in President Trump’s slipstream of cuts to USAID.�� []

In other words, when resigning, Dodds was asking why the Prime Minster of the UK was following the lead of the President of the USA so closely. This hits hard because although Trump may be popular among some in the USA few people in Britain can understand why. As was explained repeatedly in many recent : “So the fact that a significant minority �� perhaps a third �� of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy�� is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

�� Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

�� You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

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This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws �� he would make a Trump.�� []

Of course, there are a tiny number of people and organisations in Britain who do support want Trump’s administration are doing in the USA and dream of that being introduced in the UK. Take, for example the Adam Smith Institute which gives awards to young writers (almost always men) to pen articles, which the institute then publishes with titles such as ‘��. In which those in favour of the kind of deregulation going on in the USA explain their thinking: ‘The market desperately wants to provide houses people can live in at prices they can afford �� but in the eyes of local authorities these houses are too small, or too tall, or the ceilings are too low, or the windows not energy efficient enough. Sweeping deregulation is the only way to provide Britain with the slums it is crying out for.�� []

I normally include a graph or two in these articles so here are two �� simply , because some kind anonymous soul has done the hard work and done it well.[] The first shows all polls in the UK since the General Election last year. Together, the Conservatives and Reform polls combined are roughly twice those of Labour. The second graph shows something similar for Scotland; but that there, the SNP provides an alternative to this that is growing in strength, and Labour have plummeted more quickly in popularity from 35% to 18%.

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Recent UK opinion polls according to Wikipedia, July 2024 �� April 2025

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In 1935 Sinclair Lewis published the USA best-seller ‘�� warning Americans through the story of a presidential who ‘who promises poor, angry voters that he will make America proud and prosperous once more, but takes the country down a far darker path.’[] It is now happening there. It could happen here. It is unlikely to happen in Scotland. What happens in future to the public sectors depends on politics most of all.

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Recent opinion polls in Scotland according to Wikipedia, July 2024 �� February 2025

References
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2. Whose name I keep anonymous as these are not safe times to name everyone.
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For where this article was originally published and a PDF click .

Another Spring in the UK, another set of statistics are released on��. The British government does this just once a year. It could choose to do it more often if it cared more. It could choose to update the statistics as frequently as for GDP, or as often as inflation statistics are released; but our political leaders do not prioritise poverty and the extremely high levels of income inequality that underlie the remarkable extent of poverty which now pervades the countries of these islands.

The statistics released in March revealed that the 10 largest rises in child poverty in a decade had been in some of the already poorest political constituencies in the UK: Middlesbrough, Leeds (South), Liverpool (Riverside), Birmingham (Hodge Hill, Ladywood, Yardley and Erdington), Grimsby, Blackpool, and Bradford (South). In those areas an extra child in every six or seven was poor by 2024, compared to 2014.

Child poverty has fallen in only twelve of the 650 constituencies of the UK in the last ten years. This is as measured and released by government.

The areas just listed are all the north of England. This is not because poverty has risen most only in the North, but because the measure released by constituency was poverty as measured��. If those costs were included, London constituencies like Holborn and St Pancras, Hackney North and Stoke Newington, and Hackney South and Shoreditch would be included in those places that have seen child poverty rise by the highest amounts too. The costs of housing are an inevitable cost when it comes to children. You are not legally allowed to sleep with your children on the streets in the UK.

Child poverty has fallen in only twelve of the 650 constituencies of the UK in the last ten years. This is as measured and released by government. The falls are small in each of them, but extremely significant, especially, the fact that every single one of them is in Scotland. The only places where a lower proportion of children are officially poor than was the case in 2014:

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Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire

Stirling and Strathallan

Glenrothes and Mid Fife

Airdrie and Shotts

Dunfermline and Dollar

Hamilton and Clyde Valley

Midlothian

Mid Dunbartonshire

East Renfrewshire

Motherwell, Wishaw and Carluke

Rutherglen

Lothian East

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The case of Scotland

When UK countries and regions are compared, child poverty is now lowest in Scotland. This did not used to be the case. In the 1990s Scotland, and especially Glasgow, had some of the highest rates in the of the UK, and across all of Europe. The immediate reason for this turnaround and the most recent reasons for the fall only being in Scotland has been the introduction of the��

Why did the Scottish government decide that it wouldn’t tolerate rising child poverty anymore, contrary to the Westminster Government? (The administrations in Wales and Northern Ireland do not have sufficient political powers here to intervene enough.)

Why did the Scottish government decide that it wouldn’t tolerate rising child poverty anymore, contrary to the Westminster Government?

Scotland has seen great change by the devolution which Labour introduced in 1997. In many ways its people and press now behaves much more like the people and media in Nordic countries behave. Take, for example the headline of the local paper today ‘Fife Today�� (which claims to have been going �� in one form or another �� since 1871). On the 7th��of April 2025 that newspaper’s headline read “�� In short, people in Scotland are now much more likely to care about issues such as child poverty as compared to people in England.

That story in the Fife Today paper continued with this statement:��“…Figures from the Department for Work and Pensions show 11,038 children under 16 in Fife were living in relative poverty in the year to March �� down from 12,118 the year before. �� Across the UK, 2.7 million (22 per cent) children were living in relative poverty, including 145,804 (16 per cent) children in Scotland.��

So, in Fife, high child poverty figures are still presented as heartbreaking even when falling by over one thousand children in a year. In contrast, the BBC, when writing about����said: ��Separately, the Scottish government has missed its legal targets for reducing child poverty for 2023-24.�� The focus of the main story was Scotland missing its targets, and only later on in the analysis section is, there an admission that the Scottish numbers: “��.��

, when the latest figures were released, explained the situation simply: ��The UK Government could lift 700,000 children out of poverty overnight by matching Scotland’s fiscal commitment to driving poverty down.�� And the����also pressed the point home: ��According to the CPAG, child poverty fell in Scotland, with the three-year average poverty rate falling in Scotland from 24 per cent to 23 per cent �� with the latest one-year data showing a fall from 26 per cent to 22��per cent.��Meanwhile in England it has risen from 30 per cent to 31 per cent, from 23 per cent to 24 per cent in Northern Ireland, and from 29 per cent to 31 per cent in Wales.��

For the English more left leaning middle classes,����updated the story it releases each year, the one about how things were worse again: ��The figures, released on Thursday, show an extra 100,000 children were living below the breadline in the year to April 2024 �� the final full year of child poverty statistics for the last Conservative government. It is the third year running that child poverty has increased.��

The idea that we are making short term sacrifices, during which the poor suffer, in order to generate economic growth no longer seems like a viable strategy.

��The Government is running out of excuses

So, what is to be done, or might be done? One possible silver lining to what is happening across the Atlantic with the Trump administration’s attempts to ignite a global trade war is that it blows all of the Chancellor’s excuses for supposed careful balancing of some fictious set of economic rules out of the water. The idea that we are making short term sacrifices, during which the poor suffer, in order to generate economic growth no longer seems like a viable strategy.

Without a doubt, the Government will blame any further cuts to welfare to a continuously shifting global order, instigated by the Trump administration.�� We have heard a lot about the importance of safety and national security during these times. His Majesty’s executives like to say: ��.��

But providing food and shelter from cold for the citizens who are children is also a big part of keeping them safe. Of course, ideally you keep all citizens safe and secure. But in a crisis when your resources are limited, it is the children you secure first.

Within the UK, Scotland has shown what can be done and needs to be done. It is almost impossible to imagine now that the UK government will not, grudgingly, begin to change direction.

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For a PDF of this article and the original source click .

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References

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[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

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Cuts to disability benefits will worsen health and the economy

The chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, will set out the UK government’s spending plans in her spring statement on 26 March.1 The consultative green paper, Pathways to Work,2 has already outlined plans to cut several billion from the welfare budget, with the aim of saving £5bn by 2029-30.3 The plans include stricter criteria for personal independence payments (PIP) for people with disabilities; halving incapacity benefit payments under Universal Credit for new claimants; and restriction of incapacity benefit top-ups to those aged 23 years and older.

Ministers have argued there is a “moral case�� for these cuts, and that “people that can work [should be] able to work.��3 However, the chancellor’s approach is unlikely to achieve this goal for two key reasons. First, high rates of economic inactivity in the UK reflect its almost unique failure among industrialised countries to recover population health after the pandemic,4,5,6 which came on top of over a decade of declining health linked to austerity,7 as well as long term structural weaknesses of precarious employment in a low pay economy.8 Second, health outcomes and economic policy are inseparably intertwined—even if the government chooses to focus solely on the economy, it cannot expect growth without a healthy population.5,6

Evidence from austerity
The experience of the past 14 years of austerity is a warning. From 1945 to 2012, life expectancy in the UK rose steadily. But after 2012 it flatlined, and for those in the most disadvantaged areas, it declined,9 caused by deep cuts to social security and local government spending.7,10,11 The list of consequences is shameful, including increased infant mortality, deterioration of mental health, particularly in young adults,12 and record numbers of children being taken into care in England.13,14

Policies justified on the grounds of austerity—including real term reductions in the value of benefits, stricter eligibility requirements, and harsher sanctions—have harmed health and pushed millions of people, especially children, further into poverty.15,16,17 The cost of living has risen sharply in recent years,18,19 leaving prices far higher than they were just five years ago. The combined result is that, since 2010, more people in Britain are experiencing destitution and many more people in full-time work live in poverty.20

Since 2012 the UK has seen the largest rise in child poverty among countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to Unicef.21 Child poverty adversely affects child mental health, creating a cascade of mental health challenges into young adulthood,22 which in turn creates difficulties transitioning into the labour market, and higher social security spending in the long term.23

A key proposal in the green paper is to tighten access to PIP—a benefit covering the extra costs of disability or long term health conditions—by raising the eligibility threshold. The Fraser of Allander Institute, an independent economic research centre, estimates that saving £1bn a year could mean about 250 000 fewer people receiving PIP.24 Existing evidence suggests this is unlikely to increase employment rates.25,26 Previous governments have sought to restrict eligibility to, and levels of, these benefits. Most notably, just over one million existing recipients had their eligibility re-assessed between 2010 and 2013, with benefits removed if the assessor thought they were fit for work. This led to an increase in 290 000 people with mental health problems, increased antidepressant prescribing, and an estimated 600 suicides.27,28 It did not increase employment, but rather shifted people, particularly those with mental health problems, onto unemployment benefits, many of whom later moved back onto disability benefits.29

The idea that introducing sanctions or restricting the value of, or eligibility for, social security is an effective, harm reducing or “moral�� means of increasing “economic activity�� is not borne out by evidence.17,26 When people become too sick to work, or when people with disabilities lose the support they need to enable them to live and work independently, there are costs to the state as well as to society, notably in terms of health and social care. Instead, enhancing social security and public services to improve population health, and creating high quality, better paid, and accessible jobs, is better evidenced as the key means to support people into work, and to reduce the costs of social security for those who are experiencing in-work poverty.6 Policies and interventions to improve health are more likely to achieve the economic gains the government is pursuing, and further cuts are unlikely to achieve either the “moral case,�� or the reductions in public spending, that the chancellor is seeking.

Solving this austerity fuelled health crisis will take political will and commitment to recreate a society with high quality public services (to provide both the services the population needs and fulfilling work) and rebuild a social security system that lifts people securely out of poverty. If the government is serious about supporting people with disabilities and long term health conditions to work, it needs to collaborate with people with relevant lived experience (for example, disabled people’s user led organisations), employers, and researchers to develop and implement effective, evidence based policies and interventions.25

Acknowledgments
David Taylor-Robinson, Clare Bambra, Danny Dorling, Benjamin Barr, and Martin McKee also contributed to this editorial.

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For where this post was originally published and a PDF of it click .

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The Chancellor delivers the spring statement, 26 March 2025

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������References

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References

��1 HM Treasury. Reeves R. Chancellor commissions Spring Forecast on 26 March 2025. 2024. .

��2 Department for Work and Pensions. Pathways to Work: reforming benefits and support to Get Britain Working green paper. 2025. .

��3 Islam F. Chancellor set to cut welfare spending by billions. BBC News. 5 Mar 2025. .

��4 McKee M, Hiam L. Britain’s not working. BMJ2022;378:o1883. doi: pmid:35905984FREE Full TextGoogle Scholar

��5 Bambra C, Munford L, Brown H, et al. Health for wealth: building a healthier northern powerhouse for UK productivity.Norther Health Science Alliance, 2018. Scholar

��6 Bambra C, McNamara C, Munford L, Wickham S. To get Britain working we need to get Britain healthy. BMJ2025;388:r76. doi: pmid:39824618FREE Full TextGoogle Scholar

��7 Walsh D, McCartney G. Social murder? Austerity and life expectancy in the UK.Policy Press, 2025.Google Scholar

��8 Hiam L, Marmot M. Is Britain sicker than a decade ago? The number of people being signed off sick from work has tripled in the past decade. But will the government do anything about it? Prospect 17 Jan 2024. .

��9 de Haro Moro MT, Schofield L, Munoz-Arroyo R, McCartney G, Walsh D. A new era of inequality: profound changes to mortality in England, Scotland, and 10 major British cities. Eur J Public Health2025:ckaf008. doi: pmid:39965773CrossRefPubMedGoogle Scholar

��10 Alexiou A, Fahy K, Mason K, et al. Local government funding and life expectancy in England: a longitudinal ecological study. Lancet Public Health2021;6:e641-7. doi: pmid:34265265CrossRefPubMedGoogle Scholar

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��12 Vriend M, Rocks C, Finch D. Mental health trends among working-age people.Health Foundation, 2025, Scholar

��13 Pickett K, Taylor-Robinson D, Bennett D, Davies H, Mason K, Parkinson S. Child of the North. Building a fairer future after COVID-19.Norther Health Science Alliance, 2021, Scholar

��14 Bennett DL, Schlüter DK, Melis G, et al. Child poverty and children entering care in England, 2015-20: a longitudinal ecological study at the local area level. Lancet Public Health2022;7:e496-503. doi: pmid:35660211CrossRefPubMedGoogle Scholar

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��17 Taulbut M. Improving lives? Monitoring the impacts on health and health inequalities of post-2010 Welfare Reform and economic change in Scotland. 2024.

��18 Broadbent P, Thomson R, Kopasker D, et al. The public health implications of the cost-of-living crisis: outlining mechanisms and modelling consequences. Lancet Reg Health Eur2023;27:100585. doi:. pmid:37035237CrossRefPubMedGoogle Scholar

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��20 Edmiston D. Plumbing the depths: the changing (socio-demographic) profile of UK poverty. J Soc Policy2022;51:385-411. doi: Scholar

��21 Unicef. Child poverty in the midst of wealth. Innocenti Report Card 18. 2023 .

��22 Latimer E, Ray-Chaudhuri S, Waters T. The role of changing health in rising health-related benefit claims.Institute of Fiscal Studies, 2025. doi: Scholar

��23 Kreshpaj B, Elsenburg LK, Andersen SH, De Vries TR, Thielen K, Rod NH. Association between childhood adversity and use of the health, social, and justice systems in Denmark (DANLIFE): a nationwide cohort study. Lancet Public Health2025;10:e29-35. doi: pmid:39681123CrossRefPubMedGoogle Scholar

��24 Sousa J, McFadyen C, Congreve E. Welfare Green Paper: what we know and what we don’t know. Fraser of Allander Institute. 2025. .

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Why did crime rise in Britain in the 1980s? Was it rising economic hardship, rising greed? A bit of both and something else? Was it the adoption of the mantra that there is “no such thing as society, just people and their families��? In which case �� why not?

Emily Gray and Stephen Farrall have been asking these questions for some time, as they say themselves, for a much longer period than the key decade in which so much appeared to change. And they ask questions about the questions. Why was it that it that the response to crime rising was different because of the perception of why it was rising? And, in turn, did that feedback and further fuel the rise?

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The authors acknowledge that ‘some see Thatcherism as being of limited impact.�� (p.32). But in many social studies this era stands out as a sore thumb. It led to a new kind of politics in Britain emerging later, one epitomised by the Conservative Party becoming the most economically far right of all political parties in all the rich and medium income countries of the world (Figure 1)

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Figure 1 �� analysis of the Conservatives that came after Thatcher and Major

The Political position of the world’s political parties by economic policy in autumn 2023.

Source: John Burn-Murdoch (2022) The Tories have become unmoored from the British people, The Financial Times, 30 September.

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The Conservative party of Britain became unmoored form its social base, as the graphics which the Financial Times began to produce by the 2020s made clear (Figure 1). All this was seen as having been inspired by Thatcher. Every new Conservative leader played homage to her (as did Tony Blair and Keir Starmer). The politicians who came to power in 2010, and then ruled without the aid of the Liberals after 2015, were all Thatcher’s children �� teenagers when she was in power. And the shift that occurred at that time is very clear to see in the most important social indicator of all �� the gap between people in terms of how much freedom they each had and �� in effect �� how they are respected, which is best measured by what they are allowed to live off �� what inequalities are tolerated. That graph is shown as Figure 2 below �� which deals with economic inequality in disposal incomes before and after housing costs are paid. It is very simple in what it depicts �� and housing is something I want to focus on in what I have to say, because after the huge ramp up of inequalities in the 1980s the two lines in Figure 2 are further apart.

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Figure 2 �� the rise of income inequalities over time, and the rising importance of housing in that

Gini index of Inequality in income between all households before and after considering housing costs.

Graph drawn by the author. Data source: Institute for Fiscal Studies, Living Standards, Inequality and Poverty Spreadsheet:

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Before Thatcher came to power the cost of housing yourself was a similar proportion of annual income for rich and poor alike. Because of this the two lines in Figure 2 run almost along the same line prior to 1979. After then they begin to diverge. The cost of housing themselves became higher and higher for people who were poorer as rent regulation was abolished by Thatcher and council housing was sold off without replacement. The poor had to increasing turn to the tiny but growing private sector. By the early 1990s, economic inequalities after housing costs were much higher than before housing costs. Housing had not become cheaper for the best-off, other than those who owned outright; but it was much more expensive every month and year for the poorest; taking up a higher and high proportion of their income, and income which was relatively lower compared to the national average each year.

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Emily Gray and Stephen Farrall chart the changes in housing policy from the 1980 Housing Act through to various increases in means-testing and the reduction of rights, including destroying almost all British rent regulation, which coincided with an increase in the importance of being on means tested benefited in 1981 at age 23 being associated with an�� increased chance of ‘adulthood contact with the criminal just system�� (p. 77) as compared to an earlier birth cohort.

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Initially unemployment ‘was not a predictor of criminal justice engagement��, but it was in 1996 for those aged 26 (p.78). Poorer households used to be burgled less than richer one’s in the United States in the 1970s (we do not have the same data for the UK). However, by the 1980s, and especially in the late 1980s people in social rented accommodation were 1.7 times, initially, to 2.4 times, eventually more likely to be burgled at home as compared to those who owned their home or who had a mortgage. Making life harder in poorer areas increased the chance of burglaries in those areas.

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Increasing the cost of housing also increased the chances of homelessness, and rising homelessness was partly associated with some of the rise in crime (p.87). The feedback loops can look complex (p91), but they are also logical. Finding it hard to start a family, or otherwise settle down because you could not afford a home because Thatcher’s policy was to allow the market to increase the price of housing for those who were poorer meant that ‘…the delayed transition to adulthood resulted in an increasing number of young people moving into or being “held�� in aversive, crime-prone situations and lifestyles, such as “sofa surfing,�� working and claiming benefits, or working in the “cash�� economy …�� (p.91)

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That description carries on to describe a feedback loop that strengthens over time and into particular places and social groups in this eras. So, how does this end? It certainly is not over.

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Figure 3 �� the rise in child poverty in all counties assessed by UNICEF from 2012 to 2021.

Change in children poverty rates in all comparable countries in the most recent seven year period measured.

Source: UNICEF Innocenti �� Global Office of Research and Foresight, Innocenti Report Card 18: Child poverty in the midst of wealth, UNICEF Innocenti, Florence, December 2023

Figure 3 shows how unusual the UK remains. Among all the countries shown in that figure it has the highest rates of inequality bar, occasionally Bulgaria. That inequality level and the huge among of poverty associated with it is almost entirely due to the rising inequalities of the 1980s and the fact that they were never reversed, not even slightly in the 34 years after 1990. Yes there were some small changes of tact with the new government of 1997, and that of 2010, but those slight changes in direction were too small to show up in Figure 2 and the crime, housing, welfare and many other regimes that had become entranced by 1990 remain what is considered normal for the UK today.

This, however, does not mean that nothing changes. For a start detailed age-cohort-period analysis shows that that the group that did best out of Thatcherism, the ‘golden cohort�� born between 1925 and 1934 did worse of all in their very old age. Margaret Thatcher herself was a member of this cohort, born on 13 October 1925. Her age cohort saw larger improvements in their health and wellbeing than that which came both before and a faster improvement than that after, until around the time she died in 2013. In the years around her own death, and through to the start of the pandemic that began in Britain in early 2020, all of that advantage of that cohort was lost and they suffered .

At the very same time as Thatcher’s contempories began to die far more quickly that older people had died for some time, especially the affluent who used to live longer, their great grandchildren began to show signs of being stunted in height. This was a trend which began for those born around 2005 (*). It will be for future researchers to pull together and try to understand these new trends �� rising mortality among the very old not appearing to come to an end, a stalling of progress in health in the young �� possible the first for over a century, and the stunting of the grandchildren of Thatcher’s children and rising mortality rates for all children, but .

The most recent rise in child mortality that has been reported for England is not associated with the ending of the worse of the pandemic because that would not be expected to result in rises in the age group 1-4; the same age group that have been becoming stunted and smaller in height. Individual news stories tell of tragedy, such as of a two-year-old boy who starved to death in December 2023 or January 2024 next to . The same newspaper that boke that story tried, two days. later, to . But, of course, what social services are available and how much they are needed depended on a legacy that stretches right back to what happened in the 1980s.

What happens next could be a break in the change in trend established in the 1980s, or it could be something new, and worse. Cohort analysis is generally used to look backwards, but it might now make sense, with this much evidence collected in this new book, to now look forwards. ‘The Politics of Crime, Punishment and Justice�� is about much more than its title implies. It uses techniques developed first in studies of health to examine age-cohort-period effects using many large datasets, including synthetic cohorts. It is analytically sophisticated and draws also on the huge literature that has emerged since the 1980s to examine the enduring legacies of the far-right that took power in Britain then. I was a teenager in those years. My memories include the National Front, Britain’s fascist party, shrinking in size because �� if you wanted black people to be ‘sent home to Africa�� you knew that the Tories, after 1979, might do this. However, it was not until 2024, 45 years later that the Rwanda Act was passed in a form that might make it feasible to deport a tiny number of desperate asylum seekers. It was Margaret Thatcher who first talked of ‘swamping��. That is just one example of the enduring legacy of her party’s transformation under her leadership. A particular kind of racism was partly legitimized (although most people know this is a racist policy). The book also touches on truancy, education, deindustrialization and much more. In all these areas we are still seeing the legacy of the 1980s play out, but now in accelerated form. The UK has more children not at school and with location unknown than anywhere else on the continent of Europe. The British school system is an uncanny mess of academy chain corruption, private school social-segregation, and collapsing school roofs on a scale that again is not seen anywhere else in Europe. And, as I analysed in detail for the work I did for the 2023 book “��, there was as much if not more de-industrialisation in the period 1999-2019, as there was between 1979 and 1999.

One state in all of Europe had to have the worse political, economic, social, education, health, imprisonment, and housing record across all of the continent. It need not have been the same state that ranked lowest on all these counts �� but it was. The blame cannot be laid solely at Mrs Thatcher’s feet. The men who propelled her government to power are equally to blame, as were those who failed to unite the opposition at the time and those who did not fight back later but acquiesced to the mantra of there is no alternative. British history became a sad, even pitiful, story. This book held documents the decline because one day we will have to accept what so many got so wrong.

* ITV (2023) British children shorter than other five-year-olds in Europe, study finds, International Televisions News, 21 June, further information can be found here and detailed data is here: For a PDF of this review and link to the original publication, click .

There was once a time, long ago, when every year the population of the UK became more united as income inequalities fell and the public sector grew. The six decade period from the start of the BBC (in 1922), to the wobbles of the Callaghan government of the late 1970s, encapsulates that period. After then we heard more and more talk of ‘letting tall flowers grow taller��, and later of ‘talent��. That talk began in 1976, ironically, in Oxford’s ‘working class�� Ruskin College. It was accelerated by Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph in the 1980s, but it was not only politicians who were steering the ship of state starboard (rightwards). There were many others, often still with access to significant wealth, who thought things had gone too far in the wrong direction, that the UK had become the ‘sick man of Europe��, that we needed to get a grip. They believed that we needed fewer gritty dramas, fewer programmes on our TV screens about poverty, homelessness and inequality (even as homelessness, poverty and inequality rose) and more gentle programmes about Life on Earth, the Living Planet, footage of weird and wonderful animals and planets from faraway lands, and more historical epics of our own imagined costume drama past.

We needed cheering up by our state broadcaster, less doom and gloom, more Strictly Come Dancing and Bake Off. The latter was later poached by Channel 4, who also had a sweet tooth for the housing programmes that the new BBC so often created. We needed as many programmes as possible about aspiration, about doing up houses, buying houses, selling houses, especially once the share of those who could ever afford a mortgage began to fall during the 1990s. We eventually had a different housing programme for each social class from Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen’s ‘Changing Rooms��, for those only able to do up a room, through to Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsop’s ‘Location Location Location�� (then ‘Love it or list it��, and ‘Relocation Relocation��) to Kevin McCloud’s ‘Grand Designs��, and up to Jean Johansson’s ‘A Home/Place in the Sun��.

It became clear that the new mantra was saccharine for the many and highbrow for the few. To placate a minority, Adam Curtis could continue to produce multiple BBC series such as ‘Century of Self��, one of which over two decades ago, in 2002 smirked at how New Labour was created by focus group experts watching the conversation of ��.�� Oh so knowing, oh so divisive.

The BBC motto of ‘Inform, Educate, Entertain�� had been reinterpreted �� in the new era of equality of opportunity (not outcome), the ‘clever ones among us��, the ‘grown-ups in the room��, came to believe that everyone had to realise their potential to make Britain great again. But they increasingly believed that unlike them, most people lacked great potential, and so needed to be made to understand, to be informed, on what was realistic. People the economy worked like the budget of a housewife; that they needed to be educated to know that inequality is inevitable and we have to reward top talent appropriately, including top talent at the BBC.

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Imaginary Friends

It is not just the presenters of house-porn who you may feel you now know, so too with news journalists. The presenters of the Today Programme can easily become new imaginary friends. There is imaginary Justin, slick but clever, with an interesting back story and an odd obsession with rugby. A bit of a maverick, he graduated from the LSE. In contrast, imaginary ‘mate�� Amol (Downing, Cambridge) is a geezer, like Justin he steers the line, questioning but not too questioning. Imaginary dinner guest, Mishal (Murrey Edward, Cambridge) is calmer, talking in a quizzical way as if she senses that perhaps something is not quite right, but also believes that nothing much can or will be done (she recently retired from the role). Then there is the chap you can imagine standing next to on a football terrace, both of you trying to pretend this comes naturally, Nick (University College, Oxford) is like tigger, he still has that boundless energy which he first showed at the Oxford Union. Emma Barnett (University of Nottingham) was not exacted a ‘diversity hire�� given her exclusive private schooling. While cheery imagined chum Martha (St Anne’s, Oxford) is perhaps best placed to remember different times. Martha is not on the program that often. The times have changed. There are now sometimes two women on ‘Today��; Oxford and Cambridge are no longer balanced with two apiece; but the superciliousness remains.

It was possible to have a high quality universal service BBC in the 1950s to 1970s because we were a solidarity society then. Younger people working within the BBC then were less likely to be socially separated from society than they are now �� they had to be very technically able to cope with what was then new technology. No one thinks they are separated from society of course. And someone battling within the BBC will not see themselves as part of an establishment. However, there are now signs of a turn for the better beginning, including in the BBC. The ‘Gary Lineker weekend�� which illustrated the limits to censorship (at least for someone not officially on the payroll). Within the last couple of years we may have seen the most sustained fall in income inequalities to have occurred for many years. Wealth inequalities are as wealth fell when inflation rose (and because the poor have no wealth to lose). But the BBC reacts slowly.

Take another example of where we current sit. A BBC journalist, John Simpson, in March 2023 was embroiled in a on the issue of BBC impartiality. He ended up, in effect, telling his interlocuter to take a .

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A discussion on Twitter

The rest of the discussion on Twitter

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Today, a young successful reporter or producer at the BBC, say one in their early 40s who had purchased a home in Fulham a couple of years ago, could now find themselves in a tricky economic position with tens of (if not hundreds of) thousands of pounds of negative equity were we to enter recession. Their extended family may have already all chipped in earlier to pay the private school fees that ensured they could attend the right university. Their grandparents may have provided the deposit for the house purchase. But their BBC salary is falling in real terms. They may have to consider sending their children to a state school in London; and skiing could be off the agenda this coming winter. But all that is just not the same as seeing your contempories forced to fight in two world wars because of the foolhardy politics of your parents�� generation, and joining a corporation which then tried to embody the words ‘nation shall speak truth unto nation�� rather than repeatedly and often unthinkingly talking down the China and Russia, as the BBC so often does today.

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The young and the BBC

Things went wrong for the BBC because the countries of the UK fell apart socially, politically and economically, between the late 1970s and today. You cannot have a universal broadcaster that is trusted (and good) if you don’t live in a state that is actually trying to hold things together. Much the same can be said of the NHS and, like the BBC, it too is worth saving as a universal service but that can only be done if . The more shattered the (fictional UK-land) nation becomes, the more papering over the cracks has been required. More new myths are created, more talking up of our (British) creativity. The young, however, increasingly tend not to watch the BBC, getting their information and news from elsewhere. Increasing proportions of BBC fodder, as a result, is prepared for the old as they are the audience. But it also, by a roundabout route, the BBC still generates much of what the young will learn about the world.

Until British society becomes less segregated, it is very likely that people working in the higher paid jobs at the BBC will continue to believe that they are impartial. In practice, however, they have a narrow definition of impartiality that boils down to what a few people, who are doing very well for themselves, think is reasonable. In more equitable states, the media questions its own impartiality and role far more thoroughly, and hence more effectively. This is not just a problem for the BBC, it also affects all our newspapers, and TV news channels.

We think we know where we are with the Murdoch and Rothermere family’s press empires, but the BBC and Guardian are not that different. Papers like the Guardian and broadcasters like the BBC just as clearly reflect the sensibilities of the upper reaches of our very unequal society. We see this in the views that are discussed amongst those at the top. There is debate, but it is a debate between the few who have succeeded in an unfair race.

The Today Programme became a fascinating daily invite into the inner thinking of the Conservative party �� view it like that and its stance is not at all annoying. ‘Today�� is not alone in this, the majority of our Newspapers are the same and even our most independent and popular podcasts. When Tony Blair’s former Director of Communications and Strategy (Alastair Campbell) and former Conservative cabinet minister Rory Stewart debate on ‘The Rest is Politics��, ask yourself: who is this a debate between? When you hear Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss the student uprisings in France in 1968 on ‘The Rest is History��, ask why do they take the stances they do? Could it be more about them than about what they are discussing? Similarly with Ed Balls and George Osbourne who, from September 2023 onwards, began to chummy up with their economics podcast. So, is impartially really the space between these ?

A more balanced Today programme, balanced say to the Western European norm, would sound revolutionary to current UK ears. But it would be nice to have just one British newspaper or broadcaster that was as left wing as Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany had been in terms of her policies between 2005 and 2021. In Europe her politics are normal �� but in the UK they would be viewed as advocating far too high levels of state spending. Both Germany and France now enjoy economic inequalities almost as low as those seen in Nordic countries.

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Tomorrow’s World

Until Britain is again a society in which the wealth of your parents does not so strongly determine your future chances of working in the media, we will not have an impartial media. BBC training schemes may try to encourage a diversity of faces, and there is more of a diversity of sound now too (as ‘colourful�� regional accents are occasionally viewed as an asset). But for those not based around Salford, the London rents are simply too high without parental beneficence. It is not that the BBC is failing, it is just that it reflects our society (which is failing). However, the UK need not continue to fail so badly. All other European countries that are compared by our Social Mobility Commission have far greater social mobility than we do by the time people are age 40 �� so saying it is impossible for us to change is silly. It is very hard for us to remain this unequal �� that takes a lot of work, especially cultural work like that of the BBC. And, of course, although no country on earth has an unbiased media that is not still heavily skewed towards repeating the views of life’s winners, few rich countries are now as economically unequal as the UK.

There are many current positive signs that the polarization of British society, which took place between the 1970s and the 2020s, could be ending. However, if we do begin to change, it may well take a couple of generations for that change to be truly noticeable. Progress may move at the speed of one retired journalist, editor and producer, one at a time. Or our journalist, producers and commissioners, could become a little braver and realise that the times are a changing again.

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For a PDF of this article and where it was originally published click .

I am eight lots of seven years old (56). My generation grew up with Seven Up! �� a warning and hope about what we might become. Every seven years we got to see what had happened to people just a little older than us. Much of our lives, out heartbreaks and hopes, our falls and laugher, were foretold. My book, Seven Children was inspired by Michael Apted’s landmark documentary Seven Up! but is set more than sixty years later.

The original documentary film, and those that followed every seven years, focused on fourteen children born around 1957, the year when the Prime Minister told the UK it had ‘never had it so good��. In contrast, Seven Children looks at life in 2023��24, when many people have never had it so bad. The statistics used to create our seven children were published between when they were born, in 2018, and 2023, when they turned 5.

No one would blame a child for where they are in the pecking order of inequality; they are too young for anyone to see them as skivers. If a new series of Seven Up! were to be based on seven children like those in this book, the producers would certainly ensure that the children they chose were cute and camera-friendly, photogenic, and perhaps a little cheeky too. Most importantly, they would need to have parents who were not too fraught, too overprotective, too likely to pull the plug on the filming.

Apted’s Up series was intended to follow the lives of youngsters from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. But those who were chosen were not at all representative of British society, either then or now. That 1950s project sought out the extremes, not the averages, in its aim of giving the public ‘the whole picture�� of Britain’s socioeconomic diversity.

In Seven Up! Three boys came from the same private pre-prep school in London, alongside a girl with a similar posh background. If the documentaries had reflected the reality in the country as a whole, only one of the documentary’s fourteen children would have been privately educated. The other three girls in the series attended a state primary school in a poorer part of the capital. Two of the remaining seven boys lived in a charity home, and the others were hardly a random sample.

An evidence-based remake of the Up series would require the children to be representative of the country. An odd number of children would mean that one was the average child. (In Seven Children, it is David.) Seven is the minimum number of children that can also show the variation around the average, as revealed by the government-published statistics; this is because of how many children are in each of the UK’s household income brackets.

The government measures household income by splitting the population into fifths. Let’s call these five equally sized groups poor, modest, average, affluent and rich. (Those five labels are not that accurate, but they often describe a person better than that person might describe themselves. In a more equitable country, we might use the very same labels, but the poor would be less poor, and the rich less rich.)

So why not have five child profiles now, one for each of the five income brackets? The reason is because the country’s children are not evenly distributed across the five groups. If we divide the UK’s 14 million children into groups of 2 million, we get seven children—and, of these children, two would be in the bottom fifth for household income, another two in the next fifth, and then one each in the ‘top�� three fifths: 2+2+1+1+1=7. If we took only five children, one from each of the five income brackets, that would obscure this skewed weighting. It would not reflect the reality that the majority of British children come from poorer households.

Each one of the children in my book represents a seventh of all the children in the UK today. They are not at the extremes of their seven groups but are drawn—statistically—from the very middle of each. And the groups are sorted by what, above all else, most determines children’s life chances in Britain—their parents�� income. That was much less the case in the late 1950s. The UK was then becoming a melting pot.

It is demoralising to describe the deeply unequal UK our seven children have been born into, but to try to understand why their futures look so unequal on example can be done using housing, as everyone understands the necessity of housing and it is only the extremely rich who do not hold the majority of their wealth in housing.

In 2019 the government calculated from council tax data that there were at least 648,114 empty (unfurnished) homes in England—a 2.2 per cent increase on the previous year—of which at least 225,845 had been empty for over six months. Those empty properties are all someone’s assets.

Although the powers existed for them to do so, rarely did local authorities do anything to bring vacant dwellings back into use. Some 5.5 million people, or one in nine of all UK adults, owned at least one spare home, worth some £1 trillion in total. Very few of these owners were people with young children. They were almost all richer older people; and among them were the 1.9 million adults who were buy-to-let landlords. However, the Resolution Foundation report that these statistics appeared in also explained that, although only 37 per cent of adults owned any property by the age of 29 (down from half of all 29-year-olds just two decades earlier), 7 per cent of adults owned multiple properties by that age. Wealth inequalities had risen.

Our seven children’s futures are unwritten. Because they are taken from the middle, not the bottom, of each household income group, none of them are living in destitution. But in the future, one of these children could well become homeless. It happened to one of the boys in Michael Apted’s Seven Up! documentary series. According to the official statistics for England, in 2018—the year our seven children were born—at any one time there were 124,000 children living in temporary accommodation provided by a local authority. This number had almost doubled in a decade, and it might well be higher in future. To be precise, it had increased by 80 per cent since 2010, so by the time the children in my book are aged 7, in 2025, it may have risen to around 200,000 children at any one time who are housed in temporary accommodation. And to that figure you have to add the hidden homeless: ‘In 2016��17 there were 92,000 children living in sofa-surfing families. 56,880 or 68 per cent of the families in temporary accommodation are in London.�� By the end of June 2023, the total was 82,360 homeless children in London. Far more had been pushed out of the capital and were homeless elsewhere.

In the September 2023 official government snapshot survey, sixty-seven children and adults under age 25 who had left local authority care were found sleeping rough in the UK, including three in London. It seems clear that the survey data is wanting; for London, there is better rough-sleeping data from other sources. In 2022��23, outreach services in London found that some 589 people sleeping rough in London that year, or 8 per cent of all rough sleepers, had had experience of the care system.

The story above is an edited extract from the book seven children. It shows how statistics de-humanize but also reveal when thing are actually getting much worse, as they have bene doing for some decades. Why have we not been told that the situation is getting worse? Because those who get to tell the stories of our times invariably come now come from privilege. When inequalities widen, as they have relentless over the course of the last fifty years, opportunities narrow. We become worse at seeing ourselves. However, eventually, the reality becomes too stark to ignore.

‘�� was published by Hurst in September 2024:

For a link to where originally published and a PDF of the article click .

The original Seven Up children as adults

Ten book published in 2024 and one extra, so good, that it is in the list again!

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Clive and Myra Hamilton, (Wiley & Sons).
What if elite privilege was not just a by-product of wealth, but the organising principle for our society? This book is a detailed critique by two Australian scholars of the micropolitics that serve to sustain��social inequality. The Hamiltons, in their unsparing survey of the landscape of privilege from Rhodes scholarships to super-yachts,��and from philanthropy to elite private schools, point out that, even as we are told that the power of male and white privilege is on the wane, elite privilege remains stronger than ever.

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Thomas Piketty, translated by Willard Wood,�� (Scribe UK)
Just brilliant. This treasure trove contains what you most need to read of Piketty’s most important work, in a very well-packed nutshell, and with much new material despite being so brief. Succinct and clear, this impressive book offers a concise synthesis of Piketty’s insights on subjects ranging from education to inheritance, from taxes to the climate crisis, and most importantly touches on the much bigger question of whether natural inequality exists. Piketty is the world’s most accomplished economist and this is his clearest work.

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Sarah Wise, (OneWorld)

This is a masterpiece of historical research, uncovering the incarceration of the poor and powerless under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Sarah Wise’s exposure of the unbearably cruel ways we treated so many people a century ago, and more recently too, demands that we ask ourselves who among us is the most morally defective. It is all too easy to think that this inhumanity is safely behind us, but The Undesirables should lead us to reflect on policies that the large majority of our members of parliament support today, and which in future will be clearly seen as terrible and unjust.

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Francesca Froy, (Routledge)

A beautifully illustrated digital archaeology of what some call “the first American/Industrial city��, Manchester. Francesca Froy charts the evolution and integration, the complexity and morphology, the style and substance of a place made by people and the materials they consume, process and rely on. Relying on a wider range of sources than almost any other book of this kind, the result is an academic masterpiece. A little pricey, so ask your library to buy it, unless you only buy a very few books! ��Should you need more convincing, the configurations of Sheffield, Newcastle, Detroit and New Haven are also included.

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Jackie Kay, (Pan Macmillan)
A slim, luminous book to give, read, and treasure, with as much wisdom, humanity and beautiful turns of phrase on each page as many other books contain in their entirety. Glaswegian, activist, poet, academic and memoirist Jackie Kay should need no introduction, but this latest collection is a wonderful reminder of why her work is loved by so many. May Day’s poems of love and loss, grief, solidarity and hope offer many tributes to the lives in struggle of Kay’s late parents and to the many figures who inspired them, from Angela Davis to Paul Robeson, and vividly evoke the city of Glasgow itself.

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George Monbiot and��Peter Hutchison, ��(Penguin)

Are we all neoliberals now? If so, is there any alternative? This is an explosive and beautifully told account of the rise and rise of one of the greatest confidence tricks of our age. The truths in this courageous, definitive and damning book can free us from the lie that this is the only way the world can be. If you want to know why so many of the powerful tell us that it can only be one way and that there is no alternative to a system that benefits just a few so much, and how the lies behind this thinking were originally spun, then this book is the most efficient route into that truth; and is beautifully written.

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Peter Mertens, (LeftWord)

“People are eager to understand how the world works,�� says Mertens, who as leader of Belgium’s Workers�� Party (PVdA/PTB) helped spearhead its recent renewal as a significant political force representing the working class. The world is turning �� so what do today’s mutinies in the North and South have in common? With US hegemony on the wane, what will replace it? A clear, jargon-free and insightful look at recent watershed moments from the Iraq War to the war in Ukraine via mass social protests in India and Chile, Mutiny considers what the future holds, and how: “the left can give people hope and perspective again �� it must want to fight to win, and actually win��.��

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Preeti Dhillon, (Dialogue Books)
A valuable, readable and timely account of many of the important movements and campaigns for justice in the UK from the 1960s to early 1980s, from the Black Education Movement and the Mangrove Nine to the Grunwick strike, from the Battle of Brick Lane to the Bristol Bus Boycott and 1981 uprisings around the country, via the experiences of activists from Stella Dadzie and Winston Trew to Jayaben Desai and Norman Samuels. A journey of discovery into the ongoing legacies of empire and oppression, and the role played by the state, police, judiciary and media in racial oppression. In spotlighting lessons for today, it is an essential contribution that deserves a broad readership.������

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Rhona Michie, Andrew Feinstein and Paul Rogers, with Jeremy Corbyn, (Pluto Books)
This edited volume shines another light on what is uncontestably “the most destructive business in the world��. Its murderous impact is seen from the vantage point of activists, researchers and scholars in locations including Palestine and Yemen, East Africa and India, Latin America, and Hawai’i, via mass movements, worker uprisings, strategic litigation and youth campaigns. In the face of a deadly, rapacious and hugely profitable industry, bolstered by governments around the world, this collection details the scale of its depredations, showing that global resistance is diverse, determined and growing.

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Angus Hanton,��(Swift Press)
Vassal State is a shocking and meticulous description of how the fire sale of Britain was accelerated by Brexit, of how Britain was singled out, and why, today, a so much of all the assets held by US corporations in Europe are in the UK. Angus Hanton explains how Stephen Schwarzman’s private equity group, Blackstone, led the feasting predator pack; how every single recent British Prime Minster and Chancellor sold out their country and their own souls; and what must be done to avoid a historic bankruptcy of Britain and for the British to take back control from the Americans.

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,�� (John Murray)
Logical, readable, authoritative: philosopher Arianne Shahvisi offers up an everyday manual on how oppression came about, how it works, why it persists, and how to defeat it. This book was published in 2023, but it’s so good it richly deserves to be in a best of 2024��list. As the book’s blurb explains: “…imagine that instead of losing another hour of your life in a social media spat or knowing that the only way to make it through lunch was by biting your tongue, you could find a way to talk about injustice �� and, just possibly, change someone’s mind��. How not to fall into the trap of talking about the dead cats they throw on the table.������

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top 10 books of 2024 (plus one)

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On 11 November 2024, on Armistice Day, Cat Hobbs of the lobby Group “We Own It��, called for a truce. She explained that two groups of bondholders, two groups of rich people, were competing to ‘rescue�� the privately owned public utility: Thames Water.

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One set of rich folks, she explained briefly, was a group of bondholders charging 9.75% interest; the other was another almost equally rich group, but they were charging only 8.00% interest. Interest was the price they wanted to levy for ‘investing�� their money in bailing out the stricken private company.

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Cat asked why there was no third option on the table: public ownership. She asked why there was no option where a refinancing of the debt of Thames Water would take place at 4.75% interest �� at considerably less cost to both the UK taxpayers and Thames Water customers. She could have asked why there was no fourth option. One possible fourth option might involve reparations, where those who had in the past stripped this public company of its assets and its ability to supply reliable clean water, and its competency to dispose of sewage safely, were not to be pursued by our government for the damages they had caused to health and safety.

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Alternatively, Cat could have asked why there was no fifth option. This could have been a wider and more general redistribution of public assets, or assets that should be public and which are in most other European countries. In this case, rather than working through the issues of one privatised badly functioning utility at a time, the entire public domain would be dealt with together �� through legislation. However, Cat was being practical, and she only had the space of a tweet to fill; but outlining the fourth and fifth options would, if it had been done, put her preferred 4.75% proposal in the centre of an enlarged Overton window. Her proposal was nationalisation, financed by public borrowing, at 4.75%.

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Source:

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A month earlier in October 2024, the Common Sense Policy Group had published a response to Rachel Reeves�� first budget, titled ‘Spend to Save Britain: A Common Sense Approach to the 2024 Budget�� The Common Sense group explained that:

��The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has described the UK economy as being in its worst state since the aftermath of WWII. But the Government’s fiscal rules mean that it has shied away from a Beveridge-style public investment package that made Attlee’s administration from 1945 so successful. While the change to the definition of debt has freed up some space for borrowing for investment in infrastructure, an austerity agenda that has clearly failed over the last 15 years for current spending, on things like public health and education, is likely to persist.��

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The Common Sense Policy Group explained that investing in Britain, to rebuild public sector spending, would result in large returns through productivity multipliers (£2.74 for the economy for every £1 of public funding invested). They showed that this could be supported through taxation on passive wealth, taxation of excessive carbon production, greater taxation of luxury consumption (as occurs in China) and greater taxation of corporate profit

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The Policy Group suggested that Reeves should have considered having a target of reducing poverty and increasing income and wealth equality. That this target should be for a measurable reduction to occur for all of the UK. They suggested as well that there should be targets for falls in poverty and income and wealth inequality within and between all nations and regions. They suggested this because of how the UK has become the most economically unequal large country in Europe.

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Over time scale the Policy Group suggested that inequalities must be falling by the third year of the forecast with the intention that they continue to do so until they return to their UK 1960s lows, equalities which most European countries enjoy today. And that this could be achieved through infrastructure and current spending investment as well as fair and efficient taxation.

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The Common Sense Policy Group proposed that Rachel Reeves could and would have had better targets if she saw the world through a more interesting Overton window rather than the very small circular window she appeared to be looking through. As Floella Benjamin used to say on the children’s TV show, Play School, a relic from the distant past: “Which window shall we look through today?��. The arched window was clearly the most interesting.

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Source:

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To quote directly from the Common Sense report �� these were some of the alternatives to how we currently operate. These are the kinds of targets we could have:

Public Sector Net Worth must increase by the fifth year of the forecast.��Public Sector Net Debt must reduce sustainably and predictably by the tenth year of the forecast by insulating the nation from international price spikes and economic crises via:
1. large-scale, public-sector driven investment in secure, low-cost and plentiful renewable energy.
2. re-establishment of local manufacturing capabilities for products essential to national security, including commodities like steel, and medicines, vaccines and personal protective equipment crucial to defending against future pandemics.
3. Operate the newly renamed National Wealth Fund as a National Investment Bank with sufficient capital to make largescale investment in infrastructure and R&D projects that are essential to meeting the new economic rules.

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The group suggested institutional reform to drive economic success, growth and long-term debt reduction:

1. Recognise the de facto political control over the Bank of England and rescind its national independence. This recognises that fiscal and monetary policy are inextricably linked and that the Bank’s independence is so narrowly defined as to be meaningless. When crises hit, the Government should be able to use monetary levers directly and be subject to democratic oversight. There is nothing wrong with using monetary policy to achieve national economic success.

And a return to public investment for the public good:

2. Take our house back. Renting essential services and utilities from companies that obtained them through the public asset stripping of the 1980s and 90s cannot be allowed to continue. It is baffling to rent services we require forever.
3. Address the weaknesses in our economy by investing in infrastructure, including gaining control over utilities and public transport, to support productivity, growth, inter- and intra-regional inequality and a broad, sustainable and fairer tax base.
4. Deliver ‘current spending investment�� to produce exponential savings for the public purse downstream and productivity benefits that drive growth and bring debt down in the long term. Borrowing to fund public health interventions that cost £3,800 per year in good health to enable reactive services that cost £13,500 to move beyond crisis, recover and bring down costs is just common sense.

Tax reform to close the fairness gap, streamline the system and shift the burden from productive, socially beneficial work to passive wealth and environmentally harmful activity:

5. Roll regressive employee National Insurance Contributions into Income Tax, raise rates by 3 points and equalise rates for dividends with those for Income Tax to raise £58.1 billion per year. This is a hugely popular approach with the public.
6. Introduce a progressive annual Wealth Tax on household wealth above £2 million beginning at 2%, with an additional tax on large financial transactions out of the country to deal with capital flight, to raise £43 billion after allowance for avoidance. Wealth sitting in the UK that distorts the housing and other markets, is enjoyed elsewhere or not spent or taxed at all, is of no benefit to the nation.
7. Establish a carbon tax of around £55 to £60 per tonne in 2024 as well as a permanent excess tax on fossil fuel companies and a redirection of current subsidies to fossil fuel producers, to raise around £13 billion in current prices.
8. Introduce a tax on frequent flyers and on private jets departing from the UK, the latter set at £780 per passenger per flight, to raise a further £4.5 billion per year.
9. Reverse fuel duty freezes since 2010 (accompanied by investment in making public transport more affordable than driving) to raise almost £20 billion per year.
10. Replace the outdated and regressive Council Tax with a Proportional Property Tax (PPT) similar to that in Northern Ireland at a rate of 0.7% for primary residences (double for second homes and empty properties) in Scotland, 0.9% in Wales and 0.95% in England, while compensating any low-to-middle income households that lose out. This would raise approximately £9 billion per year.
11. Remove 40 of the largest unnecessary or badly targeted tax reliefs and allowances that enable the wealthy to avoid paying tax through avoidance schemes, which should raise just under £74 billion.

And among much else:

12. Remedy our polluted and failed water supply and waterways.
13. Reduce crime.
14. Fully fund and address the failings in the NHS and social care.
15. Build a strong and healthy foundation for all children and young people.
16. Address the funding crises in further and higher education.
17. Build high-quality, affordable public, social and private housing.
18. Deliver cheap, clean and effective transport.

Commentators explained ‘Perhaps the biggest problem for Labour lies in the fact there are no easy short-run solutions. National renewal takes time: the legacy of the last fourteen years will not be overcome in a single parliamentary term.�� But if you are not being daring, it may take longer than time itself �� you may see no overall progress. Furthermore: ‘the proposals for taxing wealth in this budget are way too modest.�� But at least we are more often and more loudly now asking the right questions.

References:

[1] Cat Hobbs on Thames Water
[2] Common Sense Budget Response
[3] Jo Michell (2024) Beyond Growth: Can Labour rise to the politics of growth after fourteen years of stagnation? Phenomenal World, 21 November, .
[4] Özlem Onaran (2024) An alternative needs-based budget: analyses the strengths and weaknesses of Rachel Reeves�� first Budget, Labour Hub, 6 November,

For a PDF of this article and a link to the original publication click .

Source:

Spatial Inequalities and Wellbeing is a carefully brought together collection of nine chapters written by over twenty separate authors from the regional science/studies tradition. The book appears at an apposite time. Why are so many people in some places less happy than others, especially within the United States of America? What was it, in short, that led to the geographic patterns of voting that resulted in the election of President Trump for a second term in office? This book, published long before that election and containing material from work done in earlier years, does not answer that question directly, but it does provide some interesting clues. Furthermore, if such questions interest you, and you like three-way interactions in your regression analysis, then this is especially the book for you.

Lenzi and Fedeli’s book is international in scope, although with examples taken mainly from Europe. Some of the assumptions made at the beginning of the text could be questioned. For example, those assumptions for why economic inequalities have increased, where it is suggested that “enhanced globalization and super-fast technological change, both achieving peak levels in the last couple of decades, represent the best candidate explanations�� (p. 2). However, if this were the case, then why were economic inequalities falling in most countries during the white heat of technology years of the 1960s? And why are economic inequalities today so high in some rich countries but so low in others? A century ago, income inequalities were high in all rich countries. But, such nit-picking aside, the book is carefully introduced, and curated and nit-picking opportunities are rare. So, what does it suggest?

Chapter 1 suggests lower productivity growth is associated with “higher stages of development economies�� (p. 24). In some way this book is traditional in its outlook. A century ago, when the US and the UK were last the most unequal and, in many ways, even more unhappy states than they are today, academics were complaining that

politicians 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.

�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ��[For source: see Footnote 1]

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Chapter 2 very usefully discusses the ways in which apparently negative attributions are used to shape discourses over the potential for inward migration to improve the lives of those already living there: “A feeling of being left behind can contribute to the undermining of democratic structures and the strengthening of undemocratic forces�� (p. 38).

Chapter 3 speculates on why and whether people are happier in big cities or small towns. Again, it is worth thinking here of the US and the geography of the presidential election of 2024. However, the data used in this chapter is from the European Social Survey of people on a very different continent. Nevertheless, the parallels are fascinating. Control for poor health and what appeared to be a detrimental effect of not having many local social connections is explained away. Or, considering who has university degrees and the anomie disadvantage of the large city is outweighed by greater life satisfaction being achieved despite not knowing one’s neighbors as often. Although a formal test of a three-way interaction suggests that “residence in metropolitan centres increased the wellbeing gap between the tertiary educated and [the] much larger non-tertiary population, thereby lowering the average wellbeing of those in the metropolitan centres�� (p. 79).

Chapter 4 presents a careful study that shows just how much lack of security of tenure, or not having a safe home, makes people miserable in large Dutch cities. Given that this is the case in the Netherlands, with all the protection for privately renting tenants that there is there, just try to imagine how much greater the fear and harm to well-being private renting causes elsewhere.

Chapter 5 turns to all of Europe and finds that there is a goldilocks effect where urbanization reduces discontent but only until it reaches a certain threshold. To sum up the nuance of this book—through empirical models and well-argued treatise—it is explained that

[t]he narrative of a bucolic paradise, opposed to miserable urban idle, goes against both almost all theories of agglomeration and the empirical evidence of subjective wellbeing. Similarly, the celebration of the city and urban life as the unique path to happiness overlooks the costs of agglomeration, and their unequal impact on the wellbeing of different categories of people.

�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ��(p. 132)

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Chapter 6 continues the different strokes for different folks messaging. Looking at data for Italy, it confirms that there are regional differences in how people react to the situation of themselves and others around them, what they can ignore, and what they do not ignore, and that it is the most severe of inequalities that most need to be tackled: the severity of poverty matters most greatly and the reduction of the largest of disparities.

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Chapter 7 looks to Egypt and away from the riches of wealthy countries or even the middle-income ones. The authors talk of thinking of a city for children: a city that is accessible, sensitive, liveable. Thinking about children is a useful way to get people who do not want to think about poverty, unfairness, and inequality to consider such things, despite their instinct not to (see footnote 2).

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Chapter 8 considers politics, again in Europe; again, the parallels with the US are interesting; again there is a regression analysis; again the results are complex; again we are looking at happiness and behavior and the circumstances people find themselves in. For example, radical leftists are something of a universal, not particularly placed based, so not a cosmopolitan elite.

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Chapter 9 turns to France and an interview—very interesting and different from the rest of the book. Daniel Behar, Professeur Émérite of the Lab Urba in Paris explains how “The political priority appears to be in a way the need to respond to the feeling of abandonment and the need for recognition. Lost territories give way to forgotten territories�� (p. 222). It is a refreshing end to quite an empirical piece of work with a discussion of this kind, and the global parallels are uncanny.

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Do I have any criticisms? No, not really, this is a much better book than the vast majority of similar collections. It has been put together more carefully, and it has been edited and constrained in size well. I was tempted to say that it is not very multidisciplinary, but that would be wrong. At times the detail of the appendices of the regression models can seem a little over the top—but that detail is the truth of such studies and what matters most. This is an excellent book—it does what it says on the cover—and it does it well.

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Notes

1 R.H. Tawney (1920) , New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Ch I, para 5; see:

2. D. Dorling (2024) Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation, London: Verso,

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For a PDF of this article click .

A review of Spatial Inequalities and Wellbeing: A Multidisciplinary Approach, edited by Camilla Lenzi and Valeria Fedeli

In 2023, suicide rates in England & Wales reached their highest levels since 1999. Despite changes in legal definitions and registration methods impacting trends, this increase reflects growing individual suffering.

International comparisons suggest that while the UK saw a 12% rise in suicide rates between 1999 and 2020, many other European countries experienced significant declines; with rates falling overall in the EU-27, and especially for people aged 50-54 and a littel older and younger than that.

We used publicly available data from the Office for National Statistics on suicide rates from 1981 to 2023, by sex and geographical region in England & Wales. We conducted descriptive and statistical analyses with the Joinpoint regression programme to identify significant discontinuities in trends in suicide rates.

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INTRODUCTION

The August 2024 Statistical Bulletin from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) opened with a stark warning. In 2023, suicide rates in England and Wales reached “the highest rate seen since 1999��. For females, whose rates have consistently been much lower than males, one had , to 1994, for a higher rate.

Inevitably, caution is needed. These data relate to year of registration, not of death, and recorded suicides increased in 2018 following a change in the legal definition. Yet, notwithstanding these caveats, these numbers testify to widespread suffering among those who die from suicide and those left behind.

International comparisons are problematic due to extensive missing data and, especially, differences in reporting, some of which are cultural. So, comparisons of levels should be avoided, but comparing trends over time between countries . Data reported to WHO show a 12% increase between 1999 and 2020 in the United Kingdom (UK) but falls in almost all EU member states for which complete data are available. For example, Spain, Denmark, and Finland, respectively, saw falls of .

The exceptions are Greece and The Netherlands, with 12% and 4% increases respectively. The thus indicates that the UK has been, with Greece, an outlier over the past two decades (see Supplementary material, and note Greece suffer great austerity after 2008).

The first graph below shows the longer term trend for England and Wales by age as compared to EU27 more recently.

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Data used to draw the figure above.

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The second graph below zooms in on the trend for England and Wales by age taht can be compared to EU27 more recently.

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Comparison over time of Suicide rates: Source: Suicides in England and Wales from the Office for National Statistics, and from Eurostat, for the period 2012 to 2023.

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The above graph shows Comparison over time of Suicide rates and is based on two sources: Suicides in England and Wales from the Office for National Statistics, and the equivalent data from from Eurostat, but the later is only for the period 2012 to 2023. Note the caveats in the full paper. However the definaions do not change greatly over time and so the trends over time are likely to be robust

Also note: Eurostat. Suicide death rate by age group. Accessed 7th October, 2024.

And: Office for National Statistics. Suicides in England and Wales: 2023 Registrations. Accessed 3rd September, 2024.

The full paper gives more details of trends by region and for Wales within England and Wales and highlights how it has been in the last decade, or so, that the trend in England and Wales worsened as compared to that in the EU 27 (the 27 countries of the EU once the UK had left). The EU-27 at no point includes the UK.

For A PDF of the paper this post is based on and the supplementary material click .