Whenever I do a potted biography of Danny Dorling, geographer, author, crusader, I miss the late Dawn Foster, thinking of her going through his bibliography in the office ahead of meeting him, saying: “Fuck, I can never read all this.” His first book, published nearly 30 years ago, had the arrestingly dry title Area Cartograms: Their Use and Creation. Then, in 2010, something changed: well, the government changed, austerity was born and Dorling became, in public, the radical geographer that academic colleagues – first at Bristol, then Leeds, then Sheffield, then for the past 10 years at St Peter’s College, Oxford – must have always known him to be. Starting with Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists in 2010, he would write at least one book a year and sometimes as many as three, on justice and equality, until 2018, when he published Peak Inequality. Spoiler: we were not at the peak, but that’s not what he meant.
I meet him in Greenwich, south-east London, where he is between meetings at a conference on inequality. He has a new book, Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State. The picture he draws is delineated carefully through appalling statistics: over the first five years of austerity, the poorest fifth of people in England lost, on average, 11% of their income, while the richest fifth lost nothing. There are now twice as many food banks in the UK as there are branches of McDonald’s. “The country [is] moving towards a minarchy, or night-watchman state, with minimal power over the rich and minimal support for the poorer of its citizens,” he writes.
When he started writing this book two years ago, he thought he needed to explain how bad things were, in case some people still didn’t know: he finished writing it just as the lettuce lasted longer than Liz Truss. “I no longer have to persuade anyone how bad it is. Early this year, the government bunged BMW £75m not to close the Cowley car plant. On the same day, they cut £250m from social security spending, I don’t think entirely because they wanted to, but because for the government to borrow money, they had to show that they weren’t going to increase spending overall. So they really have run out of money.”
“Honestly,” he continues, “the stories I hear from inside government, they’re basically asking, ‘How do we stop people being on the pavements?’. They’ve lost control of the ambulances, they’ve lost control of the border queues, they can’t afford to house the Ukrainians.” Birmingham council had declared bankruptcy just before we met, and there are many other councils, unable to cover their basic costs, about to go under. “Slough went much earlier than Birmingham, and they’ve had to sell everything. Surrey almost went bankrupt as a county, and the government quietly solved that because you can’t have the county with [Michael] Gove’s seat in it and [Dominic] Raab’s seat in it unable to pay.”
He says something which ought to be chilling, except now, against the backdrop of the unhinged Conservative party conference, it is quite difficult to believe: “I’ve never seen Conservatives care as much as this. I’ve never had phone calls – ‘What can we do in the short term?’ – before.”
I’ve met Dorling at events, on panels, a ton of times: the night before the Scottish referendum, when he scoped out the radical measures the government would have to take should the Scots vote “yes” (many of which – a temporary ban on forced evictions, for instance – would be taken during the pandemic). Once I interviewed him for a piece in Glamour about regional lifestyle differences, and managed to smuggle in a neo-Marxist interpretation of why young women in Edinburgh spend the most money on the gym. That was a good day.
Then, in the aftermath of Brexit, he explained painstakingly, in the slightly strangled tones of a person who knows no one will listen, that the leave voters were not, or certainly not exclusively, “the left behind”, or the red-wall: equally influential was the huge affluent-pensioner vote in the south-east and south-west. If we carried on talking about Brexit as a howl of rage from the dispossessed, we would get it wrong, and everything about the debate, and the deal with the EU, and the politics that followed, would also be wrong. He was right, as he usually is – something about all that evidence, all those graphs.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, though I knew nothing of his background, I assumed he was a classic 80s Labour party member, lower middle class, first generation in his family to go to university, all that. “No, I’m a posh boy. Germaine Greer babysat me at least once. Tariq Ali may have done.” His parents were dreamers and hippies, he was a child of the revolution, born in January 1968. His mother, bypassing the nearest state school because it was too posh, sent him to Wood Farm, the same school Frances O’Grady went to. “I was in the 1%. My father was the doctor. I was the only doctor’s child in my school.” He surmises, rightly, that I still don’t really believe his legend – I think he’s making a complicated radical geographer’s point (something about where on the gradient you class “posh” begins, perhaps).
So he delves deeper into his family. “In the poorest part of my family, we’re Labour aristocracy.” He had one not-rich grandfather who won an exhibition to Jesus College, Oxford, and was best mates with Harold Wilson. He rattles off the rest: “My mother went to St Hilda’s [Oxford], her brother went to Jesus [Oxford]. My dad went to New College [Oxford] after his older brother went there, my cousin went to Pembroke [Oxford], my great-aunt went to Somerville [Oxford].” OK, that is quite posh. Dorling is not making a point about his determined downward social mobility – though that does come up, and it is funny – but getting to a defining moment. He could also have gone to Jesus, through “connections” – “I could have been Toby Young” (who didn’t get the grades to go to Brasenose [Oxford] but his father, meritocracy-inventing Michael Young, put in a call).
Instead, Dorling went to Newcastle, because it offered geography and maths, a rare degree, and, anyway, he thought that’s the way society was headed: nobody wanted to watch Oxbridge sketch comedy. They wanted to watch The Young Ones. “I don’t think I’d have been as left wing if I’d gone to Oxford. I would have fitted in. I think Ed Miliband is a really nice person; I like to think I’d have been as nice as that. But I’d now be sitting having dinner with Peter Mandelson – I’d be a completely different person. Going to Newcastle, I walked into a city, I saw poverty I’d never seen before in my life. It changed my view. That’s why I am who I am.”
That, by inference – and explicitly, in the book – is also why politics is what it is: too many decisions made by people who have simply never witnessed poverty. People who “associate hunger with that feeling you have when you’re a bit peckish. You may not realise quite how terrible and debilitating it is.”
In this book, Dorling recasts Sir William Beveridge’s five great evils – want, squalor, idleness, ignorance and disease – into their modern equivalents: hunger, precarity, waste, exploitation and fear. In brief, after 13 years of austerity and multiple self-inflicted and external crises, we’ve gone from rhetoric about not fixing the roof while the sun shines, to the point “that the roof is literally going to fall down and kill kids. We’re going to get an Aberfan.”
He carries on humanising the story: I get the impression of a long career spent trying to jolt people who don’t really do numbers back into the room. “The heart-rending story last year was that there are babies in Oxford who have never been washed in warm water, the heating has never been on. It never gets easier to wash a baby in cold water. The majority of children with a brother and a sister in England are now going hungry two or three times a month. The fact that I’m still surprised, still shocked, is incredible – and it’s worse this year than last year. We’ve got the worst stunted health in all of Europe.”
The poorest fifth of people in eastern Europe are now richer than the poorest fifth of people in the UK. That’s partly a story of their success, but also a story of our failure, that we were chasing a dream of our own exceptionalism when we should have been aiming to be a mid-level European country. “If we keep on aiming to be No 1, we could end up becoming a second-world country on the fringe of Europe. We call it Singapore-on-Thames but we’d be Jakarta-on-Thames.”
On some gut level, we all know this: David Cameron created a happiness index as some camouflage for his shtick of the nice Tory who unaccountably did horrible things (a role repurposed lately by Rory Stewart). The Office for National Statistics, though, took him literally and “they’ve monitored happiness in society really cleverly ever since. It didn’t suffer much after Brexit, people who wanted to leave thought they’d left, people who wanted to remain thought they could stop it, people who wanted radical politics were quite happy because here was some radical politics. Our levels of anxiety shoot through the roof and our wellbeing collapses in autumn of 2019, and reach a low point in December 2019. The election of Boris Johnson, on a landslide, was such a shock that we can’t see even see the effects of the pandemic.”
I’m laughing at this point, because what’s happened to our politics is just so sad, and he mistakes this for disbelief. “This isn’t a fix! We know this, it’s an index.”
But if the ravages of Covid don’t show up on the national wellbeing index, that doesn’t mean we can forget it. “The spike on the finances is bigger than the banking crash. So it’s mainly financial, although at least that’s shared with the rest of world, which had a financial hit at the same time.” That, of course, was on top of the 2008 crash from which we’ve still nowhere near recovered. “Real wages show no sign of getting back to where they were before, it’s now beaten the 1798 wage slump. We have the worst fall in living standards – it’ll soon be worse than the Napoleonic wars.”
There’s also a psychosocial hangover from the pandemic. First, that we saw the state make huge interventions, and people make huge sacrifices, without anything disintegrating, which alters the sense of what’s possible. Second, Dorling says: “I think it really was like a war. In the wars, most people were just at home. They didn’t see anybody die. When soldiers came back they didn’t actually tell anyone what had happened. But the war still had great effects.”
As reflected in the five evils structure of his book, Dorling is poised for a Clement Attlee moment – the point at which things are so bad there’s no alternative to reckless hope, and the nation is transformed by seismic projects, on the scale of an NHS and radical homebuilding programme. “We’re so used to crisis, that we can’t notice that this is it. We’re at the point where it stops being a political choice.” I don’t know what that means – are we at the end of British politics? “We’re at the end of the Thatcherite experiment.” That’s good, right? “Except that we’ve had to live our lives through it. And we either come out of it slowly and painfully, which is what we did in the 1920s and 30s. Or we do it faster.”
The thing that amazes me about this conversation is not the parlous state of the UK, its finances, its social fabric, its living standards; to be unaware of any of that, you really would have to be deliberately not concentrating. It’s that Dorling sounds quite optimistic, not for some amorphous deus ex machina where we all wake up at once, but for political solutions, from the politicians we’ve got sitting in front of us. We are, as a nation, just too close to the edge not to formulate a crisis response.
Does he really think that will look like mass redistribution, a post-Thatcherite era? “Unless we’re happy for slums to come back. Unless we’re ready for things literally to fall apart. But it isn’t in [the government’s] plan for Hyde Park to be full of tents. I may be overdramatising. But I’m talking to officials in government, and we’re not in the world of an orchestrated rightwing coup, where they take us into an Ayn Randian, nightwatchman state. We’re in a fucked up world where they’re shitting themselves.”
• Shattered Nation is out now, published by Verso.
