ŷ������

Finland has been the happiest country on earth for , according to the . This survey relies on the question:

Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?

, followed by Denmark and Iceland. Just why Finns are happier than others comes down to a including lower income inequality (most importantly, the difference between the highest paid and the lowest paid), high social support, freedom to make decisions, and low levels of corruption.

The graph below shows all 44 counties for which there is both happiness data and income inequality data, each as a coloured dot. The vertical scale shows average happiness, the horizontal scale income inequality.

��

Average levels of happiness and inequality by country

Average levels of happiness (vertical scale) and income inequality (horizontal scale).
World Happiness Survey and OECD income inequality statistics

��

The measure of income inequality used here is the of income inequality, as . It is the highest rate recorded in each county in any year after 2010 up to the most recent year for which there is data. The graph shows the close relationship between these two measures. In general, , money matters more and people are less happy.

Finland also has other attributes that may help people feel happier. It has a publicly funded healthcare system and only a very small private health sector. This is far more effective and efficient than some used in other countries. Public transport is , and Helsinki airport is ranked as the .

There is a that seems relevant here: Onnellisuus on se paikka puuttuvaisuuden ja yltäkylläisyyden välillä (Happiness is a place between too little and too much).

��

How Finland compares

Finland, Norway and Hungary report similar levels of income inequality, yet people in Finland are, on average, happier. Why is this?

According to the , the highest-paid tenth of people in Finland take home a third of all income (33%). That contrasts with the same group taking 36% in and 46% in . These differences may not appear great, but they have a huge effect on overall happiness because so much less is left for the rest in the more unequal countries �� and the rich . When a small number of people become much richer, this is an understandable fear.

In 2021, by a sociology professor that simply by having more reasonable expectations, people in Nordic countries appeared to be happier. However, that cannot explain from Norway on the happiness scale.

All kinds of explanations are possible, including as well as culture. There is now even the question of whether this global survey is beginning to introduce its own bias, as Finns now know why they are being asked the question (they moved even further ahead of in the most recent survey).

However, it is very likely that Finland having more , where you are likely to get a good education whichever you choose, as well as a fairer school policy than Norway (almost all Finns go to their nearest school) might actually matter too. So too, a better housing policy with a wide and , a health service with waiting times that are the envy of the world �� sometimes just being a matter of days (even during the ) �� and numerous other accolades.

Finland of economic and social success �� better than Norway does. And it has less money overall (and hardly any oil). You could excuse the Finns a little smugness ().

Why does Hungary do so badly despite the income gap between its people being hardly any wider than in Finland and Norway? One could argue that this is to do with its divided politics. In 2022, the European parliament suggested that “Hungary can no longer be considered ��.

Freedom matters to people greatly, as well as freedom from fear, and that could explain also why and have lower levels of happiness than their levels of economic inequality might predict.

In contrast, and may be a little happier than their levels of inequality would suggest. South Africa became a democracy in 1994 shortly after , and many people will remember the previous period. People in China are not as fearful as they are often .

��

Inequality is a factor

Most countries exhibit happiness levels () that are very predictable from their inequality levels. The UK is spot on in the middle of what you would expect for one of Europe’s most economically unequal countries.

The graph above also shows that (almost as unequal) Israel is a little happier than it ought to be �� although it is not clear that the sample taken there included all groups that currently live under that state. Also, that sample was taken in 2022, before the recent .

The other outlier shown in the graph is Costa Rica, where the president said in 2019:

Seventy years ago, Costa Rica did away with the army. This allows for many things. Eight per cent of our GDP is invested in education because we don’t have to spend on the army. So our strength is human talent, .

So what can the people of a country do if they want to be happier? The most important thing is to that will ensure the country becomes more equal by income. After that, ensuring your social services �� school, housing and healthcare �� are matters most. And finally, consider your degree of freedom, whether you are actually including everyone in your surveys, and how fearful your population is.

��

, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography,

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

And, for a PDF of this article click .

The gap between rich and poor is wider than it has been for a century. We think that change is impossible, but it may have already begun

Two weeks before Christmas 1936, plans for the coronation were re-written. The king had just abdicated. A low-key affair had been planned, without a procession through London the following day or a great . The country was in the depths of the greatest depression it had suffered .

In 1929, seven years before he cancelled his coronation, Edward, then Prince of Wales, had been to empathise over their poverty and the huge fall in wages earlier that decade. Wages , at which point the National Government cut the benefits of insured workers . Inequality was high. The richest 1 per cent of people took home almost a quarter of all income in the country.

By 1936, the Labour party was riven by division. The Tory government could not find a way out. The Liberals were sinking, never to seriously resurface again. Most of the Empire was still in British hands, but it was becoming clear that would not last. When Edward’s brother, George, stepped in to be crowned on 12th May 1937, the coronation of George VI and Elizabeth was criticised for as the 1911 coronation of George V and Mary, although the price was only 42 per cent more when taking inflation into account.

But during the misery of these years, something remarkable happened. Edward’s visit to the miners coincided with the last time that either income or wealth inequality began to fall in the United Kingdom. In the aftermath of the First World War, income and later wealth inequities continued tumbling down. They did so for 50 years, through to 1973. Could we, a century on, be about to see something similar?

The coronation of Charles III and Camilla takes place on 6th May 2023, 86 years after that of George VI and Elizabeth. There are uncanny echoes of the past. Real wages have not yet recovered to the levels they reached in 2008 and aren’t expected to do so for the foreseeable future. Fourteen years ago, in 2009, when he was Prince of Wales, Charles warned against capitalism and consumerism, saying that “poverty, stress, ill health and social tensions cannot be ended by economic growth alone��. That year his son, William, slept rough for a night in London to .

��

Edward, then Prince of Wales, visits miners in Country Durham in 1929 © Illustrated London News Ltd/ Mary Evans

��

In 1937, the best-off 0.1 per cent of people were receiving 66 times the national average income; the best-off 1 per cent, 17 times; and the best-off 10 per cent, four times. In the year before the pandemic hit—the last year for which we have reliable figures—the best-off 0.1 per cent were receiving 70 times the national average income each year; the best-off 1 per cent, 16 times; and the best-off 10 per cent of people, .

��

How many times more the best-off people were, in multiples of average incomes (log scale)

Source: Figure 0.1 from�� , London: Verso.

��

But, in contrast to today, by 1937 income inequalities were already falling, even if hardly anyone was aware that they were. By 2019, if you ignored the best-off 10 per cent of the population, you could just about claim that inequalities had fallen among the rest—as almost every Conservative chancellor has done in almost every Budget speech of the past decade. But the share of the top 10 per cent remained stubbornly high, and actually rose between 2010 and 2019. We were at “peak income inequality�� when the pandemic hit, and the crisis did little to dent it.

However, something began to change as we emerged from the worst of the pandemic years. We have started to see a rapid shift in the distribution of incomes—perhaps the first sign that we are at the beginning of a far faster move towards equality than we have experienced in any year since the 1930s.

The most dramatic change has been in Scotland, where the Scottish Child Payment—given to any family in receipt of benefits, on top of other support—was raised to £25 a week for every child aged 16 or under. When Charles and Camilla holiday in Balmoral this summer, they will do so in the only part of their kingdom where a poor family with three young children will be receiving an extra £3,900 in 2023 as compared to 2022 and so will be able to put food on the table. In the coldest months of the year, a poor family may also be able to afford to heat their home, as long as they are extremely frugal. Nicola Sturgeon left office only when arguably the most important part of her work was done.

Consider, too, what has recently happened in pay negotiations across the United Kingdom. Pay agreements used to be more simple. For example, in 2010 the Communication Workers Union (CWU) struck a deal with BT worth . Everyone got 3 per cent, no matter what they earned. Now both bosses and unions are talking about more for the lower paid, less for the higher paid. And BT doesn’t appear to be an outlier. Across almost every sector—including the more opaque private sector—we are seeing a strong trend towards more progressive deals, consisting of higher pay rises for lower-paid workers.

In contrast to the 2010 deal, in November 2022 the CWU with BT whereby the lowest-paid workers received an above-inflation 16 per cent pay rise, and the highest-paid a below-inflation 6 per cent rise. Almost all private sector pay rises have been less than the rise in the state pension and less than the rise, in line with inflation, of benefits levels (although the actual inflation rate suffered by the poorest is higher than average). Roughly half of all in early 2023 in the UK were of a rise below 5 per cent. Half were above that, but almost always below inflation.

��

Source: Figure 0.1 from�� , London: Verso.

��

Adjustments in public sector pay appear even more progressive. Since 2010, junior civil service salaries have fallen in real terms by 12 per cent, at the most senior level. In March, workers in the biggest rail union, the RMT, voted for a pay deal that will give the highest paid among them a 9.4 per cent raise while the lowest paid will get 14 per cent more. This year, NHS employees were offered a deal that included a 3.5 per cent raise for the highest-paid staff, but over 9 per cent for the lowest paid. Under those terms, minimum pay rises in the health service would be £1,400 a year: a pay cut in real terms, but the cuts would be less for those who could least afford them. The unions rejected this offer in England. In Scotland, Unison and Unite have accepted an offer from the Scottish government of an average increase of 7.5 per cent for NHS workers. Again, those who are lower paid will receive more and those on higher wages, less. In Wales, unions accepted an offer that will increase staff costs by 7.5 per cent, but again it is .

The story is similar elsewhere. The offer made by councils to social workers in February 2023 was for a £1,925 rise for all, amounting to 3.9 per cent for the best paid but 6.4 per cent for the worst paid. The unions, who were asking for 12.7 per cent, . In English schools outside of London, unions were offered a deal that involved increases of 8.9 per cent for early-career teachers, bringing their salaries up to £28,000 a year in their first year of teaching. Teachers at the top of the main scale and on the upper pay scale would receive only a 5 per cent rise, pushing their salaries to maximums of respectively.

Although all these pay offers are progressive, they are not very progressive. For example, in universities, the offer made in January 2023 varied from a high of 8 per cent for the lowest-paid staff to 5 per cent for those on larger salaries. Under this deal, only staff earning less than £19,333 a year (barely above minimum wage) would receive the most generous 8 per cent rise, equivalent to an extra £1,547 a year. In contrast, the rise of 5 per cent would apply to members of staff currently receiving little over £31,000 or more a year, and they’d take home upwards of an extra £1,570 a year. Someone paid twice that salary, almost £63,000, would receive twice as much in their increase: around an extra £3,140 a year. So even these pay offers still increase the gaps between university employees. A slightly more progressive offer would give all staff, no matter their income, the same bonus sum to take home: £2,000 more per year, for example, for high and low earners alike. The most progressive of all proposals would see pay cuts for the highest earners, and bigger rises for those at the bottom.

��

Source: Figure 0.1 from�� , London: Verso.

��

As yet these changes may not be enough to tip the scales towards a sustained fall in income inequalities of the kind that last began a century ago. Back then the incomes of the super-rich—the top 1 per cent of the top 1 per cent—had already been falling for 10 years. The modern super-rich suffered a blow to their incomes when corporate profits fell during the pandemic—in the period between 2021 and 2022 tax paid on corporate profit , as compared with 2.9 per cent before the pandemic hit. Some of that will be recovered, but expensive energy, higher wage costs for workers and the chancellor’s announcement of an April 2023 corporation tax rate rise (from 19 per cent to 25 per cent) will mainly affect the very rich. Nonetheless, even if those with most begin to take more of a hit, there is unlikely to be much schadenfreude. There was no joy a century ago when the rich were last squeezed. Every time we become more equal, there is usually a greater dose of increased misery along the way.

��

Trouble ahead? Traders at the New York Stock Exchange brace for a bruising week in February 2020, the worst in global markets since the 2008 financial crisis © Photo by Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images

��

Unions often point out how much real pay has fallen in recent decades. But in order to secure more progressive deals, they might do better concentrating on how large other gaps have been allowed to grow. A head teacher of a large secondary school in the UK can be paid up to £101,126 a year; a police chief superintendent, £91,749; an army colonel, up to ; the , £93,954; and a long-serving NHS senior consultant can earn, as a basic salary, up to £119,133. These may not seem unreasonable sums for people with such responsibilities, but in other European countries the pay of those in charge does not set them so far apart from those they are in charge of. As Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s The Spirit Level demonstrated 14 years ago, societies work better when they are more equal.

People on higher pay in Britain often argue that they cannot get by without pay rises because of the costs of education and housing, which are higher in this country than across most of the rest of the continent. To a greater extent than in any other European state, they can easily point to higher paid people: from university vice chancellors to the several thousand London bankers paid over a million pounds a year and the chief executives of Britain’s largest (FTSE 100) companies who on average take around £4m or £5m each year, equivalent to a large lottery win. They in turn can point to a handful of hedge fund managers, construction bosses and other unscrupulous individuals with annual incomes in the tens of millions. At the top of this spiral of excess can be found some of the more generous donors to the Conservative party, .

Today, as in the 1920s, arguments used to justify very high pay ring hollow. Luckless spokespeople defend high executive pay as “benchmarked to the marketplace for equivalent roles��, while feeling a little sick in their stomachs. In some sectors, leaders feel moved : the most able university leaders began to of up to 20 per cent in 2020. They are still a and those cuts mostly mean less university money is paid into government coffers through tax and national insurance, but there could be . Even has suggested that some vice chancellors could consider halving their salaries.

There is growing evidence that something is tipping—not just in terms of wages and benefits, but in public attitudes and voting too. The 2017 -election was the first since the 1970s where the Conservative vote did not become more geographically concentrated. In 2019 that trend accelerated—even as the Tories won a landslide majority, their vote fell in London and the southeast of England. And yet, just as our ancestors didn’t notice the political twists and turns or the contractions in pay going on around them, these recent developments have .

��

Yet another view of what the best-off take each year as compared to the average person (for whom annual income=1), now not using a log-scale

Source: Figure 0.1 , London: Verso.

��

We tell ourselves that the gaps between the richest and poorest aren’t closing because those who argue for greater equality are naive fools who don’t understand how to win elections. But a change in government might not be key to tipping the scales of inequality.
Not a single election won between 1974 and 2019 resulted in any meaningful overall rise in income equality. For 50 years, the UK has become progressively more economically unequal, socially divided and politically polarised. Within that period there were some shifts. Income inequality between the medians of the top 20 per cent and bottom 20 per cent stopped rising around 1986. The Gini measure of inequality between all households hit a high in the mid-1990s and has remained on a plateau since. New Labour could not knock it off that plateau, not for a single year. The proportional pay of the top 1 per cent may have peaked before the financial crisis in 2008, but those even wealthier than them kept on taking more, for years after. The wealth of the richest 1,000 families in the UK rose steadily until 2020, when it first faltered. Taken in the round, the gaps between us have been growing for half a century, in a way that other European countries did not allow. Most became more equal; by 2019, only two countries in all of Europe—Bulgaria and Turkey—were more inequitable than the UK.

That could be about to change with the current wave of progressive and below-inflation pay offers. What would clinch it would be some self-control among the richest, or the threat of action if they show none. After the financial crash of 1929, the directors of most of the largest UK mortgage lenders took real-terms pay cuts for . The salaries of MPs, too, were temporarily because of the economic crisis. In part, they were fearful of revolution after seeing what had happened in Russia in 1917. But there was also a growing sense of social responsibility. It may feel unlikely that MPs would reduce their salaries again, but this year per cent—a larger real-terms pay cut than almost all other public servants (but still an extra £2,440 a year).

The ever-increasing trend in wealth inequality may also be starting to change. The wealthiest 10 per cent of households in the country have 43 per cent of the wealth; the bottom 50 per cent have just 9 per cent. The housing market, the second-largest source of wealth in the UK, was boosted during the pandemic but in the year to February 2023, prices fell in real terms. They could yet fall further: student loans are starting to take a bite out of the housing market as most young people go to university and 90 per cent have high loans to repay. Overall wealth is also falling, due to inflation. And the future values of private pensions, now the largest source of wealth, are also more in doubt today: many have caps that won’t allow payments to rise in real terms in future (when inflation is above a certain level). Far fewer people in Britain own stocks and shares than used to, so there is no salvation even there. In 2022, the Resolution Foundation discovered that the top 10 per cent of people by income were now less likely to have savings equivalent to their monthly earnings than the bottom 10 per cent.

One hundred years ago, the last time that the UK saw the beginning of any fall in either income or wealth inequality, the country had been through one war and was heading for another. It is sometimes suggested that only a great catastrophe can truly turn the inequality tide, but the reasons why inequality last began to narrow are complex: while the First World War played a part in changing the course of inequality, during and after the Second World War, the established trend stuck. Today we get to test the catastrophe theory further.

The UK’s political parties tend to move in concert, swinging as a group from right to left when inequalities fall, and vice versa as they rise. In recent years, the Tories have become one of the . Liz Truss’s complaint that the left-wing “powerful economic establishment�� had squashed her economic agenda was on the one hand laughable. On the other, she may have had a point. Some conditions and ideas become untenable. The moral sentiment does change over time, and no-one, including the “economic establishment��, is immune from this. In the 1930s, the stockbroker and banker Oswald Falk wrote that John Maynard Keynes and his friends had helped change the moral sentiment of their times; but it was a far wider and more diffuse set of events that all combined to do so.

��

A final look at the same data as shown many times above, but now as share of all income taken by each group shown using a log scale

Source: Figure 0.1 from�� , London: Verso.

��

The 2008 financial crash and the misguided austerity that followed it; Brexit; how Britain dealt with the pandemic; the global rise in prices in recent years: all these have combined to create a crisis not dissimilar to that we faced a century ago, when salaries at the top last rose by less than wages at the bottom. History makes no promises to repeat itself and it could be that what we are seeing now is a blip. But there are signs that it could be more than that.

��

Untenable: The Truss government’s economic agenda was widely opposed © Alberto Pezzali/AP/ Shutterstock

��

The UK could revert to trend—we could become even more inequitable. Alternatively, we could be at the start of a long and at first painful process of gradually becoming more equal. The 1920s and 1930s were hardly good times for most people in Britain, but during those years of misery the inequality gap narrowed. By the 1940s it was possible to look back on the 1920s and publish plays such as An Inspector Calls and books such as Brideshead Revisited about how odd, how awful, the recent past had been. Could people be doing the same in the 2040s when talking about Britain today?

Between the year of Charles’s grandfather’s coronation in 1937 and his mother’s crowning in 1953, the pay of the best-off 0.1 per cent halved from 66 times average incomes to 28 times. It fell as fast before and after the Second World War as during it. By the time of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, in 1977, the take of the top 0.1 per cent had more than halved again, to 13 times average incomes. But then it suddenly increased threefold, to 42 times, by her Golden Jubilee in 2002. It had almost doubled again by the time she died, returning to a point slightly worse than it had been when her father became king.

If we are now again on the down slope, let’s learn from history. No other country in Europe made itself as unequal as we did. We don’t have to do it again. All the many more equitable countries in Europe that have monarchies have far more normal ones. They don’t go in for such silly coronations or allow inequalities to rise as high. There is no innate flaw in the British that means we are forever doomed to be geographical oddities.

��

Danny Dorling is Halford Mackinder professor of Geography, University of Oxford.

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

New global ranking for life expectancy shows decades-long UK decline.

A new analysis of global rankings of life expectancy over seven decades shows the UK has done worse than all G7 countries except the USA. Researchers writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine say that while UK life expectancy has increased in absolute terms over recent decades, other, similar countries are experiencing larger increases.

In 1952, when Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne, the UK had one of the longest life expectancies in the world, ranking seventh globally behind countries such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark. In 2021 the UK was ranked 29th.

The researchers show the rankings of the G7 countries at each decade from 1950 to 2020. The G7 is a collection of countries with advanced economies (UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the USA) that represent about half of global economic output.

One of the researchers, Dr Lucinda Hiam, of the University of Oxford, said: ��The rankings show that the only G7 country to do worse than the UK is the USA.��

The relative decline of the UK portrayed in the figures is stark, say the researchers, adding that the causes of the UK falling down the life expectancy ranks appear to have been decades in the making. ��While politicians invoke global factors, especially the effects of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine, the reality is that, as in the 1950s, the country suffers from major structural and institutional weaknesses,�� said another researcher, Professor Martin McKee, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

The researchers point to income inequalities which rose greatly in the UK during and after the 1980s. ��That rise also saw an increase in the variation in life expectancy between different social groups,�� said Professor McKee. “One reason why the overall increase in life expectancy has been so sluggish in the UK is that in recent years it has fallen for poorer groups.��

Danny Dorling added: ��Team GB may do well at the Olympics, but we do not fare so well in the rankings of what actually matters most in life��

According to the OECD, state the researchers, the UK recently became the second most economically unequal country in Europe after Bulgaria. ��Perhaps we should not be surprised to see that inequality reflected in such wide health inequalities and a declining overall position,�� said Dr Hiam.

Dr Hiam and her co-authors describe the UK at a crossroads, with the cost-of-living crisis meaning that ‘business as usual�� is no longer an option. ��In the short term, the government has an acute crisis to address. However, a relative worsening of population health is evidence that all is not well. It has historically been an early sign of severe political and economic problems.�� said Dr Hiam. ��This new analysis suggests that the problems the UK faces are deep seated and raises serious questions about the path that this country is following��.

For the full article and a link to where it was originally published, click .

The falling rank of the UK out of 200 countries by life expectancy

You may have become aware of a little controversy surrounding a few small changes concerning how car traffic is routed through the city of Oxford. On Saturday February 18th a rally was held to demonstrate against the proposed introduction of six new bus gates in the city. Five people were arrested, but it largely passed off peacefully. The Oxford Mail reported that this was all under the watchful eyes of police horses Wilma and Odin. You cannot fault the Oxford Mail for the level of detail it provides, or at times wonder if so little usually happens in Oxford that its earnest reporters are driven to report even the names of the horses.

People best known for having famous relatives (Lawrence Fox and Piers Corbyn) and a Neo-druid from Stonehenge (King Arthur Pendragon) wearing his robes all spoke against the proposed bus gates. The Neo-druid explained his concerns: ‘If they say you cannot go out of Oxford, how are you going to turn up to places like Stonehenge for the Solstice.�� Lawrence, Piers and Arthur were joined by other groups including many Covid-19 lockdown sceptics, anti-vax folk, fascists, and “balaclava-clad ‘anti-fascists��.�� They came from all across Britain. Some may even have flown in for the event. As many as 2000 people were there. It would not be unkind to describe some of them as conspiracy theorists. But others had genuine worries given what they had heard and read on-line. Some had concerns that the new bus gates would be turning the city into a prison. This affair has, after all, been reported as a semi-serious news story around the world.

An existing Oxford Bus Gate

There are plenty of reasonable people with worries that their method of driving and the routes they might have to take will change in the near future. However, local opposition was joined by outsiders bringing their own unrelated agendas. Many people at that march were not conspiracy theorists, but also have suspicions as to the motives of the traffic planners. At a time when central government is doing so much that harms so many people, why believe that something being proposed by a part of local government might be benign or even beneficial?

Worries about transport changes need to be addressed with sympathy for those with genuine concerns about how their own lives will be affected. By looking back at the history of traffic calming in Oxford it can be easier to see that what is about to happen won’t be as bad as they think, and that the changes are needed. This is because changes in the past were clearly needed, they were also often opposed, and hardly anyone now complains about past changes.

Why did the large rally happen? When traffic was rerouted in Oxford in the past there was always a little controversy, but nothing ever on such a scale. When cars were prevented from using Cornmarket, and later when buses were too, there were grumblings. When a bus filter was introduced to stop cars, other than taxis and a few other vehicles driving on the High Street, there were some moans. In the 1980s and 1990s when bollards were introduced into some streets so that bikes could pass, but not cars, an irate letter or two was sent to the Oxford Mail, but 2000 people never gathered before in Oxford to complain about traffic restrictions.

Another Oxford Bus

We now live in far more fractured times and this may be the reason why the protests have been so much more vitriolic this time. The city is more fractured by economic inequality than it was in the 1980s; but most of the opposition to the bus gates is from a few very well off business-people and other outsiders. If you wanted to entertain a conspiracy theory, it could be that by getting the conspiracy theorists of the world to focus on the bus gates, most opposition to them has now been made to look ridiculous. However, I can find no evidence of a safer-streets campaigner carefully seeding the idea to achieve this (possibly very useful) outcome. The bus gates are now practically an inevitability, as not to introduce them would be to bow down to the wisdom of Laurence Fox, Piers Corbyn, Arthur Pendragon, and their supporters.

If you want to know what has been proposed and consulted on, you can look it up easily. The introduction of the bus gates may be delayed, due to delays on the rebuilding of the Botley Road rail bridge, but they will now almost certainly soon arrive. Their official name is ‘experimental traffic filters��, but ‘bus gates�� is a far better description for reasons I’ll try to explain below. Two thirds of local residents support the plan. Short of a financial emergency occurring in 2023, preventing the county council from making any discretionary expenditure, which is not impossible, the bus gates are coming. And short of it turning out that they result in disaster �� they are very likely to stay.

Rather than rehearsing yet again the arguments for and against bus gates, it might be more useful to look at how previous traffic re-routing schemes in Oxford have been introduced, why they happen, and how we so very quickly became used to them. No one now calls for Cornmarket to be opened up to cars again; or complains that shutting Broad Street to most traffic is a bad thing. In fact, it would have been very hard for 2000 people to have held a rally there against traffic calming measures, if traffic measures hadn’t been introduced to make that space so much more open.

And a Third Oxford Bus (buses always come in threes)

The most recent controversy in Oxford concerned the introduction of a few low traffic neighbourhoods. It was obvious to anyone who cared to look, but especially to someone who was not used to it, that Oxford had a problem with its traffic. I arrived back in the city in 2013, having been away for 27 years. The traffic jams shocked me. I was especially shocked by the rat-running in the streets of East Oxford where children from my secondary school used to play as children (children whose parents often spoke Urdu as their first language). The city had changed in many places almost beyond recognition in terms of gentrification; but for some reason action had been slower to address Oxford’s growing traffic problems than had been the case in much of the rest of England.

I was asked to give a few public talks on my surprise at coming back to Oxford and finding it was so behind-the-times as compared to cities like Sheffield, where I had been living for the last ten years. Shortly after arriving back in the city a Conservative county councillor told me, only half-jokingly, that anything which slowed down her driving her large car from her far flung village in North Oxfordshire to lunch at the Ashmolean roof-top restaurant could not be permitted to happen. It slowly dawned on me that perhaps it had been the Conservatives�� almost continuous control of the County Council, that explained the state of the city’s streets. The county has responsibility for traffic, not the city.

I published a proposal (Figure 1), based upon worrying about people, and especially children, cycling around the city. The map is shown below. I suggested that the major arterial roads could be made one way to motorised traffic, not least because almost all of the serious car/van/lorry/bus and cycle collisions (and deaths) in Oxford occur at intersections on those roads. But I also suggested that five barriers to cars could be introduced on roads in inner East Oxford, to stop rat-running and also make the Cowley Road a far safer place to walk and cycle (buses would be allowed through).

Figure 1: A Proposal made in 2016 to try to improve traffic flow and safety in Oxford

��

I am no traffic engineer. But it is now clear that the traffic engineers of the county had been planning for many years what to propose when their political leaders changed and an administration came in that was less interested in how quickly four-by-fours could drive into the city. Rather than just suggest five barriers, as I had in 2016, they later proposed 14, which were implemented in 2022. These are shown in the map below (Figure 2) taken from an anti-low traffic neighbourhood leaflet. They are now all in place, and were added to the three which had been in place on those streets already. I like to think that I may have helped a little by suggesting that this kind of thing was sensible, but rather like Spike Milligan in his series of books on the importance of the part he played in the war, I think the outcome would have been the same regardless.

��

Figure 2: Image from a leaflet opposed to a restriction to some motorized through traffic

��

Now the “road closures�� in East Oxford have been completed, opposition to them has quickly ebbed away. Of course, the roads were not closed, instead there was simply a restriction to some motorized through-traffic. Adding a restriction to through traffic actually opens the road to users other than car drivers. Children are able to cycle to school and play outside with less fear, everyone can cycle or walk more safely.

“Closure�� implies that roads are intended just for drivers. It also implies that driving is no longer possible, when it is. It was just that through-driving has been stopped.

People have very quickly become used to the roads being largely car traffic free; and to how much quieter the Cowley and Iffley Roads now are without so much traffic trying to turn onto them from side streets. Buses can now travel more freely as they are less stuck in traffic jams on those two roads. Although the London Road is still very busy, which is part of the reason why new bus gates are planned for the near future.

Why do I think that it was inevitable that the low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) would come in (and be accepted) and that the new bus gates will now be introduced in 2023, 2024 or 2025 and similarly be accepted after initial opposition? And why don’t I think that any one individual making a suggestion that this would be a good thing matters that much? The answer to all these questions is that this is what always happens. But we can become better at understanding this if we look back at what has happened in the past.

The next map below (Figure 3) shows brilliant work recently published by CycleStreets. Their highly skilled researchers used OpenStreetMap (all one word!) data and ingenious analysis to calculate where all the rat-runs are across the UK. It was obvious that there was a problem before in Oxford. But why was the problem so concentrated in that part of east Oxford in particular? I can’t help thinking that it might have been because those streets in the past were home to some of the poorest children in the late 1970s and 1980s. Oxford really has gentrified, some parts more than others. But it was some of the parts that were poorest in the past that had been most neglected when it came to making streets safer.

��

Figure 3: Rat runs in part of the city of Oxford prior to 2022

��

It is not poverty that causes a street to become a rat-run. It is lack of traffic planning and planning officers being less pressurised to make streets safer where children were poorer in the past. The next map below (Figure 4) shows the same area of Oxford, before the new LTN’s came in. However, now all the pre-existing LTNs are included. We did not call them LTN’s before, but just look at how many streets in this part if Oxford has been cut-off from motorised through-traffic prior to 2022. This was due to bollards, gates, or narrow gaps being introduced in the late 1970s, 1980s, or a little later. All that happened in 2022 was that a few more circles were added to the map below. All that will happen when the new bus gates come in, is that there will be six more such circles on the CycleStreets maps of Oxford, and pollution will fall, and buses, vans and taxis will travel more smoothly.

��

Figure 4: Roads closed to motorised through traffic in part of the city of Oxford prior to 2022

��

Today, almost all the streets of East Oxford are coloured blue-green on the most recent national map when zoomed into this city (Figure 5). Oxford district as a whole now has 68% of streets (by length) which are Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods, 12% are not, and the remaining 20% are the main roads. Following the changes made in 2022, the two areas of Oxford with the least low traffic neighbourhoods are now Summertown and Old Headington. Interestingly, these are two of the more affluent parts of the city today. The normal trend-over-time, where it is usually the most affluent areas that become 20mps zones first, or get zebra crossing first, may be ending.

��

Figure 5: Roads closed to motorised through traffic in part of the city of Oxford by 2023

��

Of course, more could be done. At present, a great deal of motorised traffic and cycles moving from east to west in Oxford are funnelled into the Plain, before crossing Magdelan bridge. The University, and a couple of colleges in particular, could help reduce the danger of cycling on the Plain by making other routes across the Cherwell possible by bike. In some cases new bridges already exist, but they are private bridges, closed to the general public, and not well connected to cycle paths. The ‘servant’s entrance to the city�� is the only cycle route in that is off-road. This is the one the travels past where Parson’s pleasure once operated. One day the idea that we close that particular cycle and walking route on two days each year, just so that it does not become a right of way, will appears as ridiculous as the original purpose of Parson’s Pleasure.

The debate over traffic calming in Oxford has often been tortuous to watch. At times, local councillors have had to remind their colleagues of why all this matters so much. It is not just about making the city greener and traffic moving more efficiently. It is also about safety, especially safety for older people and children. On February 14th 2023 in one county council debate, when the county was setting its budget for the year, one councillor had to remind her colleagues about why Oxford needs to be a safer city:

Cllr @RosalindRogers
(LD, Headington): ��I had to watch a friend of mine hit by a car at 30mph when I was 9. If she had been hit at 20mph she might have survived.��
�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ��(Source: )

The next stage will be the introduction of (see Figure 6). They are officially called traffic filters because a large number of other vehicles will be allowed through them, including the private cars of local residents up to 100 times a year for free. However, their main purpose is to ensure that buses can travel smoothly, especially during rush hours.

Figure 6: The next six bus gates or ‘traffic filters�� �� planned for experimental introduction

No doubt there will be much debate as these are introduced. In that debate it is worth remembering that this development is mainly about buses. It is also about what has to change before a great many new buses can be added to the low or zero carbon fleet in Oxford (see Figure 7 for where only zero emission vehicles travel freely). As the Central Oxfordshire Travel Plan (COTP) makes clear: “Working with local bus operators, we will roll out a fleet of zero emission buses across the area. Funding awarded through the Zero Emission Bus Regional Areas (ZEBRA) scheme together with council and bus operator funding, will see the first phase of this ambition realised through the delivery of 159 electric local buses. Covering a large proportion of the COTP area, these buses will be used on routes in Oxford by 2024.��

Figure 7: The existing (pilot) zero emission zone in the centre of Oxford

��

There are other changes coming too. Oxford already has its first zero emission zone in operation. If you drive into the streets shaded red in Figure 7, without paying the levy, you will be fined. The levy is £10 a day unless you are driving a low emission vehicle (when it is then £8), ultra-low (a levy of £4) or zero (£0). All these levies are set to double by 2025. A £60 fine is possible if the levy is not paid; but it can be halved if you pay the fine promptly. Figure 8 shows where the scheme is set to be expanded to, but as yet no date set for the public consultation on this proposal.

��

Figure 8: The proposed extension of the zero emission zone in the centre of Oxford

��

You can try to imagine how these proposals will change life in the city but it can be hard to do so. Maybe students in most colleges in future will no longer so often be dropped off and picked up at the start and end of each term by parents driving cars �� unless that is they pay the various levies to do so. Instead, their responsible adult(s) will be able to say goodbye to them at the park and ride car parks on the outskirts of the city when they drop them off with their luggage to take the last leg of their journey on the bus. It’s better if University folk mix a little more with others and if students get to use a bus early on in their time in the city.

You may live outside of the city and if you already travel by public transport think that all these changes will not have a great effect on you, but Oxfordshire is also changing, not just Oxford. In February 2023 20mph limits were approved for much of Kidlington, Chilton, Church Hanborough, Kingston Lisle, Milton-under-Wychwood, North Hinksey, South Leigh, and Binsey Lane (on the edge of Oxford). The era of Toad of Toad Hall is coming to an end.

In 2018 two thirds of the poorest tenth of households in the UK did not have a car, half of the next poorest tenth had no car. These proportions will be higher in Oxford as car ownership is much less common in the city than it is in the UK as a whole. In contrast, almost 95% of the best-off fifth of households have a car, with three quarters of these households having two or even three or more cars each! The graph below (Figure 9), drawn by Charlie Hicks, makes the inequality more obvious. Often the debate about traffic routing is presented as if it is a battle between affluent upper-middle-class eco-greens on their cargo bikes, verses honest working class folk in their cars. But what is actually happening in Oxford is a change to make it possible to run a bus service well. Of course, how Oxford attracts and houses enough bus drivers and mechanics, people to clean the buses and the streets and all the other hundreds of jobs required to make a city work well is another question. In October 2022 the cutting of bus services in Oxford due to problems of recruiting drivers was reported by the BBC. The excuse given for delaying recruitment was not terribly plausible: ‘The Oxford Bus Company said there was a nationwide shortage of bus drivers and added a planned recruitment event in September had to be cancelled when the Queen died.�� However, if in future the job of being a bus driver in Oxford is made better, by not having to spend so much of your day sitting in traffic dealing with upset and delayed customers, perhaps retaining drivers will become easier?

Figure 9: The distribution of who owns cars in the UK by household income

��

It is often said that those most in favour of new traffic calming measures in Oxford are many of the well-off residents of the city. However, while some of this group might benefit from having less traffic outside of their own homes, or feeling that they were safer when they or their children cycled, this group are not those who suffer the most from the current situation. The group most badly affected by the current situation are people who rely on buses to commute into, out of, and across the city. That is the group who have the most to gain. In theory, in future, they could have a smoother and faster commute than car drivers. Were that to happen then the premium that people pay for the convenience of living in the city might fall, and the house prices of those who have seen their streets become quieter might not rise as much as they might anticipate.

The suggestion that one day Oxford could have a reliable, cheap, and very frequent bus service is usually greeted with great scepticism; but it is not even a possibility without bus gates. It has been over three years since it was first announced that the city aimed to become: ‘Britain’s first all-electric bus town�� At the very end of January 2023 the £82.5 million deal was finally signed. The first of 159 new battery powered electric buses arrives in Oxfordshire in September 2023. Central government are paying £32.8 million of the cost of the buses and the infrastructure to charge them. The County Council have committed £6.0 million, and the bus companies £43.7 million. When I tell people this, the most common reply I receive is: “I’ll believe it when I see it��. The central government funding was contingent on the new bus gates being introduced.

Few people argue that they would rather have diesel buses idling in traffic jams. For some, it is the reduction in air pollution that matters most, for others it is the climate change impacts. For me, I will be thinking of that Somerville graduate who spent a couple of her teenage years up looking at who then sat on the buses in Oxford and was reported (by ) many years later in 1986 to have said: ‘If a man finds himself a passenger on a bus having attained the age of 26, he can count himself a failure in life.�� Perhaps one of the new buses should be named after her? Far more appropriate than naming a wing of a college or department after such a person.

��

Figure 10: Proctor’s Memorandum on cars and the behaviour of undergraduates, 1/10/1968

��

We each have our own perspective. Depending on how, where and when we travel, some of us have already noticed a reduction in traffic jams and often attribute this to the covid pandemic and the increase in home working. But an analysis by the Sunday Times found that so many people were using their cars after the pandemic, rather than public transport, that average speeds had reduced by 2.5mph. In Oxford it varies more by road and time of day than in many places. Oxford also has a remarkably large number of private schools and you can tell when their terms times are by how full the roads are in the morning and afternoon. Those who currently drive their children a long way from their home to a private school may not welcome the bus gates.

There is much more happening. A parking levy for businesses is due to come into force in Oxford in 2023 which should also reduce traffic (see Figure 10 for a much older one). There are issues about E-Scooters and cyclists, not least the huge number who arrive in Oxford from abroad each autumn and have to newly learn which side of the road, or cycle track to be on! There is the complexity of trying to explain that when the bus gates (‘travel filters��) are introduced they will not just allow buses to pass in the hours that they are at first operating, but also coaches, taxis, private hire vehicles, mopeds, motorbikes, vans, lorries, anyone with a blue badge in their car, anyone driving ing (by car) who cares for anyone else when they are driving to or from them, any cars used as goods vehicles, and any local residents who obtain a permit (with a maximum of three permits per household and 100 days free use a year). The scheme will not begin until 2024.

Finally, I am left wondering one last thing. Why did the police name their horses after the Germanic Wilma (meaning ‘resolute protector��) and Nordic Odin (which translates as ‘raging and frenzied��)? There was once a time when there were far more horses on Oxford’s streets. People then said that it would always be so. Maybe we’ll see a few more horses in future? There was a time when the city of Oxford had trams. The country is currently too poor for that to be a possibility again, but maybe one day? The last figure include in this short article (Figure 10) is a note posted by the Proctors in October 1968. Times do change, albeit slowly.

��

For a PDF the original article this piece was published in click

��

References �� clickable links given in the text above �� given here in full for posterity (as links always eventually break)

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7. Dorling, D. (2016) The Wind and the Willows, Oxford Civic Society Visions Newsletter, July, pp.5-6,
8.
9.
10.
11.
12. Page 33 of the Central Oxfordshire travel plan:
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20. quite when and exactly what words she used in this quip are hard to pin down, and she was certainly not to first to have made this ‘joke��. The Economist’s dating is given here:
21.
22.
23.

For a PDF the original article this piece was published in click

On 1st of February 2023 half a million public sectors workers took part in strikes. These were the largest strikes in more than a decade. They included teachers, university workers, civil servants, train and bus drivers. Larger strikes by health workers were promised for the following week, including the first ever strike of mid-wives �� who would still attend births �� despite being on strike. Paramedics, ambulance staff and firefighters were all scheduled to strike in the following weeks. Many of the strikes had been on-going since 2022. At times it appeared that only the police and army had not been on strike. They were not permitted strike.

The number of strikes had grown so much that the BBC gave up trying to depict what was happening overall. The graph they produced in December 2022 became too complex to update later because there were so many more strikes by so many more workers in early 2023.

��

The first UK strikes of winter 2022/23

Source:

��

One thing that few noticed at the time, was how quiet the right wing think tanks had become during this period. It was as if they knew that if they said anything, it would rebound on them. For a decade, these bodies had loudly rubbished suggestions that people should be concerned over whether they were paid enough to cover their basic costs, such as housing. They scoffed at the suggestion that the take of those paid the most was far too high, or that this was squeezing others�� wages. Below I’ll give a few examples of how they have changed their tune from what often preoccupied them during the last decade through to August 2022. I’ll begin with some of the comments they made on my work in the past.

In 2014 the ‘Head of Political Economy.�� at the Institute for Economic Affairs wrote that ‘A lot of nonsense is being written about the UK’s housing crisis. But Danny Dorling’s book “All that is solid. The great housing disaster�� is easily the worst contribution so far.’[1] These kinds of comments came continuously, right through to a final flurry in August 2022, when this particular writer suggested that the ‘…left-wing writer, also frequently portrays “neoliberals�� as a crossover between Ebenezer Scrooge and Hannibal Lecter.’[2] The comments then suddenly ceased. They ceased in the few turbulent weeks when the failed regime of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng came and went, when the strikes grew, and then the national tune changed abruptly.

Many other examples can be given of past vocal criticism of those who had mentioned low pay as a problem. In 2015, the ‘Head of Life Style Economics�� at the Institute for Economic Affairs complained about writing on the best-paid 1% and said: ‘It is not difficult to guess why left-wing writers in the UK have virtually abandoned the Gini coefficient in favour of focusing on the amount earned by the very richest.’[3] The Gini statistic is used to show that, other than Bulgaria, the UK is the most unequal country in Europe. But it was common then for these commentators to try to ridicule and cast doubt on any worry about inequality. The rise in this kind of criticism had begun in earnest in the years immediately after the book, “The Spirit Level�� was published in 2009.

In 2017 the ‘Head of Life Style Economics�� (again) at the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) likened claims I and the charity Oxfam were making to what he called: “Karl Marx’s wretched immiseration theory��. He said: “I don’t think income inequality is very important, but those who do should acknowledge that it is now lower now (sic) than at any time since 1986.”[4] If you ignored the income of the top tenth of people and the least well-off tenth, then you could then make that claim that inequality has fallen, but you would only do that if you did not want people to know inequality overall had not declined. A year earlier, the IEA’s ‘Head of Life Style Economics�� had written: “It is no coincidence that the most vocal academics in the inequality debate �� Richard Wilkinson, Thomas Piketty, Danny Dorling et al �� are men of the left.”[5] He ignored the women writing on inequality, including Richard Wilkinson’s Spirit Level co-author, Kate Pickett.

In 2018 a Telegraph journalist, writing in the Institute for Economic Affairs blog pages, suggested that “…the old mercantilist fallacy that wealth is a zero-sum game abounds in contemporary politics, and in the work of economists…”[6] She did not mention the argument that many people could be so much wealthier if we only controlled the greedy; and that so many people are far more meaningfully wealthy �� better housed, better educated, and healthier �� in more equitable European countries.

It had become normal to expect to be accused of being fundamentally misguided if you suggested that Britain was not heading in the right direction. Of a book I wrote with Sally Tomlinson, titled ‘Rule Britannia: From Brexit to the end of Empire�� one reviewer in Spiked Magazine gave it the accolade of the ‘worst book ever��.[7] This was the third time in quick succession that a book I had written was labelled as the ‘worst book ever�� by a commentator associated with the Tax Payers�� Alliance, The Institute of Economic Affairs , Spiked Magazine, or the like.

So what are these think tanks saying today and how has their focus changed? On their blogs today there are now almost no mentions of inequality or of the strikes. At least none that I can find. Attacks on left-wing academics appear to have petered out, and these think tanks have less to say overall. Remarkably, the ‘Head of Life Style Economics�� at the Institute for Economic Affairs now critiques the current Conservative Prime Minster and Chancellor for not cutting taxes.[8] The ‘Head of Political Economy�� at that same body now writes blogs in which he wonders aloud if ‘…the main reason why nationalisation is so popular is that most people massively overestimate the profit margins in the industries in question.’[9] Incidentally, it is not the main reason. Most people would like the services to be run better and at a lower cost. Although the very high salaries of the privatized industries�� Chief Executives (and other senior staff) easily gives away just how much profit they do make, let alone any inspection of the dividends or rising wealth of shareholders, who now mostly live overseas.

Telegraph journalists in 2023 appear to spend less time talking up their impression of the merits of various Victorian era economic theories. They spend more time writing sketches about recently demoted Conservative Chancellors. However, often these show little foresight.[10] Now, instead of criticizing those who write about economic inequality, they more often speculate about cultural issues such Scottish policy on gender identity.[11] This Scottish policy was also the headline in Spiked Magazine a day after the Telegraph journalists�� piece.[12] In many ways this group acts like a herd while proclaiming the cult of the heroic isolated individual. Since August 2022 The Tax Payers�� alliance has turned its attention away from arguing that inequality was falling and towards trying to turn our focus to immigration, refugees, and those ‘small boats��.[13]

Why has the focus reverted to the obscure or to the old anti-immigration, anti-refuge, tropes? Part of the reason was the disastrous autumn statement of Kwasi Kwarteng who was doing exactly what Liz Truss wanted him to do. She in turn was doing exactly what the right wing think tanks had called for. All this ended in disaster. But another reason for the turn was the strikes, the general rise in unrest, anxiety, and anger. The lull in their commenting came at the very point that their ideas had been tried and failed, but caused great damage and further raised the basic costs of housing, fuel and food. They were, I think, hoping that few people who notice the part they had played in making the cost-of-living crises so much worse in the UK than it was elsewhere in Europe.

There is a phrase in football �� you only sing when you’re winning. Hopefully this is more than just a lull.

��

For the original place of publication of this article and a PDF copy click .

References

1. Niemietz, K. (2014) Danny Dorling’s ‘All that is solid��: The worst book on the housing crisis so far, Institute for Economic Affairs, 4 July.

2. Niemietz, K. (2022) Politically active left-wingers are the equivalent of the tribal football fan, , 31 August,

3. Snowdon (2015) The rich versus the super-rich, Institute for Economic Affairs, 16 February.

4. Snowdon, C (2017) How Danny Dorling (and Oxfam) recycle Karl Marx’s wretched ‘immiseration theory��, Institute for Economic Affairs, 20 January.

5. Snowdon, C. (2016) Is envy of the super-rich by the rest of the rich driving the inequality debate?, Institute for Economic Affairs, 25 May.

6. Grant, M. (2018) Ricardo’s ideas are as indispensable today as they were 200 years ago, Institute for Economic Affairs, 19 April.

7. Butcher, J. (2019) Is this the worst book written about Brexit? Spiked Magazine, 28 March.

8. Snowdon, C. (2022) Big Government, Big Borrowing and Big Inflation are probably here to stay, Institute for Economic Affairs, 8 December.

9. Niemietz, K. (2022) The economics and politics of nationalisation and privatisation, Institute for Economic Affairs, 2 December.

10. Grant, M. (2023) Crestfallen press pack fails to land scalp�� or shiny forehead, The Telegraph, 25 January.

11. Grant M. (2023) Sturgeon’s gender ideology is imploding in real time, The Telegraph, 31 January.

12. Macwhirter (2023) Sturgeon’s trans crusade could be her undoing, Spiked Magazine, 1 February.

13. Protheroe, C. (2023) There is no quick fix to small boats, TaxPayers�� Alliance, 21 January.

You probably don’t know about the 1922 general election. It was the ‘breakthrough election��. The Conservatives under Andrew Bonar Law won; but Labour moved from fifth place in 1918 to third place, and increased the number of seats they held from 57 in 1918 to 142 1922.

Labour were led by John Robert Clynes. Self-educated, he was critical of how the government had treated voters in Ireland, and later opposed Ramsay MacDonald’s support for austerity during the depression years. Clynes was ousted by MacDonald as leader of the Party within a month of that election. MacDonald would go on to form a National government in 1931 with 473 Conservative MPs.

Image: J.R. Clynes. Source: Library of Congress.

There was enormous division and strife within the Labour Party in the 1920s. These were years in which inequalities were actually falling in society, but very few people knew that they were. Income inequalities had peaked in 1918. They fell more between 1918 and 1938 than in the next forty years.

Britain was changing rapidly in the 1920s. Hugh Dalton, who later became Chancellor of the Exchequer, studied the beginning of the income inequality fall while a student at the LSE. He was one of the few who measured what was happening.

Others wrote novels and plays where the backdrop was the fall in inequalities in the 1920s, but the two best remembered were not published until 1945. Brideshead Revisited and An Inspector Calls were both, in their very different ways, about unsustainable inequalities.

The 1922 election was not just notable for how well Labour did, but for it being the first election in many decades in which the geographical distribution of votes became more equal. In particular, the Conservatives lost more votes where they had been more popular in 1918. The graph accompanying this short article shows the trend (see note beneath the graph).

��

This figure was first drawn in 2006 and has be updated ever since by it’s author (although the data point for the 2019 election needs adding!)

From 1922 onwards, with just the smallest of blips in 1935, Conservative voters would become less and less geographically segregated in Britain. Irrespective of the ups and downs (in terms of which party won each election) at each subsequent election it became harder to predict how someone would vote simply by knowing which constituency they lived in. That trend continued onwards to 1959, and after then voter segregation hardly rose at all until the 1970s. However, after the election of Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979 it rose at every successive election through to 2015.

None of this would be relevant today if it were not for one particularly uncanny contemporary parallel with the past. The first election after 1922, in which geographical segregation fell, was that held in 2017. The 2017 election was remarkable, not just for the damage done to Theresa May’s majority, but because the tide had been turned in the very long term trend. It may be too early to say �� but something quite remarkable began in 2017 and it appears to be continuing. For the first time in almost one hundred years, geographical inequalities in voting between constituencies began to fall again.

In 2017, Labour picked up more votes in areas where it had had the least support in 2015, and fewer votes where it already piled them high. Although this might not be the best strategy to win elections, it was a sign of a shift. Voters in the South of England, in what had been solidly Conservative seats, began more often to vote Labour. Other voters, in seats where Labour had often taken support for granted, no longer voted Labour quite so enthusiastically.

In 2017 Labour increased its seat count to 262 (up 30), and its total vote to 12.9 million; but what was much less noticed was the shift in the geographical distribution of Labour and the Conservative voters. That shift accelerated in 2019. Again the shift was not much noticed. It was obscured by talk of a ‘red wall�� having been broken. Few people noticed that the Conservative share of the vote in all of South East England fell between 2017 and 2019. The Tory share in London also fell in 2019. However, commentators were much more interested in the loss of 60 Labour seats. They rarely pointed out that the number of Labour votes falling to 10.3 million meant Labour still polled more votes in 2019 than it had in 2005, 2010, or 2015. The fall in Labour voting was mainly due to lower turnout in 2019 as compared to 2017.

What parallels can we draw with the 1920s? Jeremy Corbyn was a very different MP to John Clynes, although both opposed the austerity of their times and both were attacked from within shortly after the two great shifts in voting. Inequalities, if measured by the take of the top 1%, were very high in both the 1920s and 2020s.

There are a few tentative signs that income and wealth are now falling, if only slightly. State pensions and many benefits have risen by inflation. This is not enough, as inflation for the poor is higher, but it is a larger relative increase than most people in employment are receiving. Many pay deals are being struck now that are progressive. Bosses offer higher increases for lower paid workers in an attempt to shame unions into agreeing a below inflation deal. As I write, house prices have fallen for many months. These falls are large when compared to inflation and may be the beginning of a redistribution of wealth.

I first drew the graph shown here in 2006. I have been waiting a long time for the shift. I may be too optimistic. But when it last shifted in 1922 that was not because Labour came to power that year, it was because inequalities had to fall. Steep social divides also began to fall, imperceptibly at first, under governments led by Conservatives who believed in the old ways, in hierarchy, and in people knowing their place. The divides fell while Labour were in disarray, at war internally. People fought for the divides to fall, but they did so successfully without the need for particularly inspirational Prime Ministers.

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

We often don’t truly value something until we have lost it.

In the short term, children losing access to schools in the UK in 2020 suddenly brought home not just what schools do for most children physically but also what they do in the round. Schools are about far more than education. They are places where we become socialised into our society, where we learn to respect others and, in some cases, to look up to or down on others. They don’t just teach skills. Schools help us form our attitudes, beliefs and prejudices.

At some times and in some schools we are told that others are our betters, often other people not at our school. We learn to behave and to be disciplined, so that later in our lives our apparent superiors will find that we have been well trained; that we are respectful; compliant; that we know our place. This still occurs in England today. Not everywhere, of course, but the idea that different children are of different rank and worth is still endlessly stamped into young minds in ways that do not often occur so forcefully elsewhere in Europe.

When the classrooms emptied during the COVID-19 crisis of 2020/2021, it quickly became clear which schools were equipped and had the resources to teach online and which could not cope and handed out paper worksheets instead. The huge advantage of very low pupil–teacher ratios in private schools suddenly became glaringly obvious, not just normally but especially in a crisis. At the other end of the scale �� for those for whom school was a sanctuary from harm and indifference at home �� no longer being able to go to school was devastating. In a very small number of cases it will have been deadly. Schools do far more than teach. If we have learned anything from the pandemic, we now know that schools should be the last public institutions to close and the first to reopen.

The authors of this excellent book had school closures foremost in their minds because they began writing in earnest in early 2021, in the weeks when it became clear that, yet again, schools would be closed for many months. State schools were only kept open physically for the children of ‘key�� workers and those identified as being in special need. It turned out that everyone who worked in a school was a key worker �� something that had barely been acknowledged before. It also turned out that the politics of education was not quite as clearly divided between good and bad as we might have thought. You are probably reading these words many months after it has been accepted that the new coronavirus is endemic and a zero-COVID strategy is impossible. However, it was a right-wing government that tried to keep the schools open and the left-wing unions (championing zero COVID) that demanded they close.

In hindsight, it is much easier to see what the right course of action would have been. This book has been written in contemplation of a much longer period when we could all take stock of what we were losing without our schools even being closed �� the decades during which funding per head was cut for 13 out of 14 children, all those who attended a state school in England. Note: it is a much higher proportion than 93% in most parts of the UK and a much lower proportion among the people who get to determine education policy. Furthermore, division had been sown within the state system, with schools forced to compete against school for pupils, to attract and retain staff (not least teachers) and to be able to afford the upkeep of their buildings.

This book begins in 1976 which was the year that marked the end of optimism and trust in teaching and saw the dial adjusted to a new belief in the power of markets, centralisation and managerialism. The authors confess that their hope that the previous system would have thrived well was ‘probably misplaced��, which illustrates their freedom from conventional dogma. However, it is worth noting that in 1976 the UK was one of the most economically equitable large countries in Europe, second only to Sweden in terms of income inequality. By that measure, Germany, Italy, Spain and France all had more socially fractured societies in that year. In contrast, in the decades that followed �� when markets, centralisation and managerialism were allowed to take over much of life in Britain, not just in education �� the UK saw its levels of economic inequality grow to become by far the largest of any Western European country. It was not just education that fractured after 1976. Health, housing, employment and the distribution of material assets (including wealth) and other life chances also all saw developments that worsened lives and increased division.

Economic inequality matters in education. In the 1980s, a large number of places in private schools were sponsored by the government under the Assisted Places Scheme for (those deemed to be) the academically able children of parents who would not otherwise be able to afford the fees and the school would have had to close. Furthermore, incomes were more equal at the start of the 1980s and so not enough adults were paid so much more than others that they could afford to educate their children privately, so the commercial future of private schools was at stake. Private education only prosper in places where there is high income inequality. However, by the time Tony Blair abolished the Assisted Places Scheme in 1997, income inequalities in England had grown to such an extent that there were now enough pupils with very well-paid parents to fill the private school quotas without the need for a direct government subsidy. (The indirect subsidies that enabled tax avoidance were maintained.) But it is important to note that in no single year during the period since 1997 (which included all the New Labour years as well as the decade of austerity) did income inequality fall by any measurable amount.

It is perhaps unsurprising that during the same period there have been many changes in education but few progressive movements. In fact, there has been no progressive government in the UK since the early and mid-1970s. Most recently, under New Labour and then the coalition, we have witnessed the almost wholesale privatisation of universities.

One of the ways we hold on to hope is the belief, at times not entirely unfounded, that after many decades of banging your head against a wall and going in the wrong direction, a group of people �� in this case, those interested in education in Britain �� realise that a change of tack is required. At this point we need to know what to do next. The solutions offered in this excellent book are based on learning from what did not work in England between 1976 and today. Although the overriding ethos of markets and competition was not conducive to progress, many individuals and some organisations, most schools and millions of children and their parents struggled over those long years to improve many things. For example, we should not forget that these were years in which school became dramatically less violent places, a significant part of which was banning teachers from beating pupils �� not everything was rosy before 1976.

There are so many wonderful suggestions in this book that you will have to read it to discover them; they cannot be summarised in a short foreword. One I particularly like is that ‘we should treat pupils not as they (sometimes infuriatingly) are but as they might become��. Recently, I met a teacher who is teaching in a school that I attended almost four decades ago. She told me she thought that none of her pupils would ever write a book. It was an ‘average school��: avoided by most of the wealthiest parents in the city and aspired to by many of the parents who live just outside its catchment area. I had some sympathy with her exasperation, but I had also been a child (at that school) who failed at English at age 16. I knew that did not mark me for life. I read my first word in 1976 �� very late at age 8. I had good teachers, but I found reading hard. In the end, my mum taught me to read; my school barely improved on that although they tried and they taught be enough of maths and geography and science that I ended up writing many books. No one would have believed I could if they had seen how I wrote when I was at school.

We have all followed our own individual educational paths and each of these will have shaped us and, in turn, our views on education. Very probably, Margaret Thatcher, the education secretary from 1970 to 1974, would not have believed so strongly in her own personal superiority had she not been sent to a grammar school by her father or been awarded a place at an elitist university. Tony Blair, who came to power with the mantra ‘education, education, education��, and his one-time education advisor Andrew Adonis might well have had very different views on what a good education consisted of had they been differently educated too. In contrast, the authors of this book explain how every ‘young person can walk more than a few steps with genius��. They could have added that the geniuses among us tend not to seem quite so clever when you spend long enough hanging around them.

So many people who have steered the course of English education in recent decades, from prime ministers through to policy wonks, appear to have held the belief that they have truly realised their own personal potential and that it was because they held within themselves such great potential, which had somehow been allowed to burst forth and be realised, that their amazing ideas should be implemented. Such pomposity is pricked at many points in the pages that follow, including examples such as how, for all the hours of senior management teams brainstorming risk assessments, no one foresaw what might happen during a pandemic, through to how ridiculous it is that so many children are excluded from schools in England. Some 1,579 pupils are permanently excluded from English schools each year for each one of the five children excluded a year in Scotland �� so almost 8000 a year in total in England. Try to imagine how that feels each year for each and every one of those children, for the rest of their lives.

Education, at its best, frees you from being told to believe that you are the natural inferior of others. At its worst, it leaves you with the impression that you are the natural superior of others. Education in England is in a terrible mess. If you don’t believe me, try describing what happens in your town, city or village to someone from elsewhere in Western Europe. Tell them how different children are selected to go to different schools. Tell them about the languages and arts that we no longer even try to teach. Tell them what ensues when our children are asked a maths or science question that is not directly connected to one of the answers they and their teachers have guessed would be on the exam paper. And then ask them what happens where they live in other Western European countries that did not travel the post-1976 road we took in England.

��

For a PDF of this book Foreword, and link to where it was originally published click .

When the coalition government first introduced its landmark Health and Social Care Act in 2010, health secretary Andrew Lansley claimed the ��would never again need to undergo such huge organisational change.

But even at the time, one widely respected commentator����that �� far from being the final fix that Lansley had advertised �� the act “could become this government’s ‘poll tax’��.

In the event, it has been a slow-burn poll tax. Only now, ten years after it came into law, are we seeing its full effects, with publications from����to the����reporting that “A&E delays are ‘killing up to 500 people a week’��.

This figure �� 5% above the normal number of people who die each week, though that baseline is also rising �� can surely be traced back to the act, which ushered in a greater wave of privatisation than ever before. It compelled NHS management to behave as if they were in the private sector, competing to win business, and led to an increase in the proportion of contracts won and the use of contracts overall.

At the time, the damage caused was little noticed because government cuts in the first round of austerity targeted local authorities and adult social care. The first group of people to see their����were elderly women who most often lived on their own. It was in 2014 that this connection became apparent.

Back then, the government was still confident, with the Department for Health and Social Care rebutting any suggestion that austerity and privatisation might be linked to mortality. The privatisation figures were also opaque. In 2015, halfway through��’s tenure as health secretary, it was reported that��. By that point, private firms were winning 40% of new contracts �� far higher than the 6% spend share claimed by the government and almost identical to the 41% won by NHS bodies.

��

A busy ward in an NHS hospital, Nick Moore / Alamy Stock Photo

��

The first great increase in mortality was recorded in that same year, a 5% rise that the government tried to��. The problem with that explanation was that the stalling and falls in life expectancy were not seen to the same extent��.

By 2019, life expectancy for women had����of all neighbourhoods and in over a tenth for men. Poorer people, both old and young, in poorer areas suffered most, with infant mortality among babies born to the poorest parents rising. Later there was a��.

As NHS waiting lists spiralled, a tenth of all adults, most of those who could, were����in 2021. But, in doing so, they lengthened the lists further by jumping the queues and thus diverting resources.

By April 2022, the number of vacant beds in hospitals was at����Estimates of the damage done kept rising. Less than six months later, it was claimed that austerity since 2010 had led to��, twice as many as from the pandemic.

Now, A&E departments are stretched to capacity, unable to clear patients to other beds in our hospitals as they could in the past. Those other beds cannot be cleared as they were before because adult social care has been repeatedly decimated, with what is left being tendered out to private companies.

All of this was foretold. In the four years after 2015, the value of one group of private sector contracts in the NHS��. These figures were released just before the 2019 general election, partly in response to��, then the health secretary, claiming that “there is no privatisation of the NHS on my watch.��

Again, the damage was not so much through the extent of covert privatisation, but through the wider ethos that had been promoted. Take the USA: most of the enormous amount of money spent on healthcare there has little impact on improving health, because the ethos is wrong.

It is sometimes said �� wrongly, that is �� that the NHS has not been further privatised because the share of its spending that went to the private sector remained roughly the same between 2012 and 2020. By 2020 that share was about 7%, or just under £10bn a year. It����during the pandemic when the government paid private hospitals to treat patients, but because overall health spending rose, the proportion remained roughly the same, still around 7%.

But the number of private companies involved did increase greatly, particularly in areas where there was already more private healthcare.��, private firms were delivering a quarter of all planned NHS hospital treatment in the least deprived areas of England, and 11% in the most deprived areas. Those shares �� which have risen since 2020 �� are higher than the overall 7% because it is in planned hospital treatment where the private sector has most infiltrated the NHS.

Last year, the����put paid to Lansley’s claim that he had fixed the NHS ‘once and for all��. The act reduces the compulsion of the NHS from having to tender so many services to private sector bidding in future, but it was not designed to stop the rot. It will not solve the service’s problems, though there is hope that it could be the beginning of an actual change in ethos.

The pandemic made the effects of privatisation clear: Britons now have the����and some of the worst post-pandemic outcomes. But the successive health secretaries who inflicted this tragedy are unrepentant.

In 2018,����Hunt’s cuts in screening services, blaming them for delaying the detection of his bowel cancer. Hunt, meanwhile, went on to become foreign secretary and then chancellor of the exchequer. His legacy, as����last year, is “one of missed targets, lengthening waits, crumbling hospitals, missed opportunities, false solutions, funding boosts that vanished under scrutiny, and blaming everyone but himself.”����on live TV for money.

Belligerence, bravado and buffoonery. We got here because too many of us believed the words of fools.

��

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

Three different think tanks produced three contrasting analyses of the effects of the Chancellor’s autumn statement of November 17th 2022 and its accompanying Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) report. Everyone agreed that we were almost all about to get poorer, but it was not clear who would suffer the most.

The first, analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), said that ��The most striking figures in the OBR report are those pertaining to living standards, as measured by Real Household Disposable Income per person. Down 7% over this year and next, much the biggest fall in living memory and off the back of very poor income growth for many years. This will hit everyone. But perhaps it will be those on middling sorts of incomes who feel the biggest hit. They won’t benefit from the targeted support to those on means-tested benefits. Their wages are falling and their taxes are rising. Middle England is set for a shock.��

��

The distribution effects of the November 2022 autumn statement �� IFS

Source��

��

The IFS produced the claret and amber graph shown here, showing the longer term implications of the autumn statement on households. The chart is of the ten conventional income groups. The implication being that the worse-off would benefit most. This was due to the state pension and many welfare benefits being up-rated by inflation. The IFS graph implied that the richest would lose the most due to tax rises. Their summary, that middle England was set to be hardest hit, suggested that the richest could quite easily absorb this dip. It was a dip their graph showed to be actually slightly smaller in terms of share of income of the best-off tenth, as compared to the loss for next best-off tenth. The IFS highlighted how a particular focus on targeting some more energy-cost-related benefit payments to the very poorest (to help with the rising costs of fuel) had caused the incomes of the poorest tenth to rise higher than pre-statement changes had promised.

Of course, the IFS graph was just showing changes in income, not in income after taking into account the rising cost of living �� which is why the poorest appeared as if they were doing better than before, whereas in fact they were about to become much poorer. The second graph shown here, drawn by The Resolution Foundation (RF), illustrates this. The RF produced the most complicated and colourful chart, their “Figure 31�� emphasised how the removal of the Health and Social Care Levy had given most money to those in the very top 5% of the income distribution. The levy had been announced in the run up to Christmas 2021, and was removed by the short-lived chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng with effect from 6 November 2022. It was one of the few things Kwarteng did, along with lifting the cap on bankers bonuses, that Jeremy Hunt, his successor, did not reverse. The very best-off benefited the most overall, although the title of “Figure 31�� does not make that very clear, and as a percentage of their income, the gain for the top 5% is lowest, because their incomes are so very high.

��

The distribution effects of the November 2022 autumn statement �� Resolution Foundation

Source:

��

A third think tank, The New Economics Foundation (NEF), produced the third graph shown here (coloured green/blue), based on the same data as all the others, but now showing by how much worse-off households will be after the rising costs of having to pay for essentials had been taken into account, alongside any tax and benefit changes. It was titled: ‘The poorest households will fall a further £2,300 a year behind the cost of living�� and showed that it was the poorest who would lose out the most, despite their benefits having been protected. By this way of looking at things, only the best-off tenth of households would be any better off by 2024 because essentials make up such a small proportion of their costs, and because the OBR expect these household to increase their overall income a little, even after paying slightly higher taxes (for instance by increasing the rent they charge their tenants, for those of them that are landlords).

��

The distribution effects of the November 2022 autumn statement �� NEF

Source:

��

The NEF concluded that by April 2024, 37% of all UK households would be unable to afford the cost of essentials like putting food on the table or replacing clothes, while an additional similar proportion would be much worse-off than they had been a year ago, but still would be just about able to get by. The remaining quarter would be least affected, with a tiny few in their number becoming even better-off than before.

Finally, a fourth think tank, The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), had waded in earlier, on September 23rd, after the mini-budget. The graph they produced back then had been far more simple, only coloured red. You can try to imagine what the overall situation of households living in the UK would have been if those tax cuts proposed in the disastrous September mini-budget had been enacted and the additional targeting of the poorest that the latter autumn statement had not taken place. Looking at this final red graph, and with the knowledge of the earlier three, you can see why even the international money markets reacted in horror at what Truss and Kwarteng were proposing earlier that autumn.

��

What the distributional effects of the September 2022 mini-budget would have been �� source IPPR

Source: and

��

All of the other think tanks (known collectively as Tufton Street) were largely silent on the November autumn statement, having heralded the September mini-budget as a resounding success. It had been their own former employees who had devised that catastrophe and who in many cases had been forced out of their special advisor and civil servant jobs shortly after it was announced, but a few still remain. Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak are not that different from Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss.

Most of the ensuing media debate was about Middle England. The other countries of the UK were not much mentioned (that contain fewer of the very best-off), nor that the poor would suffer most and some bankers least. Unlike the mini-budget, the autumn statement will have increased income equality a little, it is just that we will be mostly both a little more equal, and all much worse-off; except for those at the very top who have been most protected still �� for now.

Who knows what winter will bring and what the actual spring budget of 2023 will be? A solidarity tax on the wealthiest 23,000 families, as Spain introduced in 2022, is unimaginable to many who live in Middle England and still mostly support the Conservatives today. But it might soon be hard to dismiss so easily.

��

For a PDF of this article and its original place of publication click .

We should not be alarmed at the rise in global population; it’s inequality, greed and waste that are the real problems of our age.

Damian, the first newborn registered in the Dominican Republic on 15 November, was chosen to symbolise the 8 billion milestone, Photograph: Orlando Barría/EPA

��

The news of the 8 billionth person joining our species last week was a joyous affair, with the UN secretary general,��, declaring it “an occasion to celebrate��. In contrast, when the����hit 4, 5, 6 and 7 billion, in 1975, 1987, 1999 and 2011 respectively, there was widespread��, although that did reduce with each billion. The doubling of our numbers in 47 years did not bring about the famines and other disasters widely����in the 1960s.

As Poonam Muttreja, the executive director of the Population Foundation of India, explained last week, we welcomed the new child whose birth marked this event and we are��. We have learned that most of our population growth is not due to births but to most of us living much longer, as the Swedish physician and statistician Hans Rosling so brilliantly��When sadly��, aged just 68, global average life expectancy was 72.

Collectively we are ageing, but life expectancy����in 1981. Then, people lived, on average, five years longer than in 1971 (61 years rather than 56). We will not become ever older and the rate of increase has been slowing globally for four decades.

Births����with an echo of that peak 24 years later. The UN now predicts that there will never again be as many children born in a year as were born in 1990. Globally, births in 2022 were 8.5 million fewer than in 1990, despite there being far more potential parents alive today. Worries about populations growing in countries����are about people living longer, something we should not be concerned about. The average woman in Tanzania in 2020 was a mother to four children, 9% down on a decade earlier. UN projections are for that fall to accelerate to 15% a decade, to an average of 2.3 children in 2080.

The slowdown is due to billions of women demanding the right to choose how many children they have

One abiding myth is that extra people will inevitably add to carbon pollution. It is a myth sold like snake oil to the mathematically illiterate. “Everyone has a carbon footprint,�� the tale begins. Thus, any increase in people must increase carbon pollution. The same could be said for shoes. The myth would be that if there are more people in the world, inevitably there will be more shoes. But most of us do not behave like����when it comes to shoes. In 2021, 22bn pairs of shoes were��, 9% fewer than in 2019. Similarly, our concerns over food, healthcare, education and housing should not be our numbers, but instead our inequality, greed and waste. These are the real problems of our time.

We are ill prepared for the population slowdown. We have been taught to fear an invasion of migrants. But it will be through migration that the slowdown to come is tempered. In Europe from 1946 to 1961, more than 12 million children were born each year. Fewer than 7 million are born a year now and falling. In many parts of Europe, one-child families are��. That is only a problem if you fear migrants.

A few people����that some countries are not doing enough to reduce their populations. But those Cassandras are falling in number even faster than global fertility rates. Like the Trojan priestess, they fear that no one will believe their warnings. Unlike her, they do not have the gift of prophecy �� none of us does. However, to date, births are falling fastest where they are most common. They fall even when governments, concerned about supposed virility of their nation, try to��.

��

UN population projections of 2022

��

To hold up birthrates, as researchers����last week explained, “countries with smaller, older populations need to realise the full social and economic potential of all citizens, including migrants and their families��. They cautioned that attempts to limit access to abortion, contraception and sexual education, in Poland in 2021 and the US in 2022, are not just misguided, dangerous and distressing, but futile.

Successive UN projections have repeatedly underestimated just how rapid the fall in births has been

Our worldwide human population explosion began in the 19th century, largely due to the actions of a����forcing people off the land within their own countries and invading and destabilising more stable societies worldwide. When Europeans settled in colonies around the world, and imposed free trade in goods (including opium) on countries such as China, they caused such chaos that the very slow population growth of the past millennia was transformed into a worldwide population explosion. The global slowdown is due to the actions of billions of women demanding the right to choose how many children they have or if they have children at all.

We will have to wait longer for the next milestones to be passed. With good fortune, I will be 70 when the global population is projected to reach 9 billion in 2038. Perhaps, by then, we����to mark the occasion by celebrating the birthday of an elderly person, rather than suggesting we reach the milestone due to an extra birth?

Most of us old folk will not be around to see the����reached in 2059. That 10 billion year could be much later than 2059 or not at all. Successive UN projections have overestimated future population growth because they have repeatedly underestimated just how rapid the fall in births has been. However, almost all children today will live long enough to be alive in the key year, currently projected to be 2086, when for the first time in the recent history of our species the number of humans on Earth falls overall.

No longer rising in our numbers will be as momentous as we imagine����or��discovering a new continent��to be. And is infinitely more likely.

��

Danny Dorling is Halford Mackinder professor of human geography at Oxford University. He is the author of��Population 10 Billion,����and��

��

For the original on-line article and a PDF with all references listed click .