Danny Dorling's Blog, page 18
June 17, 2019
The future is bright and the geography is clear
Brexit has been a disaster with silver linings. The process of trying to leave the EU and the end result could finally jolt the British elite out of their superior complacency, and thereby make the country a fairer and more humane place. We easily forget that on 14 November 2011, David Cameron told the guests at the annual Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London that he had ‘an opportunity to begin to refashion the EU so it better serves this nation’s interests…’
Such arrogance and ignorance!
Poly Toynbee and Danny Dorling, Lewes Town Hall
Things fall apart when empires crumble – most severely at the heart of that former empire, in the imperial capital city, and then across the home country. Rediscovery is attempted again and again, until eventually the former heart of the empire becomes reconciled with its new fate. It has always been this way and yet we rarely try to learn much from the fate of past empires. This time, we think, things are different. They are not. This time we are told that we will rebuild the empire. We will not. Things fall apart. It’s just a stage that the British are going to have to get through.
British failings are understandable, because the British have recently ruled over the majority of the known world. Every group of people that has ever done this has taken time to adapt to no longer being superior. And Britain’s leaders are mostly – intellectually or literally – descended from some of the most effective despots the world has ever known. They know how to pull the wool over people’s eyes, lie and hold on to power for as long as they can. The national narcissism required to rule an empire does not dissipate overnight. But the benefit of not growing up under the weight of such sad misconceptions is that we finally see through the men (and they are almost all men) who have so recently been trying so hard to lead us out of Europe.
We will make a prophecy here. They do not yet know it, but what the Brexiteers have actually sped us towards is the final whimper of the old ideal of the British Empire. Before Brexit, they could harbour their fantasies of national superiority – unshackled from the EU, where Britain (or at least they) would be both richer and freer. Now they have called their own bluff and are about to be found out.
The future is bright and the geography is clear. Partly as a result of Brexit, the next generation will soon have a far better idea of the sins, misconceptions and ignorance of their fathers, and hence will be relieved when the UK ceases to be a significant military power. It is for the next generation to make Britain decent, to make Britannia humane, and to consign the empire’s triumphant songs to history. The rest of the world knows what the British are going through and why Britain has an identity crisis. It is just the British, mainly older white people in Britain, who so often still don’t understand it.
Corbynomics: The politics of inequality in the age of Brexit
…
The text above is an extract from “Rule Britannia: from Brexit to the end of Empire” by Sally Tomlinson and Danny Dorling, read out as part of a speech givens shortly after the Peterborough by-election and the European Parliamentary Elections at a Hastings and Rye Constituency Labour Party Public Meeting, Lewes Town Hall, June 8th 2019. Click play below to hear the recording:
Polly Toynbee is speaking first on the saliency of the subject of inequality and how it has been affected as an issue by the Brexit impasse. She is followed by Danny Dorling talking on ‘The Politics of Inequality in the Age of Brexit’, beginning with the extract given up which is from from the chapter: ‘A Land of Hope and Glory?’ in the book ‘Rule Britannia : Brexit and the End of Empire‘. The recording ends with questions from the audience.
Corbynomics: A day exploring how to rebuild Britain
Saturday 8 June 2019, Lewes Town Hall
June 13, 2019
The best start in life?
In Japan, I once met a man who was starving. He was proud and he was dying. He told me that he had not been able to launch his fishing boat in three months because of the price of fuel. Japan has an acute problem of poverty, but it has low inequality.
Kristin Surak [letter LRB 6 June 2019] suggests that in Japan ‘Abenomics … has shrunk real household in a country that is now one of the most unequal in the OECD. Nearly every country in Europe has a more equal income distribution than Japan, where one in six children grows up in poverty’. One in six is low, and Japan is not one of the most unequal of OECD countries.
The policies of Abe Shinzō do not help Japan, but as Sagiri Kitao and Tomoaki Yamada in their comprehensive report of May 14 2019 explain, ‘ongoing rapid and massive demographic ageing is the driving force of the aggregate trend of inequality’. In all societies people tend to be paid more equally when they are young with disparities being widest between those nearing retirement.
Kitao and Yamada use the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure (NSFIE) which is released every five years. The latest data will be collected in September, October and November of this year; but only October and November for one-person households. One-person households are now very common in Japan. However, despite their rise, the May 14 2019 report found that in Japan ‘income inequality of households above age 65 has declined sharply since 1980s [and that] this is accounted for by a more comprehensive coverage of the public pension system’. In other words the rise is due to ageing within working ages, not ageing overall.
The OECD comparisons to which Surak refers are based on the Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions, conducted every three years by the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare which are now known to give misleading results in international comparison. The OECD itself explains that for these ‘Another source of official data, the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure conducted every 5 years by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, [which] shows a higher median income and lower poverty and inequality…’
A report on the most reliable survey in Japan, as reported on 14 May 2019, finds that ‘Households in the highest quintile receive 1.9 to 2.1 times the average income. The top 1% receive 4.4 to 5.0 times the average. …Unlike in the U.S., where the income grew the fastest among top earners since the late 1980s until the financial crisis of 2007-2008 …, the share of the top earners in Japan remained almost unchanged during the post-bubble period.’
In February 2019 the UK’s ONS reported that the share of household equivalised disposable income received by the richest 1% of individuals in the UK, in the financial year ending 2018 was over 7 times the average and had risen as compared to 2016/2017. The share of the best-off 1% of UK households is much higher than for individuals, much more than twice as high as their 5% take Japan.
On the 14th of May, on the same day that we learnt that inequality in Japan was so much lower than in the UK, the CBBC Newsround programme told children that child poverty was becoming the “new normal” in many parts of Great Britain and that around 1 in 3 children were now living in poverty, set to rise to 37% by 2023-24. You have to go back to the era when a young John Craven was presenting Newsround to find child poverty figures as low in the UK as they are today in Japan. A government spokesman told Newsround that the authorities in the UK now ‘provide free school meals to more than one million of the country’s most disadvantaged children to ensure every child has the best start in life’. Free food for the few is not the ‘best start in life’.
Last month, just before Philip Alston, the United Nations rapporteur on extreme poverty released his report, Human Rights watch revealed that ‘pupils at Orchard Meadow and Pegasus primaries schools in the Blackbird Leys area of Oxford are among those receiving leftover fruit, vegetables, bread and dried goods from supermarkets and wholesalers delivered by the Oxford Food Bank’. The budgets of those two Oxford schools are no longer sufficient to pay for free school meals, so both now use food banks.
The starving old fisherman man I met by the docks will now be dead; but the Japanese, thanks to their low level of income inequality, are today amongst the longest lived people in the world. In contrast, life expectancy in the UK is low for Europe, and falling. Twice as many children are growing up in poverty in the UK as in Japan, and that is rising. Unless we act, a child growing up in Oxford today is more likely to die homeless in the city than to attend one of its two universities – but that is the least of their worries.
Earlier this year British social scientists estimated that the proportion of adults starving in the UK was around 3%. They also found that between 2004 and 2016 food insecurity among the least well off almost doubled. In Japan 98.4% of elementary school children receive a free school lunch. It is just seen as lunch. Despite Abe Shinzō, children in Japan still have the best start in life.
Danny Dorling,
Oxford.
For PDF of the published shorter version of this letter in the LRB and a list of sources click here.
『東海道江尻田子の浦略図』 – Tōkaidō Ejiri tago-no-ura Sea coast at Tago, near Ejiri – sketch (1830)
June 11, 2019
Global trends over time – apart from climate, is almost everything else about to get better?
Some ideas to share with current London-based Social Science PhD students. We may be slowing down as a species. And, if so, we may not just be slowing down in terms of how many children we have, but in almost everything else we do other than the rise in global temperatures we live with. If this is true – what does it mean? And what measurements suggest it is true? Or is it just an artefact of measuring almost any aspect of our lives – that not long after we begin to measure something, the rate of change in that something appears to decelerate?
Danny Dorling speaking at the Economic and Social research Council (ESRC) London Doctoral Training programme (DTP)s’ Social Science Research Day: Social science to serve society: Communicating research to make an impact, Friends’ Meeting House, Euston, London, June 7th 2019.
Are we now slowing down?
May 30, 2019
Letter sent to the Financial Times Newspaper (London), Thursday May 30th 2019
We believe there are issues of concern over the governance of the UK’s largest private pension, the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS).
The Trustees have a fiduciary duty to act in the interests of scheme members. A board member, with expertise in statistics, raised serious concerns about the quality of the evidence and analysis being presented to the board. How were these concerns addressed and investigated by the board of Trustees? Did the rest of the Trustees investigate these claims adequately and act in the interests of scheme members?
If the Trustees or the USS executive are unable to act in the interests of scheme members, then they should resign. If the employer and union appointed Trustees are failing to act in the interests of scheme members, then it is the responsibility of UUK (via the Employers Pensions Forum) and of the UCU to replace the Trustees.
We believe the conduct of USS valuation over the last two years has brought the scheme into disrepute. An enquiry is urgently needed to obtain the necessary information to assess the USS’s claims, review the conduct of the USS executive, Trustees and the Pensions Regulator, and ultimately to rebuild members’ and employers’ trust and confidence in the scheme. It would be appropriate for a select committee of parliament to investigate.
Finally, we would like to thank Prof Hutton for her exceptional work as Trustee.
Signed
Dr Alison Cameron (Bangor University), Dr Neil Davies (University of Bristol), Professor Danny Dorling (University of Oxford), Professor Bianca de Stavola (University College London), Dr Natasha Howard (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter (Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, University of Cambridge) and 1,012 others:
Aberystwyth University
Dr Christopher Phillips
Aston University
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Bangor University
Prof Vian Bakir
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None
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Queen Mary University of London
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Retired
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Richmond, the American Int University in London
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Royal Holloway University of London
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SOAS, University of London
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University of Chester
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University of Chichester
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University of Dundee
Dr Ian Ellis
Prof Kurt Mills
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Mr Andrew Swiffin
Mr Ian Swift
Dr Timothy Wilson
University of East Anglia
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Dr Georgia Philip
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University of Edinburgh
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Ms Angi Lamb
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University of Essex
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University of Exeter
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University of Glasgow
Mr Christopher Boyd
Prof Louise Matthews
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University of Greenwich
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University of Hull
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University of Kent
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University of Leeds
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University of Leicester
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University of Lincoln
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University of Liverpool
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University of Manchester
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University of Nottingham
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University of Reading
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University of Sheffield
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University of Southampton
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University of St Andrews
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University of Strathclyde
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University of Surrey
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University of Sussex
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University of Wales
Huw Davies
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University of Warwick
Dr Adam Johansen
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University of Winchester
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University of Wolverhampton
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University of York
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May 28, 2019
How the end of Britain’s empire helped Leave to its initial 2016 victory
The collapse of Britain’s empire in the decades after World War II was followed by a huge growth and then persistence of extreme economic inequality. Britain’s relative economic decline occurred in tandem with the loss of almost all of its remaining colonies in the 1970s and the economic benefit they had provided. The British thought that joining the European Economic Community in 1973 could replace this loss. It didn’t, because the European relationship was mutual, rather than exploitative.
At the same time, within Britain, inequality began to rise. Income inequalities rose from being among the lowest in Europe in the 1970s to being the highest of all 28 European Union member states by 2015, the year before the EU referendum. And the UK’s income inequality also saw the greatest rise during this period between 1976 and 2016.
Great inequality has damaged the lives of the majority of middle-class Conservative and UK Independence Party (UKIP) voters who live in the south of England. It damaged their lives because it hurt so many of their children and grandchildren’s life chances. Whereas their generation, when young adults, could more easily secure permanent housing, start a family, hold down a steady job and – if they were to secure a place – attend university for free, it’s primarily because of rising inequality that the next generations in England could not so very often do so.
In the local elections of May 2019 the Conservative party lost 1330 seats, Labour lost 84. In the European Parliamentary elections that took place later that same month, the loses for the Conservatives were even more devastating. When they are compared to the most recent, 2014, European election results the combined number of seats won by the Conservatives+UKIP+The Brexit Party in Great Britain fell by ten. The number of seats won by Labour fell by ten. The number won by the Liberals, Green and other minor parties rose by twenty. Pro-remain parties did much better than the pro-Brexit bloc, and better than Labour (which was pro-Remain but ambiguous).
In Northern Ireland the picture was similar. A unionist pro-Leave candidate who was allied with the European mainland far-right lost his seat. That seat was won by a pro-Remain candidate of the Alliance party. Across the UK as a whole, the drop in far-right members of the European Parliament totalled eleven MEPs. This was the largest fall in far-right voting ever to have occurred at any European election in the UK since the first was held in 1979. Here far-right is defined as being in a political party aligned to groups that are to the right of the main (EPP) European Conservative bloc.
‘Leave’ no longer has the support it enjoyed in June 2016. This is what happens at the end of empire. Eventually the penny drops. In May 2019 the tide turned away from Leave. But that raises the questions of how did the situation get to this, why now and why here in Britain and not in any other state of the EU?
Please click here for the on-line version of the full article this is an edited extract from, including all references, and a pdf of the article including all comments (comments which often help to make the case for there being much ignorance of the role empire has played). And click ‘play’ below if you are interested in how these events are understood when the decline of that old Empire is put in the foreground:
Audio recording of Sally Tomlinson and Danny Dorling, speaking about their new book: Rule Britannia: Brexit and the end of Empire, Hay Festival, Hay on Wye, 25th May 2019.
May 26, 2019
Hay Festival 25th May 2019 – Rule Britannia
Sally Tomlinson and Danny Dorling speaking at the Hay Festival, on the Oxfam Moot Stage, May 25th 2019 – the day after Theresa May resigned.
How many more Prime Ministers will Brexit end? And when will the British finally wake up to the dawn of the day when they realise the Empire is over, that they are special no more, and that it is time to become normal?
A talk about the book: Rule Britannia: From Brexit to the end of Empire, first published January 15th 2019
Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson speaking at the Hay Festival 25th May 2019
May 24, 2019
On the 200th birthday of Queen Victoria: Theresa May resigned
How did it come to this? What is happening to Britain and why? Why now? Why such an enormous mess?
A few ideas are given in this article written to celebrate Empire Day May 24th 2019.
The article explains that the song to sing today goes as follows:
Brightly, brightly, sun of spring upon this happy day
Shine upon us as we sing this 24th of May
Shine upon our brothers too,
Far across the ocean blue,
As we raise our song of praise
On this our glorious Empire Day.
If you are interested in just how badly (almost) everything has fallen apart in the UK then this very short 18 minute keynote speech attempts to sum it up. It refers to the graph below.
The choice, as the talk explains, is between 36% and 38%.
Danny Dorling speaking on: ‘A more equal society is better for everyone: how can government, education, and employers help us get there’, at the Bridge Group Conference 2019, BBC Radio Theatre, Broadcasting House, May 21st 2019.
Figure 1: public expenditure as a proportion of GDP 2002-2020
May 22, 2019
What Brexit (and its aftermath) teaches us about Britain
With gratitude to the woman who founded the Brexit party for coming along and asking the world’s longest ever question. Hopefully you are intrigued.
The curse of the public Brexit lecture continues. Within just a few days of speaking on Brexit at The Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place, at University of Liverpool, (May 16th 2019) Michael Heseltine, “the 86-year old Tory ‘Tarzan’ and dog-throttler‘ had his whip removed by the Conservative party. What he was doing with the whip was unclear.
Click play below to listen to the talk, and listen out for Catherine Blaiklock, former geography university student, alumn of Christchurch College Oxford, and founder of the UK Brexit party asking her question. She was allowed to ask and ask and ask. She hadn’t turned up until near the end of the talk – but who needs to listen when they know so much 
May 21, 2019
Brexit and the end of the British Empire, Keele Public Lecture
With gratitude to the man from the Stoke area who asked the first question, after listening to this argument, and said: ‘You put me right’.
Title: Brexit and the End of the British Empire
Abstract: From Brexit the British may learn a great deal about themselves as a result of having voted to ‘Leave’. Not least that Britain, and even Brexit, has its roots in the British Empire. Traditionally British Geography, a subject that was partly born in its current form in Britain due to Empire, has not been very good at explaining what the Empire was and why it mattered so much to Britain. Brexit may well be the point at which the English, in particular, finally learn about the importance of geography. Geography is central to Brexit from the Irish border through to the modern day priorities of India. Living with the highest rate of income inequality in Europe could have been the real problem for the British, not being in the EU. The source of British woes was not immigrants or some perceived lack of sovereignty, but of their own making, and possibly partly an outcome of having so recently been at the heart of the largest empire the world has ever known.
Rule Britannia: From Brexit to the end of Empire
May 6, 2019
Lakin McCarthy Presents Danny Dorling: Rule Britannia
A talk on ‘Rule Britannia, From Brexit to the end of Empire‘ – at Komedia Comedy Club, Brighton, May 5th 2019.
Now is the hour to turn our attention to what really went so very wrong for Britain: accepting gross inequality, not understanding our own history, blaming the north and the working class for what the south and the middle class chose – Brexit. An authoritative, insightful and entertaining look at our controversial past, the anxiety-filled present . . . and the possibility of a fairer future.
A mock “BBC graphic” of how many seats each losing party lost in the local elections of May 2019
Rule Britannia: From Brexit to the end of Empire
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