Danny Dorling's Blog, page 6

The souls of the people of Oxford

Something was done differently on the lands of the University of Oxford during the exceedingly long summer vacation of 2023. Something that had not happened in many a year. Someone, or possibly, a group of someones, made the right call. Our tale concerns river banks, and whether they are crumbling, along with bridges and local participants; including Mole, Ratty, many young swans, and at least one otter. Old Badger was unsure whether it was wise to allow the stoats and the weasels such leniency, but relented. Toad, at first confused over the fuss, slowly came to realise that being seen as aloof, tooting as he passed the lower orders in his car, might no longer be a good look.

 

One of the two foot and cycle bridges over the Cherwell prior to 2023 repair.

The events took place not far from the J.R.R. Tolkien bench in the University Parks, and they concerned, above all else, children. What was to happen to the children if access changed?

Children’s stories, when told well, are of jeopardy, suspense and excitement. However, because you are not a child, I will tell you now that this story turns out well in the end. At the least, I hope it does, as the story is not over yet. It continues into the short Michaelmas term, because the bridges it concerns are still shut and the diversion I will tell you of remains in place. It will not be over until a great many years have passed, because it is the part of a much longer story, of how a city and its university changes. Of how ostensibly small things do really matter.

Our story begins many centuries ago, with the seizing of lands, and their dubious transfer of ownership. Its long history concerns the growth of empires and how the most insignificant of river crossings, a ford for oxen became what it is today. But for now let’s skip all those centuries and begin, only 150 years ago, in 1873, when a young man, studying in Dublin decided to apply for the demyship to attend Magdalen College, Oxford. He won the funding and so, in the autumn of 1874, came up to read Greats. His name was Oscar.

In those days it was far harder to traverse some parts of Oxford than it is now, but much easier to move between other parts of the city. To enter the city from the east, if not traveling on the main road, you would travel past the newly built Somerset public house,1 and use the ferry at Marston (marsh town).

To enter the city from the west, if not travelling on the main road, you would have taken a causeway through the often-flooded fields to the Fishes pub, and then used the ferry at the back of the pub to cross the Hinksey stream. Willow Walk would not open until the 1920s, and the route via the Fishes was in disrepair.

It was a time of renewed public spiritedness. Change was in the air. The Slade Professor of Art, John Ruskin had recently established his School of Drawing and Fine Art. He gained national notoriety, and much later a plaque, when he directed his students to repair the road leading to the Fishes ferry. This was both for the common good, and so that the students should each become a little more individually buff, through exercising their muscles.2

Sign at the site of the public spirited works of undergraduates in Oxford in 1874.

Among the many young men Ruskin enrolled was Oscar, who was a little wild. The high-ups were not amused, and the episode was recorded in the chronicles thus: ‘Most controversial, from the point of view of the University authorities, spectators and the national press, was the digging scheme’ not just because it was encouraging the youngsters to use their brawn, rather than direct the labour of others, but because of what effect such activities had on the young men. The chronicle continued: ‘The scheme was motivated in part by a desire to teach the virtues of wholesome manual labour. Some of the diggers, who included Oscar Wilde, Alfred Milner and Ruskin’s future secretary and biographer W. G. Collingwood, were profoundly influenced by the experience: notably Arnold Toynbee, Leonard Montefiore and Alexander Robertson MacEwen. It helped to foster a public service ethic that was later given expression in the university settlements, and was keenly celebrated by the founders of Ruskin Hall, Oxford.’3

Inset of larger map (reproduced below) showing Addison’s walk and the footbridge behind St Clement’s Church

It can be a dangerous thing, being generous to others. Who knows where it might lead? Once you begin where might it end? Oscar Wilde went on to achieve great things, including writing the essay from which the title of this short story is derived. He was also treated with evil malice. However, Oxford was changing, the country was changing, the world was changing. But why did these fine young men not do their manual work nearer to their colleges? One answer, illustrated by the map above, was that they did not need to. At that time there were public pathways through Magdalen, but, sadly no longer.

There was a bridge across the Cherwell river, not just the bridge that bore the name of Wilde’s college, but dozens of other bridges, and a great many ferries as well. There was a bridge just south of St Clements church (the footings remain today), another just north of the bridge, a third at King’s Mill, a forth crossed from Magdalen School into the land between the rivers just south of Magdalen bridge. Take that route, and then the river could be crossed by two ferries into either Merton’s field or Christ Church meadow. The Cherwell already had a huge number of crossings, which was why Wilde found himself digging out and laying a route for the public to use, in Hinksey.

There was another ferry just 100 yards south again, and many more north of Magdalen College allowing the public to walk across college lands. The penny-farthing had only been invented in 1871, and no one cycled. I would include more maps here, but space is limited. Don’t fear, you can explore the past until your heart is content, by zooming into the wonderful interactive map that the National Library of Scotland now provides, free of charge. Via the Internet anyone can now see how the ancient rights of way cut through the colleges without having recourse to a map library.4 You can change the dates of the map to see when each bridge was removed – because almost all of them, eventually, were closed. Apart from Magdalen bridge itself.

When Oxford became the home of the new motor car, foot and by now some cycle bridges, the punt ferries and public access over college land were mostly consigned to the past. We too easily forget that, before the car, it was the bicycle that made Lord Nuffield his first fortune.

Along with the new cars came buses, which did for the trams that used to run through Oxford. Lord Nuffield was a cunning man and had a financial interest in the buses, but don’t let’s go down that dark track. Instead, let’s just remember that once Oxford had so many bridges and ferries crossing the rivers because people mostly walked and (later) cycled to work along convenient desire lines. Local people continued to mostly walk or cycle in the 1960s and 1970s. The university barred students having cars in Oxford in 1968. Their cars were sometimes made by local men, almost all of whom cycled to work.

The crossings of the Cherwell in Central Oxford, circa 1873

Oxford University was also changing radically in this period. In 1873, Annie Rogers won first place in Oxford’s senior local exam list. Both Balliol and Worcester offered exhibitions (funding) for such an achievement, but not for a woman, because that was against the rules. Rules exist for a reason, to be changed when the time is right. Annie campaigned for open and full membership of Oxford University for women. She won the right to be awarded a university degree in 1920 and became the university’s first female graduate. In 1937, on her way to an evening lecture, she was killed when hit by a lorry on St Giles’.5 She also has a blue plaque.

Annie’s Plaque

Sadly, our story now turns down a darker road. The University was also becoming more insular. In 1908 Kenneth Graham explained what can and cannot be said about such matters: ‘The Mole knew well that it is quite against animal-etiquette to dwell on possible trouble ahead, or even to allude to it; so he dropped the subject.’ I have not the space to detail it here and it may be thought impolite, so it may be best to drop the subject. But should you want to know why the last alternative routes were shut, the bridges closed, and one college even built a moat around its grounds in the 1980s, then turn to R. W. Johnson’s account: ‘Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age.’ Published in 2015 by the one-time Bursar of Magdalen it triggers a warning for our more enlightened times today. Alongside some hurtful comments about local children in Oxford, it tells of why those public routes over college land were shut to keep the children out.6

Our story twists and turns: there was some progress in more recent times. It was not always unrelenting bad news. Two new bridges, Lemond and Fignon, were built to create a new route to alleviate the harm caused by closing so many public routes through Oxford. Whoever named the bridges (around 1990) had a sense of humour: ‘In 1989 Laurence Fignon, after 3,285 km of cycling and 21 stages plus a time trial, lost the Tour de France by 8 seconds to Greg LeMond. This is the smallest margin in the history of the Tour. And as the bridges are separated by an 8-second cycle ride someone had the whimsical idea of naming them after the two rivals.’7

On 21 April 1990 the Oxford Mail announced that an imminent decision was about to be made by the University’s Hebdomadal Council on a new cycle track to be laid across the University Parks with a tarmacked section placed over the River Cherwell meadows.8

 

 

The newspaper article ended:

‘Talks for a new safer route to avoid traffic congestion and the dangerous roundabout at the Plain began 13 years ago but floundered because of University objections to the use of The Parks.’

Those talks had begun in 1977. Look closely at the map and you will see that one bridge was originally planned to be set back from the other. This was so that the genitalia of the dons sunning themselves on Parsons Pleasure would not be visible to lady cyclists riding by on that bridge. In the end, nude male-only bathing was brought to an end in 1991 and the path opened with the two bridges aligned. Old Badger may not have approved, but rules exist to be changed.

And this brings us, almost up to the present day. Even in some of the University’s darkest days of closing itself off, the provision of the new track was possible, and the ending of legal flashing by the equivalent of today’s associate professorship was banned. However, after the routes across the colleges and rivers were cut off, new signs began to appear, almost everywhere. More and more signs instructing people to stay out, or if they come into a particular area, to then behave in a certain way. Civility was to be enforced by edict.

In 2022 cyclists expressed their displeasure at the ‘ridiculous and petty’ signs banning bikes in Oxford University Parks. A new sign had just been erected replacing a slightly less offensive one. Below the sign was a notice, printed upon a background of Oxford Blue, and embossed with the University Crest. It informed the reader, standing in University Parks, that ‘CCTV images are being monitored and recorded for the purposes of crime prevention, detection, and public safety. This scheme is controlled by University of Oxford Security Services. For more information call 01865 272944.’

It was kind of them to provide a telephone number, one now spread far and wide by the photographs of the sign ‘going viral’. Interested cyclists from around the world phoned it to ask why pushing a bike was so frowned upon. The Radio 2 presenter, Jeremy Vine, labelled the signs ‘disgusting’. The cyclist who took the photograph reported: ‘this has annoyed me before and it annoys me now. How petty, discriminatory and inaccessible is Oxford University that they don’t even allow cycles to be pushed through Oxford University Parks? Ridiculous restriction in the so-called cycling city.’

 

Sign erected in the University Parks in 2022.

One commentator did point out that the red circle means ‘not allowed’, and the bar through it means an end to that restriction, so the sign actually implies the end of a no cycling area. Another wondered what would occur were you questioned by a University security official, who presumably had been instructed to give you a sound ticking off should you be found transgressing. What powers did they actually have? To look very upset?

Others did point out that there have been trials to allow cycling in the parks which apparently ‘caused pedestrians distress and it’s nice to have a space just for walkers’. One wonders if smelling salts were made available? The University Parks contain a great many paths, maybe just one could be permitted for bikes to cycle over? However, were that to happen we could no longer pretend that the parks were some oasis of Victorian tranquillity. A relic from a time before the bicycles became commonplace. Perhaps the signs should be altered to permit penny-farthings to allow the charade to continue of trying to pretend nothing ever changes?

And so it was, that nothing changed. The University Parks ban on a bike of any kind, even pushed, remained. Residents of north-east Oxford had only two routes for those who cycle into the city centre: either around St. Clement’s and the Plain and over Magdalen bridge, or along the new cycle path, into Marsh town. Anyone, including children cycling to the many schools from their homes in the South West and West of Oxford were similarly limited. And so it might have remained except that bridges age and fail and new (Swan) schools are built. Thus, many more children began to use the Lemond and Fignon bridges. But suddenly, on July 10th 2023, without warning of the timing, or public consultation, signs appeared at the bridges announcing their closure for ten weeks from mid-August.

 

Sign that appeared without warning on one of the bridges

Later, in July, a map was made available telling cyclists that whilst the bridges were closed they must either use the Plain, or take a huge detour around the Marston Ferry road; a route which is now saturated with children cycling to both the Cherwell and Swan schools in morning and evening. The map, unsurprisingly, resulted in anger. The immediate question was: who had drawn it, why had they drawn it and who had approved such ridiculous detours?

A map made available later in July

We now know that on the 22nd of June 2021 a man with a hammer inspected Fignon bridge. He had then reported that: ‘There is wide delamination of the soffit which was hollow sounding when tapped with a hammer. A large area of the soffit concrete cover was missing and additional areas spalled off following light tapping with a hammer.’9 A plan began to be made to repair the bridge which would mean an extensive period of closure, but no local councillors and none of the curators of the parks appeared to have been informed. Some in Oxfordshire County Council must have known, but local residents, university students, older cyclists needing a safe route, parents of school children, cycling organisations, were given no warning almost up to the very point when work was to begin.

When the official notices appeared in summer 2023 people began to take notice and offer suggestions. One city councillor suggested that it might be possible to cycle through the red ‘not appropriate route’ (see map above) and appeared to celebrate that if that occurred, that because a gate was involved, at least life would be made harder for those who ride Deliveroo bikes: ‘so this would rule out the bulkier bikes used by Deliveroo and the like – not a bad thing.’ However, appearing to approve of anything that makes life harder for the servants who bring us our food, is not a good look. What various participants thought of others began to become more and more apparent.

And what of the University’s position? It was almost impossible to find anyone who would claim responsibility, but eventually it was revealed that: ‘The Parks Curators have been kept informed of the discussions but have not formally considered any options involving the Parks, as no alternative routes have been determined viable.’

Determined by who? I and many others asked.

Eventually, on August 1st, an FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) sheet was released by the man who had held that hammer in 2021. The FAQ was only issued to local councillors so that they could parrot some stock answers. It was not made more widely available as there was no public consultation. The FAQ suggested that there was an imminent risk to boaters, apparently. Think of the boaters! Who is thinking of the boaters? But are the boaters, on their punts, more important than local people going about their daily business? Apparently so. And thus it was deemed that something had to happen, urgently, although it was over two years since the after the bridge was tapped with a hammer.

 

Dead willows and the otters

The FAQ sheet was written in response to a local resident’s suggestion (made and ignored) that a pontoon bridge could have been placed just south of Lemond Bridge to land on Mesopotamia in an area of scrub with no trees affected. Apparently every tree, unlike every child, is sacred. Those installing the pontoon bridge would have to be wary of the dead willow, one which by August 2023 had been unsafe for many months with a heavy branch hanging by a slender sliver of wood. The dead tree was clearly just as dangerous to boaters as the decaying concrete under the Fignon bridge. Neither the University, Environment Agency (the successor to the National Rivers Authority) or the County Council had shown any interest in dealing with the dead willow.

Advice from the City Council’s Wildlife Officer mentioned otter sightings, stating that providing that the lower arm of the river along Mesopotamia was kept clear and free for wildlife, then the threat to otters in and around Parsons Pleasure would be alleviated. No otter nests had been found within 150 meters of the bridge work (which could have been a serious constraint on the way the works were handled). So wildlife threat was not a good reason for not building a temporary pontoon bridge. The temporary route would lead straight onto the bridge into Music Meadow from Mesopotamia.

Ben Dodds
Principal Engineer | Oxfordshire Highways
Milestone Infrastructure

 

Companies that provide temporary pontoon bridges specifically state that their bridges can be suitable for mass gatherings such as festivals. They can deal with large crowds and heavy loads.

A suspicion grew that the project manager for the bridge renovations working in County Hall but employed by Milestone Infrastructure, through an out-sourcing contract with the local authority, had not thought through any of the problems or alternative options that could arise from closure of the bridges for an extended period. Almost inevitably, a commercial company puts profit above public utility. It seems that this has happened here. The project manager had a desk in County Hall, but when asked by a member of the public whether he was a local government officer he categorically denied this, saying that he worked for the private sector.

Oscar Wilde might have a thing or three to say about Milestone Infrastructure and this behaviour. Thinking this through, and coming up with a sensible and safe way of dealing with disrupted cycle traffic, would have been harder work. It was what this private company’s employee was saying which resulted in the University administrators claiming: ‘no alternative routes have been determined viable.’ The buck, it turned out, stopped with the project manager, who was also the man with the hammer in June 2021. Or did it?

On Friday 18 August 2023 the cyclists of Oxford added their voice to the clamour from local parents, as well as those concerned that elderly cyclists were also being directed to the Plain. The cyclists were concerned by a ‘too long and too dangerous’ diversion as the cycle path was closed. They were upset upon learning that ‘Oxfordshire County Council says it had “no choice” but to close the route for bridge repairs, but some have questioned why a “safe” diversion has not been directed through University Parks, with it instead visiting a notoriously dangerous roundabout…’10

The cyclists reported that the most damming of English words had been invoked and someone was – I almost dare not write the word for fear of shocking you (trigger warning) – ‘disappointed.’ A city councillor invoked this damning condemnation: ‘I’m very disappointed that, after six weeks of discussions with the university, county council and local residents we have been unable to find a safe alternative route across Marston Meadows’.

Things became a little heated. Who was it that had acted on the man with the hammer’s advice? Were they willing to stand by it should a child die on the Plain on their way to school? That was the obvious implication of all the questions being asked. The atmosphere became a little unpleasant, but fear not, loyal reader, for here our story finally begins to take a turn for the better.

Committees don’t sit over the summer, someone, somewhere made a decision all by themselves to do the right thing (or a small group of someones). Or, to be more truthful, to make the smallest of possible concessions when the heat of this somewhat tortured tale, became too hard to bear. Someone realized that it is the University of the city, not that the city exists to serve the University. And that anonymous someone gave permission for Andrew Gant of the County Council and Alexander Betts of the University to issue a joint statement.11 Thus it came to be, that exactly a month after the FAQ had been issued, and within days of the schools opening, on the 1st of September 2023, Oxfordshire County Council issued an official notice, on their website. And a new word entered the lexicon of instructions in this tangled tale, a softer word: ‘urged’ – see if you can spot it in the text of the statement below.

One councillor reported: ‘The University reserved the right to pull this diversion if it’s not working, if we can’t get the marshals (or, unlikely, it’s not used). So people are encouraged to volunteer’. This was accompanied with messages such as ‘will hopefully be a jolly experience for those who take part.’

Why were marshals needed? Why were cyclist being urged not to use the now pink dashed route (formally red) on the map below?

Apparently it was because ‘the river banks are very unstable and risked people falling off them into the river as they are not very wide’. My chair is named after a man who once climbed a mountain. It was time I manned up. I knew my duty and so got out on my bike and cycled the pink route. In the spirit of past great explorers entering lands without the appropriate permission, I set forth on my bike.

 

Andrew Gant of the County Council and Alexander Betts of the University issue a joint statement.

Geographers, of which I am one, have years of training as regards rivers. I have endured the most terrible of horsefly bites while standing still holding a measuring rod in rivers in more than one country. I am, amongst much else, something of an expert on river banks. And I can report that the river banks are not unstable, that you are a very long way away from the river when cycling on the route, and that you would have to try extremely hard to fall into the river. If you are interested in doing that (falling in) then cycle along the cycle path next to Oxford canal, you will find yourself much nearer to water and in much greater danger of falling in. Here, I am not suggesting preventing cyclists from using the canal path, just take it extremely carefully and slowly. And if you want a narrow cycle path – there are many in Oxfordshire far narrower than this that are shared by both bikes and people. But it is the contractors to the county, employed by Milestone who are the ultimate authority on river banks in the city of Oxford today.

The ultimate ownership of Milestone appears to be vested in French private finance multi-millionaires. This company had been sub-contracted by Oxfordshire County Council to carry out their responsibilities, just as the University has in effect, subcontracted its responsibility to ensure a safe well-maintained set of paths into Oxford to the County Council, while retaining ownership of the land. Everyone thought they could sub-contract their responsibilities away. And so the man with the hammer ended up taking the heat. A colleague wrote to me ‘Maybe I haven’t misunderstood this, but sometimes I am ashamed to be part of this university.’

But this story ends well, the marshals appeared, enter the Oxford yellow vests. Sporting their best gilets jaunes (blanche and orange for two stylist dissenters). Five marshals appeared on the first day, and maybe another five on the second. The last time I pushed my cycle along the new Oxford blue route (map above) I only counted two marshals – but let’s not tell the University that. It can be our little secret. On 19th September, following a meeting of the Parks authorities, marshals and councillors, a decision was made to extend the time for using the alternative cycle route through the Parks by half an hour. More importantly, the Park authorities are engaging with others.

 

Oxford’s yellow vests – those who first marshalled the safer alternative route.

I guess the marshals were required to maintain the Victorian ambiance of the parks – a Victorian park comes with Victorian style marshalling and Victorian attitudes. Someone somewhere really wanted to get the children to get off their bikes and pushing them – even if the alternative is to cycle round the Plain; which becomes a faster route once you require the children to push their bikes through the Parks.

I decided that I would rather not know who that person was, so did not ask.

Previously I had sent hundreds of emails over the summer to try to determine who was responsible, and then plead with them to take action. I was far from alone, I had a vested interest. My nephew cycles that route to school. My youngest son cycles it to serve wine and carry plates of food in the evenings at a college, his only alternative would be the Plain.

In some of the replies I received I detected something I had felt before, as an Oxford child, and later on first arriving back in Oxford over a decade ago but never had the language to describe. I have that language now: The Oxford sneer – the curled upper lip – the sneer has a particular quality to it in this place. It may be subconscious, but it occurs in written communication as much as being a facial feature you might find hard to control. It is less useful, less attractive, and far less well known than the Oxford comma. But it definitely exists. Those who claimed an alternative route for cyclist was needed won out, despite others sneering that none of this was needed. I asked questions (by email) that revealed just how little they knew of the city they lived in. I kept the emails. I always do.

On the 14th of September 2023, former city councillor Roy Darke, one of the most effective campaigners to ensure that the University was not too stupid, had a letter published in the Oxford Times. Its text reminded me of Utopian stories of successful urban design in which the old will look out on children playing, with parades of perambulators being pushed by, young men and women passing merrily, alongside the cycling old maids on their way to evening mass in the autumn mist, and those in wheelchairs also well accommodated. But it also offered up a new vision, or rather a modern vision, of what we once had long before any of us were alive, and how we might win that back again – more active travel routes across the rivers and into city:

‘It is with pleasure that I sit eating breakfast on Edgeway Road and see youngsters (and others) cycling safely in and out of town on the safe ‘alternative route’ whilst the bridges are renovated. But let’s not be too complacent or sycophantic about this temporary reprieve from the fatal and only alternative route offered for cyclists by the County Council. Requiring 11-year-olds to cycle to school via The Plain was downright irresponsible and showed open neglect of public duty and a lack of spirit and imagination.
The University and local authorities should more openly take joint responsibility for making Oxford a safer and more equal place. A safe city means looking to create more vehicle free routes for cyclists and pedestrians. A series of Calatrava-style cycle bridges across Magdalen (Addison’s Walk), Christchurch Meadow (linking to Meadow Lane), through LMH etc. would add enormously to cycle safety and excite the aesthetic scene in this inspirational city.’

There are many different Calatrava style cycle bridges to be seen all around the world. Most are short and subtle, but some are large enough to span the Thames and allow shipping to pass. One is shown here.12 We are a long way behind the Dutch (in so many ways, including, when it comes to travel), but there are many ways in which new bridges can be built. As well as new platforms across meadows, over steps, and through Fellows’ Gardens.

A Calatrava style bridge – in the Netherlands.

Like Newcastle and Gateshead have now across the Tyne, and Oxford once had, there should be again seven bridges, cycle and foot, across the river Cherwell. We should have so many ways to cycle that when one route needs to be repaired it causes no problems. Far better to donate money for a bridge to save lives, than for yet another university building that doesn’t. The many colleges that border the river could all have a bridge for cycles and walkers, or make the existing ones open. Since I have returned to Oxford in 2013 the only new bridges that have been built were two, both built to ensure that students (unlike Oscar Wilde) would not have to mix with the public.

If you don’t know by now, why all this has to change, and why this is not the end but only the beginning of a story, then think of what happens when everything changes, forever, with no trigger warning. Don’t think of the child necessarily, or of the old lady who gained the first degree cycling across St Giles, on her way to an evening lecture. Don’t think of the mother of two, or the husband, wife, boyfriend or girlfriend. And don’t necessarily think of those school children. Instead think of their parents, their friends, their siblings (like me), and their children, their partners, those who live with what happened for the rest of their lives; and – if you can, think also of the drivers. When a car, or bus, van, or lorry hits a cyclist hard – without any trigger warning – everything changes, forever.

On the 28th of April this year the BBC ran a story featuring Ling Felce who was killed when she was hit by a lorry on 1st march 2022 on the Plain.13 The story was about how just one extra incremental change was being made to the design of Oxford’s still most dangerous roundabout. Lorries were to be banned from loading and unloading goods between 7am and 10am and 4.30pm and 7pm on or by the Plain. But what happens outside of those hours? What will happen when the next University scientist dies on the roundabout?

 

Ling Felce

Ling Felce’s husband has spoken out, including to the BBC, about thinking of the family of the vehicle drivers –which is very admirable and something rarely seen in public.14

The County Council, as the democratic planning authority, needs to establish a review group to reassess cycling in the city. Its aim should be to ensure no road deaths of cyclists, of pedestrians, of drivers or passengers (vision zero) and that far fewer are injured every year. The colleges, the University, the city and county local authorities need to work together to establish safe connections between all the University’s sites, the city’s schools and homes. The University itself should employ a cycling expert to coordinate action for safer cycling throughout the collegiate university, and to work closely with the local authorities so that the university, and especially the colleges, are helpful – rather than being a hindrance.

Finally, the Cycle Track and Mesopotamia are always closed on 25 December and 1 January. Do we really want to increase the chances of a death on the Plain on Christmas Day because we are so scared of re-establishing what was once a nearby right of way?

 

1 http://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/stree...
2 http://openplaques.org/plaques/3780
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ru...
4 https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/side-...
5 http://www.oxonblueplaques.org.uk/pla...
6 http://www.threshold-press.co.uk/memo...
7 https://www.cyclox.org/index.php/2023...
8 https://www.headington.org.uk/maps_tr...
9 https://docs.planning.org.uk/20230220...
10 https://road.cc/content/news/cyclists...
11 https://web.archive.org/web/202309030...
12 https://inhabitat.com/arching-melkweg...
13 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...
14 https://www.roadpeace.org/prevention/

 

Danny Dorling is a patron of RoadPeace, the national charity for road crash victims in the UK, and the brother of Benjamin Dorling (1971-1989), who was killed by a car when cycling on his bike, coming home, in Oxford.

 

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

Ed Balls and George Osborne’s new podcast is essential listening – but not for the reasons they think

In an apparent attempt to “talk across the political divide”, former chancellor George Osborne and former shadow chancellor Ed Balls have launched a podcast.

Political Currency has been billed as a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the rooms and minds where the key decisions are made. But what is perhaps more evident from the opening episodes is not how politicians of different parties can communicate so much as how they can collude.

It hasn’t taken long for the two men to use the podcast to celebrate their joint achievements. This began with the current Labour party “sticking with the two-child limit on welfare, which I [Osborne] introduced.”

Balls’s response was telling:

Well, that takes you to an interesting thing in British politics which is that in the end, however contested things are, the only things that last are the things that become consensual. So, the Conservatives opposed the minimum wage in 1997, you [Osborne] ended up boasting about raising it. The Conservatives opposed Central Bank independence in 97/98, you ended up being a champion of it. The trade union reforms of the 1980s, which many Labour People hated at the time – clearly Tony Blair and Gordon Brown carried on with them. So, things which are contested can become consensual and when people agree, that is often how our county moves forward.

Issues on which Balls and Osborne appear to happily agree have so far included setting a very low minimum wage for huge numbers of workers and greatly curtailing the ability of trade unions to protest and organise.

Those of us who listened on learnt how cross-party consensus was achieved in Westminster on the policy to restrict benefits so that parents can only claim support for two children – not a third or any subsequent child.

This policy has been a key driver of child poverty in England and Wales, where a majority of children who have two or more siblings go hungry several times a month. The policy does not apply in Scotland and Northern Ireland, which are now the two places in the UK where child poverty rates are lowest.

Child poverty, 2014-2022.
End Child Poverty Coalition, CC BY

And yet poverty itself has so far only been mentioned once on the podcast, around halfway through episode one. Even then, our hosts were talking about pensioner poverty – an issue that matters, they explained, because so many votes are involved.

In the same episode, Osborne revealed how the New Labour and Conservative parties had colluded (or “worked together”, as he put it) to “see the state pension age go from 65, to 66, to 67, to 68”. He continued with another example of how key issues were agreed by both sides rather than being put to the electorate:

I remember Peter Mandelson coming to me before the 2010 general election, he was the [Labour] deputy prime minister, and saying “we want to put up student fees, tuition fees, but we can’t do that before an election, its too difficult for Labour, why don’t we set up a report, and while you as Conservatives hopefully want to see the tuition fees go up so that the universities are better funded, why don’t you sign up to this commission and it can report after the election?”

Balls agreed that this was the right way to go about things, that the two main political parties of the UK should agree policy between themselves, as the “grown-ups in the room” while ensuring that it appeared as if each election mattered.

The two men appear to agree on almost everything of any substance. Or if they don’t, they’ll work out their differences between themselves and tell us the result later.

 

Listen to the ‘grown-ups’

So far, Balls and Osborne have been in a celebratory mood in their discussions. They appear very happy with the current state of British politics and the people in charge. There is much bile disguised as banter.

Both have particular contempt for Boris Johnson, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, with most of their anger directed at Miliband, who they linked, at length and unfairly, to Russell Brand. They both disagree with Brexit but accept it. For them, in 2023, the grown-ups are back in charge again – and that includes their gaining air time.

Listening to them, I’ve thought of how the austerity policies they speak about have led to deprivation in the UK on such a scale that many children no longer grow up properly, physically or mentally. How the average height of five-year-old boys in the UK has risen and fallen since 1990.

Average height of five-year-old boys, 1990-2020:

Average height of five-year-old boys.
The Lancet/ITV, CC BY

If Balls or Osborne have an explanation other than child deprivation for the above trends, it would be interesting to hear it. The most convincing explanation I have heard as to why we have tolerated such high inequality and poverty in the UK for so long was reportedly given at a private dinner in Hampshire in 2002, when Margaret Thatcher was asked what her greatest achievement had been. She replied: “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.”

There is an older parallel to be drawn, too. In 1940, three journalists of three different political persuasions wrote a book together: The Guilty Men. They were Michael Foot, Peter Howard and Frank Owen and their targets were the British public figures who appeased 1930s Germany.

A similar book could be written today about the appeasers of market forces who promised that we could live with “tough decisions” under austerity and that children would not go hungry or grow up stunted.

But instead we have the two-men-talking-to-each-other podcast format. In every episode, Balls and Osborne happily outline the thinking behind their actions – the actions that just a few in my generation, given the best starts in life, have taken and have caused such harm to others.

I am grateful to them for using their show to put so much on the record about their time in charge, years before their cabinet papers and other secret documents will be released to the public.

Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, University of Oxford

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

For another link to the the original article and a pdf of it click here

How Britain became a shattered nation

In this excerpt from his new book, academic Danny Dorling exposes a new geography of inequality and social fissures across the country.

Where did you grow up?

For the first few years of my life, I lived in a house on a road between a cemetery and a shopping centre. I don’t remember much of those years, and I suspect that I was too young to really know where I was living within the city. I now know that there was near full employment around me, and that my rose-tinted recollections of smiling faces fitted the mood of the times. People had never had it so good. Britain had never been so equal. Life chances had never been as fair as they were then, and they were better for more people than they had ever been before, even for those who fared worst.

 

 

When I was aged six, in 1974, my family moved to a house close to a major roundabout on the east of the city. In the 1970s, which neighbourhood a child lived in mattered far less for their life chances, and which local school you went to was less important than it is today. House prices varied far less between areas, and children who grew up in private housing and council housing more often played together, largely unaware of whose parents paid rent or had a mortgage.

There were two general elections in 1974. These were becoming turbulent times, but the turbulence had not yet affected my neighbourhood. I later learnt that in the shipyards of Belfast, on the Clyde and on the Tyne, people were losing their jobs. But the car factories in the city of Oxford were still employing thousands. I had no way of knowing that the children in my school year would be the final cohort taken on in such large numbers to work in those factories. The wave of manufacturing unemployment that swept down from the North did not reach Oxford until my later teenage years.

Shattered Nation illustration by Emma Balebela

The ravages of the 1980s swept away most well-paying jobs in the city’s car factories. Deindustrialisation was masked by gentrification as the two local universities expanded. The cheaper neighbourhood on one side of our roundabout had begun to be gentrified. The more affluent neighbourhood on another side had become unaffordable for most people who worked locally. When the manual work began to dry up, the first to lose their jobs were the parents living on the council estate beside a third segment of the roundabout. Many school-leavers could not find work. The reputation of the council estate began to fall, while estate agents talked in ever more glowing terms about the wonderful houses in the more affluent neighbourhood.

The lives of the teenagers I went to school with became increasingly determined by what side of that roundabout they had grown up on. Place mattered much more in the 1980s than it had done in either the 1960s or 1970s. The borders of the local primary school catchment areas became more rigidly defined and apparently important. Children played a little less freely across those borders. A tiny few of us went away to university. Almost without exception, those who did so lived in the ‘better’ segments. I was one of those few.

I came back in my forties to live again in the same city. Recently a local councillor told me that there were over 200 places available on Airbnb in the council estate next to the roundabout. I checked on the website, and at first it appeared he had exaggerated. However, whenever I zoomed in to any part of the estate, a few more Airbnb offers would appear; and not just in the estate, but all around the roundabout. It can be a shock to see that so many of the homes your friends grew up in have been sold on, and bought not by a family to live in, but just to be rented out to tourists.

The Oxford neighbourhood that once had the cheapest private housing – where the majority of homes were originally owned by car-factory workers – is now too expensive for most university academics to afford. Today, it’s increasingly inhabited by London commuters, including political reporters and business folk, many benefiting from being able to work from home while in theory working in London. The most expensive enclave in the neighbour- hood has become an investment opportunity for overseas buyers and more up-market buy-to-let landlords. What was once the local pub is today a drive-through McDonald’s. Fields that I played in as a child are now fenced off. There are also fewer children playing outside; and fewer children overall. Today, children mix far less with other children.

If you grew up in Britain, think of what has now become of your home neighbourhood. Very few areas of the country have become less divided over time. Those that have tend to be places that have been abandoned by money and are becoming more similar because poverty is rising more uniformly. They are now areas of increasingly widespread and severe deprivation. Conversely, many cities now thought of as affluent have some of the greatest local social inequalities within their boundaries.

I left Oxford at the age of eighteen, and lived for ten years each in Newcastle and Sheffield. The place I grew up in is hardly recognisable to me now. Most buildings are the same, but the city has become a completely different social world.

A similar story can be told of almost anywhere in Britain, but the story of what has happened to Oxford illustrates how nowhere has escaped the crisis of a shattered nation. The city of Oxford is a far more unaffordable, tense, anxious and restless place than it was in my childhood. There are far more students now, many of them coming from overseas and featuring as part of the ‘export earnings’ of the nation. Those who are not from the United States are normally shocked to see how many homeless people sleep on Oxford’s streets. People hardly ever had to sleep on the streets of the city during my childhood.

In 2019 Oxford made national news when it was revealed that the city had one of the UK’s highest rates of homelessness as well as of deaths among homeless people. What most shocked local officials was just how many of those who had died had grown up in the city, had gone away, and then come back. What most shocked me was that many were around my age, and I even recognised some of the names of those who had died. In one case, I was able to provide a name when shown a photo of a deceased person the authorities were trying to identify. He had attended my school.

If you live in the UK, it is easy to believe that everything must be getting worse everywhere. But in most of the world, most things to do with human lives and livelihoods are getting better. People are living longer. Life expectancy is rising steadily almost everywhere, except in the UK (and the US). Almost everywhere, infant mortality is falling faster than in the UK. Almost (but not quite) everywhere, people are better off than their parents were. Economic inequality is falling in the majority of countries, and population growth is slowing even in the poorest nations. The social statistics suggest that elsewhere in Europe people have never had it so good, although in the most equitable and advanced European countries folk tend to be sceptical about social progress and are far more vigilant in tracking signs of a lack of progress than we are in the UK. Other parts of the continent have experienced the socio-economic decline of which the UK is an extreme example, but they are the parts that have more often followed the UK policy mantras of privatisation and individualisation. These mantras are now being questioned more intensely than before.

Shattered Nation illustration by Emma Balebela

We now expect the global human population to peak in number within the current century. Educational opportunities are widening, and that is linked to the global population slowdown, as well as rising rates of equality in so many countries. There is terrible poverty in much of the world, but it is now more often falling than rising. Other economic inequalities are also falling worldwide, although falls in income inequality, and states becoming more stable and safer, never seem to make the news headlines. I can show students hundreds of statistics from all over the world that suggest we are not travelling towards hell in a handcart. But I can find hardly any social statistics about the UK that are particularly positive, and I spend much more time looking for them than most people do.

Climate change, our great global concern, is now being taken far more seriously than it was a decade or two ago. Carbon emissions per person are lower in more equitable countries as compared to the more profligate unequal ones, and especially the most unequal richest countries. We can see what we have to do to reduce pollution. Much may have been left too late to avoid serious harm, but some good things will be achieved. Even the numbers of people directly involved in wars have been falling for decades, although we are rightly shocked by each new war. The threat of nuclear war, something we once thought would be almost impossible to avoid, has fallen over recent decades, although it rose again as a concern after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

I am not pessimistic when it comes to global trends. It is just that closer to home the statistics are all a great deal less rosy. As a nation, we have travelled down a road that people in other nations have almost always been far more successful in avoiding. That has brought us to a particular point and resulted in a particular human landscape in the UK, one that is hard to summarise but perhaps can be best described as shattered: people feeling shattered. Hopes shattered. Much of the fabric of society shattered. The ability of our schools to educate our children well, of our social housing system to cope with need, of the National Health Service to care for us, and so much else – all shattered. Many of those previously just coping can no longer cope. Food banks are proliferating. Levels of debt have increased for millions of people, while a very few of the extremely wealthy have seen their riches soar. So many people are feeling shattered by all of this.

As a nation shatters there is a tendency to see each new crack as being the most important issue of the day. Often the retaliatory response is to say that each such event is just part of a global process that happens to be a little worse for the UK than elsewhere. But there comes a time when bad luck strikes too often, in the same place and repeatedly, for all of it simply to be blamed on bad luck. Geographical comparisons show that most places have not been as badly affected by so-called global processes as Britain has. In fact, many of those slow-running processes have had benign or even beneficial effects elsewhere.

Britain reached its current peak of overall income inequality a very long time ago, in the mid-1990s, and has remained extremely unequal every year afterwards. Ever since then changes have taken place that were not seen elsewhere in Europe. By the time the Labour Party led by Tony Blair came to power in 1997, no other European social-democratic party had placed itself and its policies so far to the right. People joked that Blair was doing things that the right-wing Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher would never have dared to attempt.

At a private dinner in Hampshire in 2002, Thatcher was asked what her greatest achievement had been. She replied: ‘Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.’ This may be a little unfair on Blair, and is certainly unfair to many of the MPs in his governments. But, partly in order to outmanoeuvre New Labour, the Conservative Party was subsequently pushed even further to the right. Indeed, in the European Parliament in 2014, British Conservative Party MEPs left the large centre-right European People’s Party group to instead ally themselves with a small far-right group that included the German political party Alternative für Deutschland.

What had pushed the Conservatives so far to the right? It was the rightwards shift in Labour during the thirteen years the Conservatives were out of office. New Labour introduced university tuition fees of £1,000 a year in 1998, raised them to £3,000 a year in 2004, and then set the stage for them to be increased again to the highest levels seen worldwide by 2012 (the average US state university fees are second highest). Most importantly, the Labour governments of 1997–2010 did not bring inequality levels down.

Britain went on to suffer more severely from the global economic crash of 2008 than almost any other nation. This was because the Blair government, seeing financial services as paramount and seeking to avoid upfront payments by government, had made financial sleight of hand central to its plans, such as by massively extending what was then called the Private Finance Initiative. New Labour had become reliant on the continued growth of the City of London. Austerity, imposed from 2010 by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, was deeper and longer in Britain than anywhere else in Europe. This was partly the result of decisions made by Labour between 1997 and 2010, and not simply because the coalition government, and the Conservative government that succeeded it in 2015, was so callous, although that callousness significantly exacerbated the suffering.

Britain was shattered as a result of the actions of all three main political parties.

And while the leaders of all three opposed Brexit in 2016, it still happened, eventually, in January 2020.

Shattered Nation illustration by Emma Balebela

The key ramifications of the shattering of the UK are threefold. First, we are growing spatially and socially further apart from each other. Second, the five giants of poverty first identified in the 1940s – want, squalor, idleness, ignorance and disease – are returning in new forms. Third, we have growing internal political divisions. These spreading cracks in the social structure are all classic signs of a failing state.

When a state begins to fail, attempts are made to suggest that claims of its shattering are exaggerations. Typically, a list of apparent problems faced by other countries will be produced whenever their people are said to be doing better than the British: ‘What about suicide rates in Finland?’, ‘What about Germany’s reliance on Russian gas?’, ‘What about the rise in “populism” in the US, Brazil, Hungary, Turkey and Russia?’ This response is so common that it now has its own label: ‘whataboutery’, which itself dates back to responses to the Troubles in the shattered province of Northern Ireland in the 1970s

One of the functions of whataboutery is to paper over the cracks by diversion and subterfuge. It draws people’s attention away from what they should be looking at by attempting to make false comparisons or confusing the terms of reference. In June 2021 it was revealed that ‘British diplomats [are] being told to change the way they speak about the UK, referring to it as “one country rather than the four nations of the UK”’.
In fact, hardly anyone tries to present the UK as a single nation, but the decision by the government to refer to it as such is another illustration of an attempt to paper over the expanding cracks. The United Kingdom is nothing of the sort. It is actually becoming increasingly disunited.

When London-based Conservatives mention ‘this nation’, for them there is only one. At the very least, it encompasses all of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a sacred indivisible whole. For some of them, Gibraltar (whose residents were allowed to vote in the Brexit referendum), the Falklands and a myriad of other rocks and islands dotted around the world are also part of their imagined British nation. One idea of a nation is of a place or a people worth fighting for. The few shattered remains of a once vast empire are clutched close to the hearts of a particular group of people who would happily send others to fight to defend every remaining offshore holding.

In a shattered state the invisible walls separating areas grow ever higher. But those walls remain mostly invisible because we are repeatedly told that they don’t really exist, and that there is opportunity for everyone out there. Lip service is paid to levelling up, even as most people are being beaten down. A peculiar map emerges as a result, a geography of places with decaying fortunes encroaching on the enclaves of success.

Those enclaves are found in the more affluent streets of London, but also in the country retreats concentrated mostly within rural parts of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, and in pockets close to the roundabout I grew up beside. The few people who have done well for themselves increasingly occupy the enclaves. In my childhood the better-off were more evenly spread out geographically. However, no enclave of affluence is now very far from other places that are going bankrupt.

In May 2022, a stone’s throw from Eton College, the borough of Slough was ordered to sell off all its assets in the wake of being forced to declare bankruptcy over outstanding debts of
£760 million. These assets included the town’s public libraries, all of its children’s centres, its community hubs and what remained of its council housing stock.

The story received very little media coverage. This had already happened in so many other places. By September 2023 the list of places going bust had even extended to the UK’s largest local authority, Birmingham. It was also becoming clear that the same fate was about to befall more and more local authorities facing escalating fuel bills and eviscerated by decades of central-government policy designed to privatise public goods and services. Most secondary schools had been transferred out of local authority ownership long ago, and most primaries more recently. At least they could not be sold off, but they would now have to face the coming storm on their own.

The pillaging of the state has seen the numbers of UK public sector workers – in other words, people working for the public good – plummet from 23 per cent of all those in work in 1992 to just 17 per cent of the much larger total national workforce today. The proportion is redefined over time by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to allow for changes in definitions of who is a public servant. The most recent large fall in the share of public sector employment began under the New Labour government in 2005 and has continued ever since, despite a temporary halt when the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in 2020. Overall, UK public spending as a proportion of GDP fell below that of Spain in the 1980s, and below that of Greece in the 1990s. It was already lower than almost every other Western European nation following the cuts that began in the late 1970s.

It is worth reflecting on the fact that it was only the least democratic of Western European nations that spent less on public goods after 1980: Spain was still recovering from the dictatorship of Franco, and Greece from the junta of the generals. While the UK continues to be an outlier in the paucity of its spending on public goods, both Spain and Greece are now much more democratic and more like the rest of the European mainland in having large public sectors than the UK.

A country’s spending statistics are presented by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a proportion of GDP. The IMF also reports on what countries plan to spend in the future. The current UK government has said it intends to spend less than almost everywhere else in Europe, even though it will allocate a higher share of its public monies to its military than any other Western European country, and a huge amount to its debt repayments. Here are the percentages for 2023: France and Belgium will spend 55 per cent of their GDP on public services, followed in descending order by Finland, Greece, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany and Spain, and finally both Portugal and the Netherlands at 45 per cent, with the UK way below at only 41 per cent. While the IMF’s projection for the UK for 2023 is two percentage points higher than the 39 per cent spent in 2019, that is a reflection of the rising costs of debt repayment and the projected further increase in military spending, rather than representing any rise in spending on public well-being.

The position of the UK is even worse than the numbers above suggest because in recent years its GDP has not risen as much as that of other European countries. Meanwhile the pound has fallen in value. By the first quarter of 2022 the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) was reporting that average real earnings per person in the UK were a massive £11,000 lower than they would have been had the slow upward trend seen through 1990–2008 continued.

You can still find parts of the UK to visit that have picture- postcard looks and which on the surface appear impervious to change. But even there, when you scratch beneath the surface, all is not well. Behind the Regency facades of Chelsea and inside the barn conversions of the Cotswolds there is growing anxiety. Very affluent people now ask me, much more frequently than they used to, what I think will happen when most people realise what has happened to the UK. I do not have a simple answer for them. The decay is clearest in the suburbs, where families now increasingly rent a home that a generation ago they would have owned.

In Middle England neighbourhoods like the one I grew up in, I get asked to give public talks about how people might cope with the latest cost-of-living crisis. In poorer areas, where things have been so bad for so long, there is less of a sense of crisis and more one of bitter resignation. The crisis of 2022/23, as mortgage rates rose, was very much a middle-class affair, affecting almost everyone who had got on the housing ladder in the current century. It was no longer among the poorest where the pain was most concentrated. The children of the winners from Thatcher’s Britain are now losing out. They face unprecedented spikes in their energy bills, pay rises below inflation and, if lucky enough to have them at all, the prospect of their private pensions becoming increasingly insecure. That was partly why Liz Truss tried to offer them Thatcher Mark II, and why Rishi Sunak presents a re-spinning of Tony Blair–like enthusiasm. But the deeper the malaise becomes, the more any solutions will need to go in the opposite direction to Thatcherism, and the more the question arises: when will so few benefit from the system, a system that already fails so many, that it ceases to be tolerated?

The multiple crises that afflict Britain are worse and have deeper roots than those affecting other European states. The UK is now very likely to be the most economically unequal country in Europe (although until early 2022 it was ranked just slightly more equal than Bulgaria). The repercussions are widespread. It really matters that Britain has the most divisive education system in Europe, tainting our institutions and affecting individuals for life. It matters greatly that the UK has the most expensive and poorest-quality housing, the most precarious and often lowest-paying work for so many people, the lowest state pension and the stingiest welfare benefits. Recently Britain has also experienced the sharpest declines in health in all of Europe, especially in the health of its children. A whole state is being plunged ever deeper into poverty. This is failure. It is not surprising that even the rich are now worried.

As the crisis deepens, geographical inequalities grow and, cruelly, these disparities help to sustain the crisis because they serve to hide the exploitation it involves. The very rich increasingly live apart from the rest of us, leading parallel lives. But so too do the fairly rich, who control most of what is left of the opposition (both within Parliament and the mainstream media), and who tell us that the only rational alternative to our shattered present is a watered-down version of more of the same.

This book is not utopian. Its core argument is that sooner or later Britain’s divisions will have to be addressed because they are now so great that they are becoming unsustainable: too few people now benefit. However, addressing these divisions will not result in a sudden arrival at the sunlit uplands.

Nonetheless, we have been this shattered before, and other states have been too. In every case it took decades to put the pieces back together again. We can choose now either to cultivate hope, so that we have the energy to persevere, or to burn out in exhaustion at the collective trauma that the shattering induces, and allow those who have divided us to continue to do so. This is the choice we face.

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

When we were young: Inequality revisited, a commentary on Geoffrey DeVerteuil’s essay

Not very long ago, the world had a different shape. The cities were shaped differently too. Anglophone geographies brought into life theories about what all this meant. Global Urban Studies was a little prince world. A world in which each prince, each scholar, created their own theory. Theories were plentiful. In Le Petit Prince the Geographer is ‘…too important to go wandering about. He never leaves his Study.’(1) He believes that geography books are ‘…the finest books of all. They never go out of fashion.’ The geographical scholar (who Antione de Saint-Exupéry had brought to life) distained the ephemeral, that ‘which is threatened by imminent disappearance.’ That particular little prince world is no more. The 1990s theories turned out to be ephemeral. Geoffrey DeVerteuil’s essay breathes a little life back into some of them, arguing for not forgetting – not becoming too distracted by the new, especially not by the more obviously ephemeral ideas that often dominate today.

In times within living memory, we talked more about class. It was class, we said, that shaped our cities. City structures reflected our class hierarchy. Flat corrugated iron roofs were the symbols of poverty. Roofs that barely kept out the rain and held in no warmth. Grand homes with high-pitched gables displayed affluence, projected authority, and gave material comfort.

Billions grew up under the deafening sound of the rain on iron. Others, little princes, were driven in cars past those ramshackle homes in their childhoods. They glimpsed lives they could only barely envisage living themselves. They learnt not to imagine. It was the city of walls, of quartz, of iron roofs and townhouses.

The squeezed middle was shrinking. Increasingly, you were either privileged or poor; prince or pauper. The city used to be more corrugated. The elite ridges separating everyday valleys were of lower social elevation in that past. The working-class grooves between them, were higher. The undulations, are more closely packed.

Back then, rich lived nearer poor. But the middle was slowly squeezed out as inequalities rose. Back then, rich were less rich and poor less poor than now. Society, though, was being stretched thin. It was, increasingly, those with more princely childhoods who were writing the new theories. There was so much more to the story of inequality, they suggested. principally, that they had so often, more often, been brought up set apart by money was not of most importance anymore. The princes were aware, they implied, of their positionalities; of their privilege.

DeVerteuil’s analogies of corrugated and lopsided are apt. Today the city is more lopsided. Gentrification has now filled up the gaps between a few of the highest hills of wealth. Proletarianization has levelled down other parts of the city. Now the city looks more like a giant volcano than a series of flattened low-lying valleys. A lopsided volcano with steep cliffs.

The once corrugated city is no more.

Today the very richest little princes own the townhouses, maybe more than one, but those dwellings are now worth so much more than before. In increasingly unaffordable enclaves, in almost every city, the grown-up children of the rest of the rich colonise the tiny homes of those that were once poor. Refurbished at great expense, these residences are named after French jewellery (‘bijoux’).

Said to be worth a fortune, bijoux homes are increasingly purchased for show and because of the princes’ growing fears of living elsewhere. Supposedly a safe investment, they are places where most of their value is derived from being high up on the cliffs of the volcano, up far above the poor. Their purpose is not to display affluence, project authority, or give great material comfort; but to be safe spaces. The princes think they live in modest homes.

As the city became more lopsided, concerns on the cliff sides transformed with the rising up of the social cliffs. To princes, those with the least began to look more like ants, no longer so human, as others are now so far below. Children who had learnt not to imagine being poor, began to see themselves more often as suffering too, in an increasing variety of ways.

You may inhabit a jewel of a home, a bijoux home, but now you too can be just as much a victim of inequality in the new lopsided city.

Today, little prince, your gender, race, sexuality – or one of many possible disabilities and neurodivergences – increasingly matter to your life on the cliff side. Your grievances, you are told and begin to tell others, are of equal importance and deserve as equal respect as any other feelings. Whether as a child you slept on silken pillows or under a corrugated iron roof is just one aspect of your fascinating individual identity.

In London, in 2023 candles began appearing again in the rooms of homes at the bottom of the cliffs. Homes in which the paupers can no longer afford to feed the electricity meter. In Baltimore, and across the United States, is it no longer unusual to have known eviction as a child. In my home city of Oxford, the poorest babies are again being brought up never having been washed in warm water. The fuel prices rose too high in 2023 and in the year before.

As yet, it is only a few who suffer the worst extremes of this new pauperisation in the richest of countries. But it was not like this in the 1990s; and it is all now taking place under the shadow of the princes’ homes, under the shadow of streets ‘worth’ billions. There are far worse stories to be told from the periphery of the United Kingdom, and much worse from the most shattered badlands of the United States.

It is the lopsided nature of the suffering that most grates. The rich, in a time of fuel inflation, do not know how high their heating bill is; they simply pay it. A few also pay the heating bills for their stables and swimming pool, their second, third and fourth homes, and perhaps for their garage too, to keep the car warm.

In Buckingham Palace, a prince who recently became king, turns down his thermostats. But he does it because he cares so much about the planet and he worries, like Antione de Saint-Exupéry’s creation did, about the future of a flower he holds in a pot in his hands. The planet matters more today, and the poor matter less. He wanted to be a defender of all faiths, not just one. Intersectionality matters to him too. He would never ask a guest where they were really from.

This kind of inequality – new extremes of poverty and riches coupled with greater sensitivity for other differences – is today just one inequality among many in our newly more lopsided world. All inequalities have become of near equal importance: racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and the recognition and respect for a myriad of forms of your and others’ neurological different strengths and challenges. But if, little prince, you can claim to suffer from more than one of these prejudicial victimisations, that intersectionality is of greater importance.

Suggest that racism tends to disappear when and where inequalities in income and wealth narrow, and you, little prince, might be greeted with derision and the accusation of not taking deep-seated prejudice seriously enough. Suggest that at the heart of misogyny is an inequality in power, and that above all else it is money that confers power, money that lets some people buy other’s time and lives, and that might imply that you just do not understand and empathise enough with the other, or understand affect and that you concentrate too much on the material. Point out that violence against trans people is disproportionately suffered by those in poverty, particularly those in forced sex work, and you may be suspected of belittling the harm caused by micro-aggressions.

More people in your city may now be hungry each day, but hunger has become just one of many possible sections of a greater intersectionality. As today’s scholarly geographer might observe to a visiting little prince, such distinctions are most commonly (and increasingly) made in the two countries that are home to those who contribute most to geography and urban studies journals. It is where hunger has grown the most in the rich world, where income inequalities have grown highest, that class has been most demoted to now become just one inequality among others.

As the paper that this commentary addresses makes clear, concern for intersectional thinking has become most common in the ‘more neoliberalized contexts such as the United Kingdom and the United States’ (DeVerteuil, 2023). And hunger and poverty of others are now seen as being of greatest concern in places where hunger has become most rare, in the least neoliberalized contexts, in the most equal of affluent nations.

In the 2020s hunger is most rare in the Nordic states and in Japan, France and Germany, in those countries where culture wars are less dominant; where the cities are far less lopsided; and where the poor have more power, still the least power, but they are not as comprehensively so often ignored as they are by today’s Anglophone geographers and avant-garde global urban studies scholars.

Acute poverty is accepted as a part of the new social landscape in the risk-taking U.S./U.K. context. A new arena where what increasingly matters is the multidimensional imagined playing field of opportunities to be made more equal. The fields in which the little princes play.

Among today’s young princelings, those most awake point out that if 16-year-olds can join the army then – if a child is old enough to consent to murder people for their country – they are old enough to know their own mind and arrange for their own medical operations concerning their own gender identity. You hear such arguments less often in the less neoliberalized states.

Yesterday’s young, who were awake, suggested that it was wrong to travel abroad to murder people for your country, whether you were a child or not, whether you were conscripted or had volunteered. They wore flowers in their hair and dreamed of a future in which one day their grandchildren would walk hand in hand.

So much changed in such a short space of time. What was it that transformed the corrugated city to be so lopsided, especially in the homelands of the theorists? Perhaps it was the fastest international growth over time in income inequality being in the United States and United Kingdom? Maybe that lies behind this shift from anti-war protesting to arguing that being permitted to kill is a valid reason for a child determining for themselves whether to have a life-changing operation on their genitals?

It was only a small minority of the old that marched against war and cared so much about the 16th of March 1968 Mỹ Lai massacre. Did the marchers succeed? Do you know of that massacre?

It was just a minority of their children that rallied against growing inequalities in the United Kingdom and United States in the 1990s. They certainly failed. But do you know of their failure or was that just part of so many other battles, all of equal importance?

So, too, it is only a small minority of the young, of the grandchildren of the hippies, arguing that what they think of what lies directly beneath their own navels is one of the most important issues of the day – and it might be. The old often resort to saying it is too early to know.

The lopsided city is a city of growing grievances where the old among the affluent still worry that the pitchforks are coming for them, while their children complain that their parents simply do not understand their problems. All the while, the poor look up bemused, necks craned ever more painfully in the ever-shortening spaces of time they have, between jobs, to contemplate what is happening high up above them.

The poor say of those with power: ‘they are all the same’. Which is worth bearing in mind when thinking about the growing myriads of inequalities now widely recognised within rich families.

What do people argue about in multi-million-pound townhouses? What intersectionality of class, culture war and generational difference matters most to those who do not have to worry about hunger, heat or cold? In the lop-sided city, the debate within these palaces is amplified by what has come to be called social media, which is the platform little princes use to project their views.

You might take great offence at what you see as your right to exist being debated. However, if more and more of us princelings take offence at anything we see as infringing our chosen identities, we will end up spending much of the rest of our lives taking offence. Proclaiming our offence can ever so easily offend other little princes, so we start to dance with our words.

Grow up as an affluent child in the lopsided city and, as an adult, mention your concerns over the comments of others and you may be less aware than, less awake than, and less conscious than the children of the corrugated city are in how badly thoughts can land. Complain that you ‘do not have a right to exist’ because not everyone agrees with your ideas on gender identity, and you probably do not notice the wry smile of the old person whose parents and grandparents were denied their right to exist through the gas chambers. Soon, none of that generation and their memories will remain.

Similarly, claiming that others need to understand that you are the ancestor of one group or another that suffered greatly and that your group’s suffering in particular must be especially revered, can cause offence today too. It is easy to not notice the slight rise of an eyebrow (when you talk of your ethnic suffering) of someone differently descended for instance from so many generations that were enslaved, raped, tortured and killed, such that it is now impossible to count all their tens of thousands of direct ancestors that were slaves – those who suffered for centuries, those from whom their genes come – from the survivors, the living dead, who toiled under the hot sun in just one tiny sugar island in the Caribbean.

Be socialised in the lopsided city and you are so much more likely to see yourself as the marginalised person, the centre-point of injustice. Your talent and individual hard work, you may believe and suggest, is being held back by others who do not respect your feelings enough. You are a part of what DeVerteuil describes as the ‘…greater (and long-overdue) interest in other axes of difference in the city – gender, “race”, sexuality, disability’ (op. cit.). Overdue, this multi-dimensional space of positionality may be, but its advocation hardly ever comes most vehemently from someone without privilege themselves.

Class is now seen as just one of the many axes of inequality, one that there are less and less attempts to reinvigorate. Often today, high up on the cliffs, it is seen as enough if you ‘respect’ and ‘feel for’ those not as privileged as you. Woe betide anyone suggesting that inequalities which result in one group living shorter lives than another are those inequalities which matter most. Especially if the person making that suggestion might quip about knowing your privilege.

A more material account, based on empiricism, might suggest that trans matters most because of the suicides; it would result in a hierarchy of racism which can be measured by whose lives are lost youngest today. This would be a hierarchy that differs in different parts of the world. This would be a counter to the conservative vanguardism that declares that all identarian inequalities are of equal importance. A more material account might emphasise more that it is where women lack socioeconomic capital, or put more simply money, that they are most vulnerable to domestic violence, lack of access to reproductive care, and hunger.

The right to exist is denied, most obviously, to the infants who are born but then very quickly die in that very populous state in Europe with the sixth worse neonatal mortality rate in what was the European Community – the United Kingdom.

The right to exist is denied to more new-borns in the United States, than in anywhere in Europe. Poverty in motherhood and material mortality matter far more than deciding whether it is appropriate to use the word mother, at least to an empiricist.

Within the princelings culture war in the lop-sided city, there has been a displacement of the empirical. The irrelevance of empirical data, of questions over how many people might be being harmed and how badly, is the only thing both sides of the culture war agree on, although the right sometimes plays with data to goad the left. And while their own longevity and personal health and well-being are becoming central concerns of today’s princelings, that of others is mentioned less and less – especially in those disciplines and countries where fashion has most moved towards becoming academically lopsided.

An empiricist might suggest that the disabilities that matter most are those that cause the most ill health and ultimately early death. Grieving parents of dead children matter as much as they ever did, but now have to compete for sympathy with the feelings of others over perceived slights that can only often be taken so seriously because there is so little other suffering high up on the cliffs.

Longevity is not everything, but people, rich and poor alike, worry the most about health in the long run and especially as they become older. All these things can be measured. Grandparents worry most about the health of their grandchildren – often more so even than their own health, and sometimes more than even parents do. We are social animals, shaped to care for others as much, if not more, than ourselves. But in the lopsided city that innate disposition is subverted, replaced with an ever-greater concern about me, me, me.

Fractal encapsulates the corrugated city; a particular mathematical pattern. If looked upon without feeling, without thinking about what it is that is being shown, the fractal pattern of the corrugated city, of the geography of social class, is beautiful – and almost infinitely corrugated. It is the image that best represents the reality that ‘In the corrugated city, the extremes of the city fabric relate to each other in a rough balance’ (op. cit.). Figure 1 shows a pattern of intricate corrugation drawn from the 1981 census of the United Kingdom, the map, a population cartigram of over 100,000 areas, is to the right of two of those first computer generated images of fractals.

 

 

Beneath Figure 1, beneath the surface of 1970s and 1980s census maps, the first ever to be drawn in great detail and in colour using computers, are patterns of great injustice. Then there is what the censuses cannot count, the unmapped patterns of informal 1990s economies, of rising sex work, cocaine dealing (most common in London), wrapped fractal-like around the formal economy of finance and booming after the Big Bang when bankers’ pay exploded. What appears fragmented is often actually fractal. The poor are poor because the rich are rich and both groups are wrapped tightly, geographically, around each other.

Without human cartography, without images, you do not have maps of who is inside each dwelling. The buildings’ exteriors cannot tell human stories, yet there is a renewed fashion for suggesting they can. In contrast and when we were learning more about ourselves, the first maps of poverty, of Manchester and London, were drawn by the sons and daughters of the rich. Without empiricism, today’s scholars in the lop-sided city are left gasping for words. They imagine their reader sees the same thing as they do in their own mind’s eye: ‘unequal and fragmented materiality’ to be ‘visualised via juxtapositions’. What do they mean?

The imaged Blade Runner future of the lopsided city cannot be envisaged simply by viewing the outsides of its buildings. As DeVerteuil explains, the ‘lopsided city is where the powerful few hold increasingly disproportionate power over the majority of the urban population, an extreme version of inequality and unevenness that suggests one side is winning (but has not won entirely yet). This contrasts with corrugation, which suggested that the middle is losing out equally to the extremes at the top and bottom’ (op. cit.).

Stories of extreme inequality best fit the United Kingdom and United States; fit less well the rest of North America, much less so almost all of Europe. Mega-cities in Asia and Africa can no longer be painted in any convincing way as somehow following a similar trajectory to others’ development. The long ago already Blade Runner-like cities of South America showed us how this dystopian future was actually a tale of the past. There is no developmental inevitability of an urban trajectory where every large conurbation arcs towards its own Blade Runner future.

If we little princes think about inequality more as a political concern, not a question of competing identities all requiring equal respect, then that Blade Runner scenario of a dominant elite with increasingly disproportionate power becomes less plausible. As DeVerteuil argues, it is not just our cities that have become more fragmented and fractious. It is also us, and ‘unlike the 1990s, the field of urban studies is currently far more imploded and fragmented, and less obviously driven by class analysis.’ (op. cit.) – why should that be? What happened to us to make us write and think so differently in the years after the 1990s?

We like to tell ourselves it was because of ‘out there’, that reality changed and we changed our theories with it. But what if it was what happened ‘in here’, in our lives, our minds, in the pages of our journals and in our classrooms and academic offices? We mostly grew up in the United Kingdom and United States, in places becoming more divided every year longer we lived.

There is something deeply conservative about academic culture, particularly in its radical iterations. Increasingly we (you and I, my colleague) were more likely to be of the me, me, me, generation and increasingly likely to come from those social groups that learnt to try to avoid imagining sleeping under the corrugated iron roof.

We are ever so emphatic but, in some ways, shallower too. We might complain that our students appear to wallow in the latest fad, but we too differ greatly from the generation above us in terms of what we experienced. We gentrified, and we (I and my generation) provided the stepping stone towards an entitled identitarian disposition to select a more arbitrary classification of injustice.

The activist Geography lecturer used to be the British old-Labour type, or the American hippy. Those have now almost entirely disappeared, to be replaced by the identitarians. DeVerteuil ends telling himself that he must resist the temptation to talk as they might have talked, but instead should wait for the emergent to emerge:

Davis (1990), like much of the self-professed (and much-maligned) LA School, was entranced by the spectacle of surreal inequalities, in turn inadvertently glorifying them, drawn in by the seductive dystopia of the Blade Runner scenario writ large. I must resist the temptation to frame the lopsided city in dystopic terms, given it remains emergent and uneven, such that the relationship between powerful and everyday fabrics continues to be ambiguous. (op. cit.)

Why must he resist? It is dystopic for the majority of people; including even for many of the little princes who most often today get to write theory but struggle to ever gain tenure. But I think DeVerteuil is right to describe the lopsided city, and by implication, the lopsided academy we work in as ephemeral. It will not hold up.

Opposition to the lopsided city must be more than destructive and angry. Like the successful progressive politics of old, it needs to also be constructive, community-building, and creative – to thrive. Find within the lop-sided city parts to love and cherish them. Love and kindness are words which culture warriors find hardest to counter, these are the holes in their lives.

Levelling the lop-sided city requires giving up on some of what has been hard won, but is not worth holding. The little identitarian princes have to begin to give up their hold on the cliff side, their beliefs that all inequalities are equal and, to ‘…this you have got to add the ugly fact that most middle-class Socialists, while theoretically pining for a class-less society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige’.(2)

Something that is too lopsided will inevitably collapse, and with it all the miserable modern fragments of today’s newly re-spun gown of social prestige. The city of the future could, and very probably will, be far less lopsided than the ones many of us live in today. But only if we concentrate more on it, and less on ourselves.

 

Footnotes
1. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943) Le Petit Prince,

2. George Orwell (1937) The Road to Wigan Pier, Part Two, Chapter 11

 

References
Davis M (1990) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso.

DeVerteuil Geoffrey (2023) Urban inequality revisited: From the corrugated city to the lopsided city. Dialogues in Urban Research.

 

 

Danny Dorling is a professor in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford (UK), and a Fellow of St Peter’s College. He is a patron of RoadPeace. Comprehensive Future, and Heeley City Farm. In his spare time, he makes sandcastles.

For a PDF of this commentary and a link to where it was first published click here

The last of the summer whine

‘The refrain we hear again and again is “We have to be electable.” No one disagrees. But is that actually what’s happening?’ asked Jamie Driscoll, when barred from running as the Labour candidate to become the North East (of England) mayor in May 2024. The result would normally be a shoo-in for Labour, but Driscoll may now stand as an independent. Fewer than half of the local Labour members eligible to vote bothered to vote for any of the candidates they were allowed to select from. They had been presented with a shortlist of two, which excluded Driscoll, the Mayor of North Tyne.

If he does stand, Driscoll will be up against McGuiness whose campaign pledge was: ‘As your Labour mayor, my number one priority will be ending child poverty. It’s an absolute tragedy that the North East has the highest rate of child poverty in the country and I’ll do everything in my power to change that. For starters, every request for mayoral funding will have to outline exactly what that money will do to help end child poverty in the region.’ Ending child poverty was a pledge made long ago by Tony Blair, another politician who represented a nearby part of the North East of England. Voters may remember what little that policy achieved. The aim had been to somehow achieve it without reducing economic inequalities . A million children moved ever so slightly over a statistical line that few could feel. But that mattered not while the upper middle class left loved Sure Start Centres, which New Labour kept alive as communities collapsed around them. Sure Start was imposed from above rather than grown from below.

In 1984, very near to where I first went to school, a centre was opened in Donnington in Oxford. That was the year in which the miners’ strike began and when the state was most rapidly withdrawing from public life. It was started by a group of mums, including my mum. It is still there. Donnington Doorstep will be forty years old next year. Long after the politicians stop bragging about what they have achieved and what their opponents haven’t, long after we have forgotten countless different narrations ‘we have to be electable’, what will remain is what we fight for with the greatest hope. What has died is what we didn’t realise to be under threat.

Consider where highest proportion of children are now growing up in poverty:

See: https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk/...

Child poverty may be highest in the North East of England and the West Midlands, but it is also now higher in affluent South East England (in the region that contains Oxford), than in all of Scotland and Northern Ireland. No one in 1984 would have believed you had you suggested such an outcome were possible four decades after Thatcher’s men trod on the necks of the miners. The South East lost too, as did all of England. Child poverty is now so much lower in Scotland that its two English geographical neighbours. One child fewer in every ten is now growing up in poverty in Scotland today as compared to both the North East and North West of England. As I type, child poverty in Scotland is plummeting because the £25 a week Scottish Child Payment for all children who are poor and under 16 kicks in there throughout 2023 – that enhanced payment began to be made in November of 2022.

Scotland fought back. England didn’t. Scotland is still fighting. In June 2023 its minsters pledged to reduce the need to use food banks within three years by introducing a human rights approach to providing cash and hence dignity. There is now a huge difference between pledges made in Scotland and those made in England. At its core that difference is intent. The Scots really do mean to do it. Tony Blair did not. Had he meant to, he would have done so. It is easier to reduce inequality and poverty than it is to go to war. Unlike most European leaders he joined America’s war. Unlike almost all of them, he did not reduce inequality and poverty.

New Labour still has its cheerleaders: ‘Labour’s leader had a strategy mapped out from day one, and nothing has distracted him from it: two years to fix the party, ruthlessly expunging any who damage it; a set of five cast-iron missions; and fiscal discipline, avoiding all spending traps ahead of the manifesto.’ This ‘…is the time to remember May 1997’ the cheerleaders say. But some of us remember 1997 differently to others – the promises, the hope, the exhilaration of the Conservatives being shown the door after 18 years, and then Mrs Thatcher in Hampshire five year later being able to list as her greatest achievement: ‘Tony Blair and New Labour’.

What are the ‘five cast iron missions’ of New Labour in 2023? Here is a summary:
1: Highest sustain growth in the G7 (a watered down version of George Osborne’s 2015 pledge).
2. Make Britain a clean energy superpower (very similar to Theresa May’s climate pledge of 2019).
3. Build an NHS fit for the future (Boris Johnson’s 40 new hospitals 2020 promise, but even vaguer).
4. Make Britain’s street safe (Tony Blair’s ‘tough on crime’ 1993 promise repeated often and in 2021).
5. Break barriers to opportunity (copyright Rishi Sunak, and his ‘spreading opportunity’ 2022 mission).

Labour do promise a few things that are a little different to what the Conservatives offer, such as removing some tax exemptions from private schools, including exemptions from VAT and relief on business rates. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimate that this would only raise tax revenues by about £1.6 billion, would hardly reduce the state-private divide at all, and result in just an extra £100–300 million a year cost from extra state school usage. These numbers are economic policy chicken-feed and do not address the core reasons why the UK has the most divided education system of all affluent countries – its high levels of economic inequality maintaining a small group who can afford the fees and the disregard for state provision from those who do not use it for their own children, or have children.

Labour in 2023 just don’t plan to be that different. They did not in 1997. They say nothing about repealing the Refugee Ban Bill which means that survivors of torture are terrified of what the future holds. When they attack the Conservatives for their proposals in The House of Commons, the Home Secretary can reply: ‘As ever from Labour, there is no alternative plan, and moreover, it does not care that it has no alternative plan.’ When the Financial Fairness tracker in July 2023 found that ‘in the last month, one-in-eight social tenants (13%) and one-in-twelve private tenants (8%) had not eaten for a whole day for three or more occasions, because they did not have not enough money for food,’ Labour can offer only ‘economic growth’. The normally, reserved Equality Trust lead its July 2023 bulletin with the headline: ‘When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich’

This promised growth, Labour’s 2023 internet, is a kind of Woke Capitalism, and Woke is profitable. Policies of inclusion, tolerance, and diversity are beneficial to business. They widen the customer base as all are welcome; reduce risk in terms bad publicity, reputational damage and/or costly legal settlements; and do not cost much. Larger brand conscious companies become especially more progressive, and New Labour – so that blue skies thinking goes – can be too. It is led by younger people as time goes on, people who are relatively comfortable with the social progress of recent decades.

As the social commentor #Max12to1 so astutely pointed out in the summer of 2023: ‘if they aren’t comfortable with social progress, then their kids probably will be, and they will pester their CEO Mum or Dad in that confident private-school manner. They will know who Greta Thunberg is and that their futures are bleak unless things change.’ Max did acknowledge that: ‘these are all positive developments, that it is now impossible to see how “woke capitalism” can be walked back: ‘Walked back to what? A narrower customer base? A toxic workplace full of racism, sexism, and bullying? Endless scandal and massive legal costs?’ But went on to point out that ‘And best of all for those who run big business, Woke is cheap. Woke doesn’t concern itself with pay ratios. Woke doesn’t have much to say on how a business is owned or run. The dividends keep flowing, the bosses get millions, and the cleaners get buttons. A bit more money may have to be spent on the Human Resources (HR) function and on the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme, but the business fundamentals are left in place. Rank unfairness remains, and social and class differences are preserved. Keep calm and carry on exploiting… Woke capitalism may be better than what went before, but it’s not nearly enough. Until we radically change business ownership, and make companies more equitable and more democratic, then #inequality and #poverty will continue to blight our economy and society.’

So, what will the Conservatives do when faced with a Woke onslaught? Expect much more talk of small boats, of putting the hard-working working-class car driver first, of Labour being the ‘Party of Extinction Rebellion’ and, as Jamie Driscoll pointed out, much more questioning over what is actually happening.

Three by-elections were held on a single day in July 2023. The Tories won one, because young people who might have voted Labour didn’t bother to turn out. The young are very astute at sniffing out fake Wokery. The Liberals won another, as they can expect to do in the huge number of seats in which they are currently placed second, or even a close third. Labour won just one. It does not matter so much where you stand in the polls between general elections. If you are relying on the old folk of Selby in North Yorkshire, you are in trouble, because the message you peddle to them will not enthuse the young, and then the old may start to see through it too.

 

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

 

The girl looks out

My Life in Fragments, Zygmunt Bauman (edited by Izabela Wagner), Review

Six years after his death, Zygmunt Bauman can still eviscerate – disembowel the claims of others and skin them of their intellectual pretensions. The penultimate chapter of this collection of older writings, translated from Polish, concludes with his “Last Memories”, revised in 2016 – less than a year before his death. He accuses Slavoj Žižek of falsifying the reality of communism (161), of playing with fire, and states, “I am amazed (and angered!) by the widespread tendency to consider Žižek a left-wing person” (223-226). As he was dying, Bauman concerned himself with what the young might come to believe, and whose call they might mistakenly follow. This edited collection is his parting shot. Often deadly accurate, it is well worth reading.

Born in 1925 in Poznań, Poland, Bauman became one of the best-known sociologists in the world. He only ever applied for one academic job, shortly after World War Two, in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. It was his first and last ever job application. After that “there were only invitations” (134). Forced to flee Poland during its antisemitic campaign in 1968, he went first to Tel Aviv University and ended up working at the University of Leeds. He wrote many books of which the best known are the Liquid series, including: Modernity (2000), Love (2003), Life (2005), Fear (2006), Times (2006), Culture (2011), and Evil (2016).

The first 100 pages of his latest, posthumous, writings concern his childhood. Many in young Zygmunt’s neighbourhoods, including his schoolteachers, were antisemitic, especially his teacher of geography (71). Despite this, as a child refugee he says: “my love of geography came in handy (Romer’s Atlas was the only treasure that I was able to preserve and keep whole in my endless wanderings; I slept clutching it in my arms)” (86). He had to abandon his atlas shortly after the barracks he was staying in was machine-gunned from the air (90-91).

By age 18, Bauman was a soldier, commanding 50 others (106). By 19 he was a second lieutenant in the Polish army and was awarded the Cross of Valour in 1945 for taking Kołobrzeg and fighting “against the patriotic underground” (147). However, not once in this book does he mention how many people he killed, or what that felt like, and how it affected him. He was made a child soldier shortly after 2 September 1939, when the train his family fled on was attacked from the air (76) – that was the second day of World War Two. Had there been no war, he would most likely have become a physicist. Instead, he turned to sociology, and to public writing.

Bauman could not “…live without thinking; I do not know how to think without writing” (30). His books have been “published in more than thirty languages beside Polish (and I will brag: these books are quite numerous)” (161). He writes of hope: “Hope wanders to that eternity that awaits us after death, before us. We trail behind it” (33). He approves of those who promote hope, including Václav Havel, Jan Józef Lipski and Jacek Kuroń, who all lowered “…the price we now need to pay for hope, courage and stubbornness” (187), and regrets he did not try harder during his life to emulate them.

As a child Bauman was intoxicated by socialist dreams of a future Poland, “…for everybody, however weak and wan. A country without hunger, misery and unemployment. A country in which one man’s success would not mean another man’s defeat…” (99-100). In young adulthood he joined and then rejected the communists. He was a lifelong socialist.

As a very old man he wrote: ‘Whether we realize it or not, whether we want it to be so or not, we carry responsibility for what will happen to all of us together. But as long as we do not take this fact into account, and as long as we continue to behave as if it were not so, both we and those around us are, so to speak, the ‘playthings of fate’. We are not free. Liberation comes only when we decide to transform fate into calling; when, in other words, we accept responsibility for that responsibility we bear in any case, and from which we cannot free ourselves; which we can at most forget or trivialize, making sure that our memory of this responsibility does not guide our actions and thus favouring enslavement over freedom” (196).

Even the sixty-word sentences are worth reading. “We live twice” he says, first living and then narrating the experience, a possible “ticket to eternity” (10). Unless we leave it too late and become a medically cultivated “cabbage,” as he appeared to fear for himself (15). At times, though, the multiple cross-references to famous philosophers can grate. Wittgenstein’s lion roars (incomprehensively) outside Plato’s cave, the dark from which the owl of Minerva emerges (at dusk); all in the space of three pages (25-28).

Stronger criticisms can be made. For all of young Zygmunt’s love of a schoolchild’s atlas, he never let his imagination wander far from Europe. Had he looked more closely towards Australasia, the Americas, or Africa, he might not have suggested that: “We, the Jews, supplied the world with the archetype of suffering; perhaps in that lies our greatest contribution to striving after moral perfection” (156); or written of “Kolyma [in North East Siberia] and Dachau, those laboratories in which the limits of human enslavement and dehumanisation had been investigated… [or that] Survivor’s syndrome is hereditary; each generation passes on the poisoned fruits of the bygone martyrdom” (163-164). This may be true, but if so, the vast majority of the world’s population would still suffer from the syndrome – not merely the self-declared European archetypes.

One final oddity is how much more men feature than women, although Rosa Luxemburg is praised towards the end, and Bauman’s wife and daughters feature often. Perhaps there were too few women of note to write about? Or perhaps Zygmunt was concentrating too much on competing with the other boys? This book’s existence is as much a labour of love by women as by the man: Katarzyna Bartoszyńska who first translated it; Paulina Bożek and Leigh Mueller who assisted later in that task; Anna Sfard who undertook the final corrections to the writing; and Izabela Wagner who edited the work into a collection.

Just as when he was a soldier, it is men Bauman attacks most effectively, including, as mentioned above, some of the most useful, terse and apposite words written on the veneration of Slavoj Žižek. Bauman may have failed to install enough hope in his own life, but several years after his death, he is well placed to warn against despair and ignorance, both today and into the future. The value of his books will not last an eternity – but they will continue to be read long enough. My Life in Fragments is among the best of them.

—-

My Life in Fragments presents the life and thought of the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman through an assemblage of letters he wrote to his daughters. Combining biography and broader reflections on the pressing issues of our time, this edited collection provides a sharp, rewarding insight into one of recent history’s most renowned thinkers. My Life in Fragments. Zygmunt Bauman, edited by Izabela Wagner and translated from the Polish by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Paulina Bożek and Leigh Mueller. Polity. 2023.

For a PDF of this review and where it was first published click here.

Zygmunt Bauman

 

 

World population projections: Just little bits of history repeating?

The world population is expected to peak in the summer of 2086. But do the official United Nations estimates give enough consideration to human behaviour?

As the Propellerheads put it so well in their 1997 hit song “History Repeating” featuring Shirley Bassey

And I’ve seen it before
And I’ll see it again
Yes I’ve seen it before
Just little bits of history repeating

 

Shirley Bassey and the Propellerheads

 

Twelve years ago, in June 2011, I wrote a blog (part 1 and part 2) for the Significance magazine website.

I explained that in May 2011 the United Nations (UN) Population Division had released the 2010 edition of its world population estimates and projections. It was then thought that humans would number 10.1 billion within the next ninety years and 9.3 billion by 2050. I pointed out at the time how crude their methodology was. But it had to be simple when so many countries needed to agree with it and not be offended by estimates that might greatly differ from their own.

The UN press release came with both a health warning and a handy explanation of how they estimated a particular type of confidence limit: “Small variations in fertility can produce major differences in the size of populations over the long run. The high projection variant, whose fertility is just half a child above that in the medium variant, produces a world population of 10.6 billion in 2050 and 15.8 billion in 2100. The low variant, whose fertility remains half a child below that of the medium, produces a population that reaches 8.1 billion in 2050 and declines towards the second half of this century to reach 6.2 billion in 2100.”

I questioned why the medium variant projection had suddenly been raised. The reason appeared to be a mini baby boom during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Figure 1 shows the medium variant projection in millions of people (left-hand axis, thick curve). It also shows the first derivative of that trend – the rate of change in population, which for a global population is simply the births in one year less deaths in that year; (right-hand axis, thin curve). A black dot on the thin curve marks the end of the previously unexpected mini baby boom in 2011.

 

FIGURE 1: World population estimates and projections (left-hand axis, thick curve) and annual population change (right-hand axis, thin curve), UN 2011 medium  variant scenario (millions).

 

I suggested that demography might be a complex science, but it is also an art. The sophisticated way to make projections is to calculate life tables and tables of fertility rates by age, and then to carefully project them forward year on year, and to do this for each country, maybe even trying to take into account international migration trends and their impacts. You then add up the results and publish your global projection. There are also far more sophisticated ways of estimating error than projecting that each couple has half a child more or half a child less; although the half-a-child measure does at least have colourful echoes of the judgement of Solomon, and an implication that choices might have to be made.

Turning to the art of demography, I suggested that demographers might consider the past trend and look at the change each year, and then the change in the change, to see if there was a pattern. Figure 2 shows the change in the change that the UN Population Division reports. This is of both estimates of what has occurred and projections into future, all in one thick line. It is the second derivative of population, the rate of change of the rate of change of our numbers. It is births in one year, less births the year before, plus deaths the year before, less the deaths this year. It is the degree to which population numbers are accelerating, when “change in change” is above zero, or the degree to which they are decelerating, when the “change in change” is below zero.

 

FIGURE 2: World population estimates and projections, annual change in population change (millions): UN projection (thick line) and alternative scenario (thin dotted line).

 

In 2011 the UN central estimate suggested that the greatest deceleration would only be, at most, about 1 million people a year and that this would flatten out towards no change in change by the century’s end. I asked the question: what if the future is as spiky as the past? I suggested demographers should look at the trend in Figure 2 of what we think occurred before 2011 and compare that to what is projected to come after.

The projection the UN was making was very smooth compared to the precedent. I debated over whether change in change is just too hard to project and, if so, whether the UN demographers had been sensible to suggest an asymptotic turn towards stability. Then I pointed out that we knew something about what we were trying to predict here. I said: “These are people, but they are being treated as if they were drops of water flowing in and out of a bathtub.”

It was clear in 2011 that the length of time between the most recent peak in Figure 2 (2006) and the one before it (1986) had been 20 years, and the one before that (1966) had also been 20 years. I suggested it mattered that these were people, not baboons or fruit- flies and not water running in and out of the tub. I suggested that the peaks and troughs in the rate of change of the rate of change represented mini baby booms, the echoes of past larger booms and busts, and then I asked, what if those peaks and troughs were to repeat? That is what the faint dotted line in Figure 2 illustrated. It was a projection based simply on repeating, from 2012 onwards, the last 42 years of peaks and troughs. It is just what you get with, literally, a little bit of history repeating. Why 42? Because that takes us back from the year 2011 to 1969 and best matches the last point in time we were in a similar point in this cycle. The peaks may have been each 20 years apart: 1966, 1986 and 2006; but the last two cycles themselves appear to average nearer 21 years in length.

I suggested that many of the children of 1986 had recently become parents (around and shortly before the year 2010). They in turn, were more numerous because of the worldwide baby boom of 1966. And so we should expect a further smaller boom around 2026, 2046 and on, perhaps becoming more spaced out in time as the average length of each cycle increases because more people have their children later in life, and hopefully also damping down as compared to the strict repetition shown by the dotted line in Figure 2.

Back in 2011 it was clear that the introduction of a little bit of variation has a huge impact on how population changes in future. That is shown in Figure 3, with the dot again marking where we were in 2011. The trends from 1950 to 2011 are identical, but under this alternative scenario, births decline just a fraction more rapidly because, between the booms of the past, there were troughs which we currently ignore as we project forward from a time of boom. That potential error has great cumulative effects.

 

FIGURE 3: An alternative scenario of world population estimates, projections and annual population change (millions) based on the idea of a little bit of history repeating. Published by the author in 2011. Change per year in millions per year is shown on right hand axis and drawn as thin line on the graph.

 

As Figure 3 shows, if the change in change repeats the most recent little bit of history we have enjoyed, then a human population maximum is reached in 2060 at 9.3 billion, but by 2100 there would be just 7.4 billion of us. We would be back down to total human numbers last seen around the year 2016.

Many might hope that the falls were not as abrupt as those shown in Figure 3. You only have to continue that rate of decline onwards another 38 years and we would all be extinct. A fall to fewer than 7.4 billion humans by the year 2100 may appear rapid, but it is a slower fall than the UN Population Division’s own low variant projection, which was for world population to fall to 6.2 billion by 2100. It is remarkable that the UN endorsed projections that varied by some 9.6 billion people (15.8 to 6.2) in just the 89 years after 2011; and as the story below explains, we still really do not know what will happen.

The UN was born out of a world war with the mission to stop history repeating – above all else, to try to prevent the repetition of war and the harm another world war would cause in affluent countries. World war tends to result in baby booms, as did the partition of India and the revolution in China which were both, in effect, wars involving many millions. If you are looking for the origins of the mini baby booms then look back to those events of the 1940s, and earlier.

So, what have we learnt in the last dozen years? Figure 4 shows Figure 1 updated to include the most recent 2022 UN projections. The main projection is now for population to grow a little higher, as shown by the thick brown line, but peaking at 10.4 billion people in the summer of 2086 and then falling slowly. This does not cause great concern today because between 2011 and 2022 the UN predicted even higher growth and then revised its estimates down, so people are now surprised that the population is projected to fall by the end of the century, not that it is projected to be higher for most of the century than it was thought to reach (in the near future) back in 2011.

 

FIGURE 4: Two sets of official world population estimates and projections – also showing projected and past annual population change (all numbers in millions). The first of these is the UN 2011 median variant scenario (thick black line). The second is the UN 2022 based scenario (thick brown line). The scale for change per year in millions is shown on the right-hand axis and drawn as two thin lines, in grey (the UN 2011 based estimates) and red (the UN 2022 based estimates).

 

The thin red line in Figure 4 shows how the change in population is now thought to be different from that believed to be the case in 2011. Note that it is not just the future, but also the past, that has been revised. The global projections are now higher in the short term because there were more babies born around 2010 than the demographers in 2011 knew (and a few fewer people dying than they thought).

The sudden drop in the thin red line around 2020–22 is the UN estimate of 8 or 9 million more deaths a year due to the pandemic in these years, and about 3 million fewer births a year during these years. But after that, the projections are for a rapid return to normal, albeit higher population growth than was projected in 2011 in the next four decades; but then much lower growth and actual decline.

So, how has the picture changed in a dozen years? Figure 5 shows the “change in change” each year as originally drawn in 2011 (in black), and as updated (in orange and red). The orange line shows that we were far too certain about the past, in the past.

 

FIGURE 5: The revised alternative scenario of world population estimates, projections and annual population change (millions) based on the idea of a little bit of history repeating. The original UN 2011 world population estimates of change in change are shown as a thick black line. The first alternative scenario published in 2011 is drawn as thin dotted black line. In orange and dotted red: the same two lines, but based on the UN 2022 data instead. The thick orange line is the UN estimates of change in change published in 2022. The dotted red line is the most recent alternative scenario of what happens now with a little bit of the (recently revised) history repeating.

 

It turns out that the past had been even more variable than the UN had been reporting. Nowadays, the great famine of China (1959–61) can be included, whereas the UN had to pretend a dozen years ago that it had not happened, and the baby boom that followed that famine also had to be ignored. Between 2011 and 2022 it was quietly accepted that this story could be included in the global demographic record – China now much more openly accepts that there was a great famine.

What is interesting about the 2022 revision is that the UN projections for change in change are now always lower, from 2043 onwards, than they were a dozen years ago. But what is more interesting is how my alternative scenario changes. Here that scenario is started just before 2020, as if the pandemic had not occurred (otherwise the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic would be repeated in future, every 42 years, in the new alternative scenario). The same periodicity is used as before and so the dotted red line in Figure 5 repeats every 42 years, just as the higher dotted black line did. Why still chose 42? As explained before, it is roughly two generations in length, or was in 2011, and I am tempted to stick to it for now, partly because 42 is the number that Douglas Adams once explained was the answer to life the universe and everything. More seriously, as we have fewer and fewer children in future globally, we may not continue to have them later and later in our lives. We may want to meet our great- grandchildren. What is key is that the slight drop in the dotted red line in Figure 5 has a huge effect overall, as is shown in Figure 6.

 

FIGURE 6: The implications of the revised alternative scenario of a little bit of history repeating. In black, the thick line shows the original 2011 based alternative scenario for our total numbers each year. The thin black line is annual population change under that original alternative scenario. All numbers are in millions and the scale for annual rates of change is shown on the right-hand side. In purple is the new 2022-based alternative world population projection based on the updated alternative scenario, and the thin blue line is the annual change that updated scenario suggests.

 

The black line in Figure 6 peaked in the year 2060, a little ahead of what the UN demographers now say will be the peak year. When I made that prediction in 2011 it turned out to be more accurate than the one the UN was making. At the time I was predicting that its projection would soon bend down towards mine (it did). However, as the purple line in Figure 6 shows, using exactly the same method and exactly the same time intervals, I would now end up predicting global population to peak in 2050, ten years earlier than I did before, at 9.1 billion.

Back in 2011, I had suggested it would reach 9.3 billion in 2060. That may not be bad news – the planet could happily fit a few fewer people on it, if they behave well – and behave better than a few of their parents and grandparents have in burning so much fossil fuel.

However, worryingly, this little-bit-of- history-repeating method suggests that if history carries on repeating as we know it has done most recently (prior to the pandemic) then soon the global human population will fall to below 9 billion in 2060, below 8 billion in 2075, below 7 billion in 2082, and rapidly down and down to below 4 billion in 2097. That would be extremely unlikely. It is the kind of scenario predicted in P. D. James’s 1992 novel, The Children of Men.

History will not carry on repeating, but it may repeat for at least one more cycle, a couple of generations, yet. All the signs currently suggest that the peak in global human numbers will occur earlier than the UN currently predicts. Fertility is already lower now in 2023 than it predicted in 2022 – the pandemic did not result in a baby boom. Mortality is higher – the pandemic has not gone away, mortality remains higher than expected, and there are reasons to believe it will continue to be higher than we thought in the past. But those two things are not what will matter most in future.

What matters most is security: social security. If people feel secure then they tend to have fewer children. If there are not large or never-ending wars, they tend to have fewer children. If adequate pension schemes are maintained, they tend not to have as many children. If they do not see their own children die, they tend to have fewer children. If they live longer, they tend to have fewer children. And all of that could be disrupted by war, famine, economic collapse, disease, or any of the other variants on the “four horses” that we have feared so much, throughout almost all of human recorded history – resulting in more, not fewer, people despite the initial population falls.

The effects of climate change, medical innovations, food availability, and many other factors may all play a role. However, as yet we really have no idea how climate change will influence patterns of migration, let alone births or deaths. Instead we speculate a great deal. Migrants often have fewer children if they move to an area where that is the norm. Medical innovations may in future make it easier for people who find it hard to have children to become parents later in life. Food availability is an ancient concern in demography, although it is only in recent decades that we have come to realise that increased food security reduces our numbers as we become less afraid of the future and have fewer children.

A crucial factor is changing cultural norms, especially the role played by education in this. When those around you are having fewer or no children it is much more likely that you will too. A norm of people having no, one, or (more rarely) two children – and only very occasionally more – is becoming very widely and very quickly established over an ever increasing share of humanity. A few economists still ask how a country like the UK can enact policies to raise the British total fertility rate to 2.0 as a grand societal challenge (see, for an example, a comment from the executive chair of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, 31 May 2023). However, increasingly, social scientists have come to realise that such a medium-term aspiration is unnecessary, very unlikely to be achievable, and could well not be beneficial.

If we would like population to peak earlier and lower than 10 or even 9 billion, we need to focus, as the UN does, on security. A very large part of that security, the most important part, is the position of women in any society. The more power women have, the faster births fall. Many years ago a survey found that the average woman in the world would like half a child less than the average man. When she can secure that, we slow down faster. Improvements in health can also increase our population numbers – as more of us are then hanging around for longer. But the effect of those improvements on reducing the number of children we have is probably now greater than the increase in population numbers that lower mortality results in.

There is almost no evidence from anywhere in the world that the number of children a couple (on average) have can easily be raised to 2 or maintained at that level, rather than being a fraction below it; but a great deal can be done to help people who want to have an average of around 1.7–1.9 children per couple rather than averages of around 1.3 or even lower. In Japan this year, the debate over what a decent level of state child support would be has intensified, but so too has the discussion about the benefits of encouraging more immigration (s.nikkei.com/3CBNa3O). In Scotland in November 2022, the raising of the Scottish Child Payment to £25 a week per child aged 16 or under whose family receives any form of benefit is now one of the most progressive reforms in Europe to both reduce child poverty and make it a little easier to be a parent. However, greater social stability and equality tend to result in fewer births.

What, though, of the falls predicted after 2050? The UN has always had an assumption in all of its scenarios that we will, in the long term, magically move towards a world in which every potential couple on the planet will have, on average, two children. That implies that actual couples will mostly have more than two, because an increasing number of people do not have any children, or just one, and many are not in couples of any kind today. Increasing numbers of people are now single for the majority of their lives.

I suspect that the UN scenario is over- optimistic and we will not see a return to a two-child average anywhere soon in all of those countries where it has fallen below that. They are where most people in the world now live. Pro-natalist policies may raise average numbers of children in some places from say, 1.4 to 1.6 children per couple. Immigration could be encouraged to prevent population decline, but only while there are still places with rapidly growing populations.

At the extreme, the population of South Korea is now more than halving each generation as the average number of children per potential couple there is well below 1. But whereas the UN projection may be too optimistic, mine is almost certainly far too pessimistic – or is modelling a future that will (optimistically!) be far more politically, socially and economically stable than what we might well experience. This is because the 42 years from 1978 to 2020 were a more stable period of human history than any previous 42 years seen for many centuries. The previous 42 years included world war (with the years 1936–78), as did the 42 years before then (1894–1936). The 42 years before then included the great famine of India and a myriad of other horrors that we now understand were largely products of colonialism and imperialism (1852–94). I could go back to the effects of the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, the destruction of almost every stable social human system on earth following European settlement, the earlier effects of the enclosure of land within Europe; but hopefully most people now realise that our global numbers first exploded because of our choices and actions and that they will stabilise and fall faster depending on how we collectively behave and what we now understand.

For my projections to come true, hundreds of millions of young people would have to decide right now, and in the next few years to come, that they were not going to become parents. That is unlikely. But we should perhaps begin to worry more about why fewer people are having children. One good way to worry is to look at the purple line in Figure 6. Becoming a parent should not be a financial strain on adults. It should not mean you are much more likely to live in poverty in future. Note that in 2023 a majority of parents in the UK with three children now go hungry at times).

It is social security that matters in both the short, medium and long term.

What happens to us depends far more on our behaviour than our numbers, and our behaviour depends greatly on what we understand. This is why it matters whether our recent past suggests there are trends in our collective behaviour we are still not aware of. Too many people worry that there are too many people. A tiny proportion (less than 10% of us) are responsible for almost all the pollution on the planet. A large number of us need to begin to realise that it is the choices being made today – by the potential parents of the elderly of 2100 – that will actually decide all this.

 

For where this article was original published, and a PDF of it, click here.

 

Dorling, D. (2023) World population projections: Just little bits of history repeating?, Significance Magazine, Volume 20, Issue 4, August 2023, Pages 22–27, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrssig/qmad062

Scotland is showing us the route to a fairer society

I am not pessimistic when it comes to global trends. But closer to home the statistics are a lot less rosy. People are feeling shattered. Hopes are being shattered. Much of the fabric of society feels shattered.

Whether it’s our children’s education, the availability of good quality and affordable housing, the ability of the NHS to care for us or of the economy to thrive – all shattered. Many of those previously just coping, can no longer cope.

This might feel as true for you in Scotland as it does for me, living in England. But there are positive changes in Scotland which show us a better way forward.

Last month the Financial Fairness Trust reported that nearly two million British households were missing three or more meals a month, due to cost. Food banks are proliferating but it is the Scottish Government that is proposing a plan to begin to make food banks unnecessary.

In our shattered nation, children in families of three children or more, are especially likely to go hungry. This is the direct result of policies penalising larger families. In Scotland that trend is being reversed by the Scottish Child Payment, ensuring that all families on Universal Credit, and other qualifying benefits, receive an extra £25 a week for every child up to age sixteen.

Unfortunately, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has pledged to keep the two-child benefit limit in England, shattering what could have been a consensus for the healthier, fairer future of the UK.

Levels of debt have increased for millions of people, while a very few have seen their riches soar. Inequality has grown to levels higher than can be found almost anywhere else in Europe. By 2021 only Bulgaria was more unequal than the UK by income.

In England the policy of the two main political parties is to stagger forward, keeping a stiff upper lip. Politicians in England promise only minor remedial actions with short-term impact. Those in Northern Ireland ask for more and have the lowest child poverty rate in the UK very similar to Scotland’s.

In Wales anger at England’s apathy grows. People ask why are the basics no longer within reach? A home for everyone. Teachers who are not exhausted. Care for those who need it. The choice to do work that is useful. And food for everyone who is hungry. Food they can buy with money they have – not that they beg for.

People there are increasingly willing to ask who is taking too big a share of what we need? Of homes, of spending on education, of our time to care for others or in profits from basic services. Why is there not enough left for those who are hungry or homeless? And people are asking why we tolerate this more than any other people in Europe today?

The alternatives to the shattering already exist. They are being attempted in Scotland – today. They are being argued for in Wales – now. They have been in place in many countries in much of the rest of Europe for decades.

We once worked together to eradicate soup kitchens and to create a more equal, dynamic economy, even in England. We can do it again.

 

Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor at the University of Oxford

Danny Dorling will be previewing his latest book ‘Shattered Nation’ at an event in Edinburgh hosted by the David Hume Institute and Scotland’s Future Forum on 23rd August 2023. Shattered Nation is published by Verso, on September 19 2023.

For where this story was original published and a PDF click here.

Council Housing: time to Invest (now, more than ever), submission of evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group for Council Housing

In 2010, the Parliamentary Council Housing Group of MPs and Defend Council Housing (DCH) published “Council Housing: Time to Invest, fair funding, investment and building council housing”. It was the result of an Inquiry that took evidence from tenants, councillors and others, and combined this in a thoroughly researched analysis of existing government policy, concluding that direct investment in council housing, accountably managed and maintained, was essential to produce and maintain the genuinely affordable and secure homes we have and need.

But the 2012 ‘self-financing’ regime which promised new financial resources for Council housing, has not delivered. Councils have attempted to find alternative sources of much-needed investment, looking to Special Purpose Vehicles, Joint Ventures and Local Housing Companies. These have not brought solutions to the scale of the UK’s housing crisis, which continues to deepen.

A lot has changed since 2010, and the pressures on council housing have only increased. Grenfell is a deadly symptom of what has gone wrong with UK housing policy. And the false economy of current policy is illustrated by the billions of pounds councils are having to spend on temporary accommodation. We are therefore glad to help in updating research to assess the current situation and the different investment strategies offered as an alternative to direct investment.

MPs will be calling for evidence, and discussing these issues, with tenants, campaigners, trade unions and councillors around the country. This paper is intended as a starting point for that discussion, outlining relevant past and current policies and assessing what we know about their effectiveness and possible consequences.

Contributors: Prof Danny Dorling, Oxford; Dr Richard Goulding, Univ of Sheffield; Dr Neil Gray, Glasgow; Dr Stuart Hodkinson, Univ of Leeds, Dr Joe Penny, Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, UCL; Dr Glyn Robbins, London; Prof Stewart Smyth, University College Cork; Prof Paul Watt, LSE. – July 6th 2023.

All-Party Parliamentary Group for Council Housing: Launch of Inquiry, 10 July 2023. Photo Credit @EllieEmberson

 

Why Council Housing?

Countries that fail to provide a decent council/public housing service begin to fail in much wider ways. Extensive international studies have documented how this has occurred over time [A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid By Nancy Kwak University of Chicago Press, 11 November 2015].

Decent council housing provision reduces pressure on the private market. Private sector rents are lower. Housing and flats become more affordable to buy. Some argue that the private sector will not be incentivised enough to build enough new homes, but that is hardly well reflected by what has actually occurred in the UK.

There are important effects of having a decent council housing system. In education children are able to stay at the same school for longer, they do not have to move schools when their parents are evicted because the private rent rises. In countries with better housing, teachers and other workers can live nearer work, and have lower housing and travel costs. This saves them and the state money.

Health services in countries with a better public housing system have lower staff costs and a far more efficient health service. People become ill less often through not being forced to live in unfit homes in the private and housing association sectors. And poverty is reduced, as is the greed of the wealthy who have less of an incentive to horde their wealth by buying too many homes.

In the UK, as far as housing is concerned, 2023 is different from 2022, despite all this being a long time coming. In 2023 we already worry much more about mortgage rates, empty (hoarded) rooms, and the collapse of parts of the owner-occupied sector as well as rising private rents and falling housing prices.

You don’t get a decent, stable overall housing sector without decent council housing. Housing Associations are no substitute: we have tested that as a theory and found it wanting.

Finally, decent council housing is not only housing for the poor. It is housing for people who prefer not to have the responsibility of all the upkeep of a home. The UK is decades away from having a housing sector as well developed as that of many other countries in Europe; but we could at least see where we should be heading. If you want to know what is possible, ask how and in what conditions the majority of university students in Finland are housed. You might be surprised by what you find. Once you begin to sort out housing – that need not be the end of your ambitions…

For the full report and an on-line link to its launch click here.

Growth which makes everyone, not just a few, better off

In 2023, when discussing what might be possible with levelling up, Peter John quoted the July 2021 words of the Prime Minister said a year before he was forced to resign from office:

‘Johnson elaborated by focusing attention on his belief that potential and talent was spread evenly across the country. He said emphatically: “We don’t want to level down. I don’t believe … that there is any basic difference in the potential of babies born across this country. Everyone knows that talent and energy and enthusiasm and flair are evenly spread across the UK…it is opportunity that is not…” He also added that such a condition was causing a massive waste of human resource as too many were failing to fulfil their latent ambitions. However, he purposefully did not link inequality in the UK to poor outcomes rather he stuck with the standard Conservative trope – improving opportunity.’ [1]

 

Johnson had moved some distance from his ‘top Cornflake’ days,[2] but he, and many like him, hankered after holding onto a belief that some people had greater latent potential or ambitions than others, even if he was now will to conceded that perhaps this distribution was geographically more spread than he had once believed. In his belief in inherent differences between humans being of great consequence, Johnson was far from alone. The British Labour embedded eugenic beliefs in both in the original fundamental cause IV of its constitution and in the Blair rewrite which contained similar prejudices. The key text simply changed from ‘workers by hand or by brain’ [two types] to ‘to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential’ [a continuity of types with differing potentials].

 

A belief that chaps, and it was mainly chaps they were worrying about then, were born as babies with differing potentials served the British empire well. Some were born to lead, others to follow. In between a few had the potential to raises up a little in the ranks. Order was maintained and 170-odd current members of the United Nations were invaded or otherwise controlled, as another Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, pointed out. Interestingly, none of the 22 not invaded are included in the long list that Johnson insulted as Foreign Secretary.[3]

 

But why does any of this matter when it comes to levelling up? It matters because there is no Empire 2.0 coming. Because Britain is not going to level up by securing more overseas students for ever, or by turning its banks into even risker casino type; the kind that would not be allowed to operate in the EU. Britain will not level up by introducing freeports or enticing car battery companies to come here. Britain will not level up by spending paltry sums and building a few ill thought out edifices for sitting MPs to be photographed next to in the hope that that might benefit in the next General Election. None of that will work. None of it is showing any signs of working.

 

More level, and today far more prosperous countries do not hold to British beliefs of inherent differences to anything like the same extent. Elsewhere, in the actual level sunny uplands, people think their children should go to the same schools, together. They believe that no one should be very badly paid and that it is repulsive to be too greedy. We once thought that too, from 1918 to 1978. But becoming level back then had been easier because of the final spoils of empire. It will be harder now.

 

The British have an excuse as to why they have reverted again to such weird ideas of inequality being good and ability being concentrated far more in some than others. The excuse is Britain’s unusual history. When controlling the largest empire the world has even seen, it helps not to see those you control as like you. When you no longer have that empire to control, such thinking can be your greatest weakness. For those at the top, the rules are for the little people – people who can be given scraps. But it won’t wash any more.

 

Labour need to stop thing like this too. Labour from 1945 to 1970 used the receipts of Empire attained advantage to level across. They convinced the Conservatives to copy suit. But when almost all of the last of the colonies gained their independence, the Conservatives shifted back again to promoting inequality, and Labour from 1997-2010 followed suit. Inequality never fell in any single one of the thirteen New Labour years, making it easier for the Conservatives to come up with their duplicitous levelling slogan.

 

In this context, the words of Keir Starmer, spoken in February 2023, sound hollow. He wanted: ‘A collective ambition, a partnership – to secure the highest sustained growth in the G7. With good jobs, productivity growth in every part of the country, growth which makes everyone, not just a few, better off.’[4] If Labour continue to mimic the Conservatives. Or try to claim they can be better at being ‘true Conservatives’, they will be ridiculed. The pendulum has shifted again.

 

People cannot eat growth. They do not believe promises that economic growth will be their salvation any more. They have heard those promises so many times and know them to be false. Johnson’s 2022 promise that if we stayed close to his chosen path then soon: ‘… we will be the most prosperous in Europe.’ was almost identical to one given by George Osborne seven years earlier. The only difference being that Osborne had promised that the UK would soon be the richest of all larger nations in the world. The change over time in these promises is that they have been watered down from over one hundred ‘larger’ countries in the the world (Osborne) to less than three dozen in ‘Europe’ (Johnson), to just seven mature slow growing economies – ‘the G7’ (Starmer).[5]

 

Neither Labour nor the Conservative can level up – but that is not what levelling is. Levelling is to make something more equal or similar, to create a flat and even surface. You do not level by piling on money you do not have to ignite a potential that is not there. You level by making flat that which is most egregious. You level the tax avoiders and evaders, the non-doms, the elite private schools that wish to retain the perks of registering as charities, the people who charge the heating bill for their swimming pools to expenses, and those who employ a household of personal servants.

 

When we last levelled we began at the top and we knocked it down. We did this in a polite British way. The country houses were ‘donated’ to the National Trust. We did it because we had to. And now we have to do it again. Only a fool would try to level the ground without first knocking down the outcrops that prevent it being level. It takes time to level properly, but it is the poor who benefit first and most quickly. Eventually even the rich do too, they are just often the last to realize it. No child should grow up surround by servants and told they have potential above others around them. It does them no favours in the long run.

 

 

References

[1] John, P (2022), ‘Levelling up with the meritocracy: balancing equality with opportunity’ in ‘Levelling Up: What is it and Can it work?‘, Centre for Inequality and Levelling Up (CEILUP), January 2022.

[2] White, M (2013) ‘Boris the clever cornflake gets his IQ in a twist’, The Guardian, 28 November 2013.

[3] Jakobs, F (2016) ‘A World Map of Boris Johnson Insults’, Big Think, 17 July 2016.

[4] Starmer, K (2023) ‘“Growth is the answer” – Starmer’s speech on Labour’s plan for the economy‘, LabourList, 27 February 2023.

[5] Dorling, D. (2022) ‘Let them eat growth?‘ Tribune MPs Blog, 29th September 2022.

 

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