Saturday, June 8, 2024

Breaking Apart (2024)

Book Review from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State. By Danny Dorling. Verso £14.99.

It was recently reported (BBC online 21 March) that the UK now has twelve million people living in absolute poverty, after the biggest rise in thirty years. And in December the Centre for Social Justice (centreforsocialjustice.org.uk) published Two Nations, a report which concluded that for those who are not getting by, ‘their lives are marked by generations of family breakdown, their communities are torn apart by addictions and crime, they live in poor quality, expensive, and insecure housing, and they are sick.’ Here Danny Dorling, who has written on similar issues in the past, surveys many of the ways in which the lives of British workers are indeed being shattered.

One theme is that in most of the world, human lives are improving, but not so much in the UK. For instance, infant mortality is falling faster elsewhere than in the UK, and economic inequality is falling. The UK is probably the most unequal country in Europe in terms of income inequality. In the late 1960s and early 70s, Britain was more equal than it is now, and where you grew up was less important than it is today.

The second part of the book echoes the Five Giants identified in the 1942 Beveridge Report. They are presented as hunger, precarity (insecurity related to housing as well as employment), waste (with far more people now working in finance and accounting), exploitation (such as high university fees), and fear (physical and mental health having declined since the 70s). Research in 2022 showed that one UK household in six was in serious financial difficulty. Austerity has led to a slowdown in growth in life expectancy in Britain, and people in the poorest fifth of households saw their earnings fall between February and May 2020. Death rates from Covid were higher in the poorest areas, and long Covid is most commonly found there too. Many facts and statistics such as these make much of the book an informative but rather depressing read. There is one refreshing observation, though: ‘We should measure the value of a job by the amount of happiness it brings to others, not by the profit that can be made by the person employing the worker.’

And what is the author’s proposed solution? This is not a book where the last chapter offers a raft of reformist measures intended to do away with the problems discussed earlier. Rather, the proposals are spread throughout its pages, including minimising VAT, raising wages faster than food price increases, making school lunches universally available, making tenancy agreements more secure, and restricting second-home ownership. It is ironic that the Labour Party is criticised for proposing ‘only more tinkering’, when the ideas set out here are little more than that.

What we said in the April 2015 Socialist Standard is just as valid as it was then: Danny Dorling should be a socialist and not simply fight for reforms.
Paul Bennett

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