Danny Dorling's Blog, page 37

Melissa Benn, Danny Dorling, Kayleigh Garthwaite and Owen Jones, Speaking on the future of Social Justice, at the Bristol Festival of Ideas and Policy Press Evening, University of Bristol, December 5th.

Full recording of entire event is here

Edited transcript of Danny’s talk:

I want to talk to you tonight about a man who has created a group that published nine Blogs on the housing crisis in the last few months. He named the group “Taxpayers Against Poverty” [1] as everyone pays taxes and the poor pay most through VAT, and to contrast with “The TaxPayers Alliance” which was created by Mathew Elliot in 2004. Mathew later became Chief Executive Officer of the Brexit Leave campaign. The man I want to talk to you about tonight is Paul Nicolson.

Paul Nicolson, the retired vicar who created Taxpayers Against Poverty is 84 years old [2]. Born on 10th May 1932, for most of his life Paul saw the battle for better housing being won again and again. He was a child in an era when most people rented privately, when most housing was overcrowded, when many people lived in slums and the UK was incredibly economically unequal.

Paul Nicolson with Ros Wynne-Jones from the Daily Mirror on his way (again) to the Magistrates courts to protest

In 1937, when Paul was five years old, the best-off 1% of the population, which then included many landlords, took 17% of all national income. Of every six shillings received by anyone earning in the UK, one went to this tiny parasitic group of people, and most of what was left went to those who were almost as well off as them. The vast majority of people in Britain were poor and their greatest expense was the rent.

In 1957, when Paul was 25 years old, the best-off 1% only took 9% of all national income. A great transformation had taken place and it had begun before Paul was even born. Rents had been regulated since 1915 and so the takings of landlords fell throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Slums were cleared to the ground and new social housing, and housing with mortgages was built.

In 1957 the Conservative Prime Minster, Harold Macmillan would tell people that they had ‘never had it so good’. His administration did build many council houses; but people had never had it so good because they had never been more economically equal, and that was won by rent strikes in Glasgow ushering in that rent regulation in 1915 and then by campaigners winning concession after concession from Conservative and Liberal politicians, then another war, and then a brief but extremely effective Labour government (1945-1950).

More and more better quality housing was built as the population grew in number. Most of the rest was greatly renovated. Social security was improved and tenants rights further strengthened. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s people were better housed year after year, overcrowding declined rapidly and housing quality grew. Because rents were so affordable and the rich were controlled, by 1977 (when Paul was 45 years old) the best off took less than 6% of all income in Britain; three times less than when he was born. The lowest they have ever taken.

Paul could have expected the situation to become better still. It did in most of the rest of Western Europe in the years that followed, where people are usually better and more affordably housed today than they have ever been before. But it did not get better in Britain. In 1979 a new kind of Conservative government was elected and it tore up the previous protections. Rent regulations were abolished, along with the building of social housing, and a rise in inequality was encouraged. Mrs Thatcher called it “letting tall poppies bloom”. The result was a catastrophe of national and international speculation by the better off, and especially by the very richest 1% who gained the most as most others began to lose out. Housing prices and rent soared.

In 1997 (when Paul was 65 years old) the take of the 1% had doubled to 12% of all national income each year. This occurred in just twenty years. When he turned 75, 10 years later in 2007, that take had risen to over 15% (under ‘new’ Labour). Levels of inequality had returned to what they were when Paul was a teenage boy. Today their take remains very high, around 14%, or a seventh of all income, although increases in tax avoidance makes the precise proportion harder to estimate now. OECD estimates suggest that UK income inequality is now highest of all the countries it compares in Europe. [3]

Thatcherism had taken such a hold of the thinking of those at the top that even the election of a Labour government in 1997 did not halt the rise in economic inequality or the deterioration of housing affordability for most people. Those that ran that Labour government no longer understood why rent regulation was needed and why the rich getting ever richer and buying up more and more homes created misery for the majority. The number of people renting privately doubled between 2001 and 2011.

New Labour believed that the rich should be rewarded and the poor should be bullied. Sanctioning of the benefits of the poor first rose abruptly under the 1997-2010 government. It was not a real Labour government and although it quietly spent a great deal on renewing some social housing that had been neglected, it did not help make housing more affordable. When it was kicked out of office in 2010 it was because it failed to secure enough support from those it had championed in the past.

The 2010 coalition government’s greatest “achievement” was to sanction over one million benefit recipients in 2013. More money was taken from the poorest people in Britain that year through benefit sanctions than all the fines imposed by magistrates and sheriffs courts. [4] A new poor law had been introduced. But still the Labour party did not offer the electorate a change in direction large enough to be worth voting for.

The Conservatives won a very narrow working majority in 2015 and quickly set about trying to dismantle the remnants of the welfare state, including affordable housing. They were lead by David and George, people who had been teenagers when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister and who worshiped her as a hero. And they lasted only just over a year in office before Prime minster David Cameron had to resign and his chancellor George Osborne was sacked. Only just over a year when fully ‘in charge’ after waiting half a lifetime to get that power!

A great deal has been written about why Cameron lost the Brexit vote on the 23rd June 2016. Just as in the United States in the November 2016 presidential election, it was people from across the income spectrum who voted against business as usual. A majority of leave voters in the UK were middle class and, on average, Trump supporters in the USA were better off than those who did not vote for him.

The UK and the USA are the two affluent countries with the worst housing systems in the rich world, in which health is currently deteriorating the most, often largely as a result of housing problems. In both the UK and USA poorer housing and declining health have been linked more closely than any other factor to the political turmoil we are now in. It was the places where the old are suffering more that have voted most for change because they can remember a better past. [5] But neither vote is for a better option.

The change in the political mood is remarkable. People have not voted for better options because they were not presented with that choice, but they have voted against carrying on as before and they are now far less predictable in what they might now do. This has shaken politicians who are suddenly enacting U-turn after U-turn, especially when it comes to housing policy in the UK.

In October 2016 the Conservative government announced that its main flagship ‘help to buy’ policy would end abruptly on the 31st of December. Taxpayers’ money would no longer be used to boost peoples’ mortgages to help housing prices stay high and to allow people to borrow money those lenders would not otherwise lend. It was a policy devised to ensure that homes remained expensive. For another four years lower ‘help to buy’ 20% loans on newly built property will remain but they too are now set to be phased out by 2020. [6]

When Paul was 84 the Conservatives threatened to introduce “pay to stay” where social housing tenants would be forced to pay “market rents” if the combined income of everyone living in their household rose above £30,000 a year. Some 60,000 households would have been evicted from their homes after April 2017 if it had been introduced. Following months of opposition and protest, on November 21st 2016 the policy was suddenly officially abandoned. [7]

Three weeks earlier the Conservatives had delayed extending the right to buy to housing associations – another of their previous flagship policies. Ministers gave “Brexit” as the reason, but what they feared for was their own popularity. [8] The public mood was turning against them, and one by one they were unravelling their housing polices. It was housing that government turned to first to try to reduce the anger.

Before he gave his autumn statement on November 23rd the new chancellor, Philip Hammond, let it be known that letting agency fees would be banned in England and Wales. Those fees had been successfully banned years earlier in Scotland. When that happened the Conservatives said the idea would not work and that it would harm “the market”. Now they suddenly embraced the idea. Shares in companies that made money charging such fees fell by 6% to 8% on that day because the fees had been being taken largely as profit by the share holders of the letting agencies. [9] The fees were bogus.

There are thousands of nasty pieces of law left to fight over. The so-called national living wage will rise to only £7.50 an hour from April 2017, but that is still 4% higher than now. Had corporation tax, not been reduced to 17% that minimum legal wage could have been increased further and faster or benefit cuts could have been reversed. [10] The tide has only just started to turn on housing polices. Families with disabled children are still having their benefits capped at new lower rates so that they will be evicted from what were previously secure tenancies and have to find cheaper insecure private accommodation wherever they can. That is happening now.

Councils will still have at their discretion the right to charge higher rents to some tenants; they just no longer have to do that. Insecure tenancy agreements will still be issued in social housing just like private renting, even as government continues to have to be told, again and again, that the beliefs of its ministers and MPs over housing are fundamentally wrong. At least now we know that they do eventually listen. Changes circumstances force in better polices when those are argued for again and again and when the population at large begins to no longer believe their leaders.

Paul was born between the wars. He was born at a time of rapid social progress although few people at the time realised this. The progressives fought and agitated for a better world and better countries because they recognized that conditions were so unfair and that change was possible. 84 years on and again with street homelessness rising, evictions rising, millions forced into poverty because of the high rent or high housing prices it is widely accepted that conditions are unfair but it is not yet widely accepted that great change is possible. That does not matter. It can be achieved as it was before: battle-by-battle.

Rent regulation, common in Europe and many states of the USA is now urgently needed across the UK. Paul Nicolson has called for a rent freeze in the private sector. We need this while regulation is being introduced, otherwise private landlords will try to push rents up even higher as they begin to realize that regulation is becoming a plausible political option again. It is in the private rented sector that the most urgent actions is required.

More social housing is needed, much more than will be provided with that the paltry new funding announced in recent days allows for; but at least we are at a new a beginning. Capital gains tax need to be introduced on privately owned homes to end speculation and it should be set at a much higher levels on second and subsequent homes. Government is going to need greater tax revenue soon. It was right wing governments that raised taxes the most when Paul was young, and in the two decades before he was born – because they had to.

We need to aim towards being a country in which people are as well housed as is now common on most of the European mainland. This is not asking for Utopia, it is asking for what already exists elsewhere. This is only possible if income inequalities are reduced. They do not simply fall by themselves and the UK is currently the most economically unequal country in Europe. The best off 10% take 28% of all income, a higher share than in any other European country; and the best-off 1% take half of that 28%!

One day we might have a fair land value tax. Good quality housing for all, including well-adapted housing for the millions of us in old age, housing costing less than a third of our daily incomes. Housing we are happy with and that we can see our children starting families in. If all this sounds fanciful it is not more fanciful than imagining, in 1934, that within three decades a prime minster could declare that people in Britain had never had it so good; and then see his party voted out of office a year after he resigned in 1963, for something even better.

Private rent regulations were introduced in Britain under the 1915 rent and mortgage restrictions act, which was subsequently and repeatedly strengthened every year as income inequalities also fell from then right through to 1977 when Britain began the most economically equal it has ever been and the take of the 1% was lowest. However the rent act of 1977 was the last act of parliament that limited landlords’ ability to increase rents as they wishes. The Conservative government that came to office in 1979 abolished rent controls in the 1988 Housing Act. [11] Every year after that housing became less and less affordable and income and wealth inequalities in Britain rose.

Do not underestimate how quickly things can change. The most important change of all is in what we believe to be right. In late November 2016 a young Labour MP spelt it out ““Why should people in this country work the longest hours in Europe and be paid some of the lowest wages? Why should people not be able to have access to an affordable safe home? Why do we have to wait in long queues in our National Health Service which is increasingly being sold off?”. Clive Lewis explained that politics was not about “left or right” but about “right or wrong”. [12] Change is in the air.

Taxpayers Against Poverty recommends a standard of affordability for governments to aim at were a home is affordable when the income remaining after rent, income and council tax have been paid is enough to buy a healthy diet, the fuel to cook it and keep warm, clothes, transport, other necessities, with enough left over for cultural and social participation. This is the standard that was first called for by Seebohm Rowntree in 1901 and which was opposed then by people who did not wish to see inequality fall. [13] There are always people who argue against progress. They failed then, they will fail again, and one day soon we will be able to set our sights higher.

References

[1] This text first appeared as a blog here: http://taxpayersagainstpoverty.org.uk

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/global/20...

[3] http://researchbriefings.parliament.u...

[4] http://www.dannydorling.org/books/all...

[5] http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphi...

[6] http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/lifest...

[7] http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/...

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2...

[9] https://www.ft.com/content/ee2803a6-b...

[10] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/busine...

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_re...

[12] http://labourlist.org/2016/11/lewis-n...

[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty...

Margaret Thatcher’s government sowed the seeds of today’s housing crisis when it abandoned rent regulation in the private sector.

Those seeds were watered by the administrations of John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg who failed to realise the extent of the growing disaster that they were all nurturing. The results are the bitter harvest that it falls on Theresa May’s government to reap: rising homelessness, fear, destitution and dismay. The housing crisis will not end until homes are again seen as places to grow people, not profit.

But the fight for affordable housing is a battle that we can win again. See – Taxpayers Against Poverty – Affordable Housing Campaign BLOG 9 here

And then listen to Kate Pickett and Danny Dorling talking about Capitalism on the edge: Inequality and Brexit versus really taking back control below.

Really taking back control means

1. Taxing at the normal European level

2. Spending on education & health normally

3. Having housing laws that are fair to tenants

4. Working towards a basic income for all

5. No sanctions and student loans for the young

6. Introducing a fair system of voting (PR)

7. Not allowing the 1% who take a 7th of everything every year in the UK – to also run political parties, newspapers, companies, even university building programmes unchallenged. This is best done by reducing their income/wealth – and that can be done in many ways – which they are aware of.

What does the world look like when you map it using data about people? See the world anew — a connected, ever-changing and fascinating place in which we all belong. You’ll never look at a map the same way again.

There are a huge number of good news stories in the world, and just a few are given in this 2016 TEDxExeter talk: incremental changes for the better that rarely feature in the print and broadcast media. This is the 6th TEDxExeter talk to be featured on TED.com

Using beautiful and unfamiliar world maps created by Ben Hennig (and shown in colour for the first time here) Danny Dorling shows us that in many ways life is slowly getting better and there’s much to be optimistic about, as long as we continue to connect with each other.We need new ways of viewing the world, its future, and how we can be a little less afraid if we do not see other people as being our enemy as much as we currently do. We currently fear people from other countries too much, we fear that those in faraway places are taking ‘our jobs’, we fear what we do not know. But if we begin to see the world as a whole, as the place from which we all get our food, as the place that we all pollute, then as our global population begins to stabilise we can learn to become less fearful. Some people learn faster than others.

The British Prime Minister, Teresa May, recently said that ‘if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’. It is not her fault that she was taught geography at a time before we could map all the citizens of the world and see that we are each just such a citizen. We are now all incredibly closely connected, through trade, through migration, through ideas and through hope.

Seeing the earth shaped in proportion to the amount of rain that falls, and how that changes over a year, shows the planet as a single entity that almost appears to have an annual heartbeat. Seeing all the humans of the world drawn on a single projection can help us realise that imagining all of humanity as one is not beyond the scope of our collective imaginations.

The 2016 book behind the talk was written by Carl Lee and Danny Dorling. It is titled “Geography: Ideas in Profile” and is available here, where you can also find copies of the maps shown in the talk. Further resources are available on the TED website. And high resolution copies of the maps can be found here.

The Annual Political Studies Association Lecture given by Danny Dorling in The British Library, London, November 28th. Introduced by Carolyn Quinn

A talk that concentrates on the very recent past and especially on the 2015 general elction. There is also speculation about what the future may hold, not just in terms of new political mapping techniques but in the much wider range of possible electoral outcomes we should consider as being plausible. The outcomes of the two recent Labour leadership contests, the Brexit vote, and the US presidential election all make it easier to now argue that the future is not certain, but the 2015 general election result also showed that before all of these more recent events. No one should have said that the next UK general election was now a forgone conclusion.

Rather like meteorologists, political scientists have a tendency to use recent events to predict the political weather. However, if and when the climate changes, what was once thought to be impossible becomes reality. From choosing which colours to use to depict a growing range of parties on the map, through to how we might depict uncertainly in our predictions, we have many choices to make when it comes to how we analyse elections and show the changing political geography that they reveal.

Are we ready to entertain the possibility of rapid change? Eventually everything always changes. At some times change comes quickly. This is an illustrated lecture about maps, but hopefully the descriptions of what is being shown on the screen work, to some extent, without the actual images being there!

If you are interested in seeing some of the maps described in the audio above, then a few are shown in the video below of an earlier lecture given in July 2016 shortly after the result of the June 23rd 2016 EU referendum was announced:

Danny Dorling: A better Politics: how government can make us happier and healthier, The 10th annual Julian Tudor Hart Lecture, Cardiff University School of Social Sciences, Cardiff, July 7th. An early reaction to the vote to leave the EU, among other issues.

Danny Dorling’s Review of Ecotopia 2121: A Vision for Our Future Green Utopia – in 100 Cities, by Alan Marshall

Can you imagine the Emirati city of Abu Dhabi decades after Indian guest labourers have risen up to secure democracy in the city and won citizens’ rights for all residents and a sustainable future? Can you see a future in which the great-grandchildren of today’s slum dwellers of Accra, the Ghanaian capital, live in homes on stilts or in trees above the threat of flooding? What of the city of Almaty in Kazakhstan, currently the smog-filled home to 2 million people: can you predict what life will be like there in the distant future if things don’t turn out for the worst?

It is because you probably can’t answer any of those questions that this book has such great value. Abu Dhabi, Accra and Almaty are just the first three of Alan Marshall’s 100 cities. For each, the environmental studies scholar paints a different possible – and sometimes plausible – scenario. Each scenario is also literally painted, in most cases by Marshall himself, resulting in 100 beautiful images of “what might be”.

The year 2121 is chosen because it is sufficiently far away that we should expect life then in each city to be very different. Nearer to home for many readers, Birmingham is painted as the future green heart of England, a city of elegant towers surrounded by a rejuvenated forest through which pass new canals, with windmills on their banks.

A barrage built across the river Severn – the eco-bridge – powers Bristol and Cardiff by 2121. London is still home to a Royal Family, but Queen Maria prefers her garden to her jewels, people can vote from the age of 10 and the centre of England’s capital has been turned over to a giant eco-village in which pensioners teach children lessons of actual worth.

If this sounds far-fetched, imagine someone in 1911 being told that in 2016 banks would dominate the London docks and that most children in London would go to university but many would still not be able to find a job. But in Marshall’s vision, by 2121 a car-free Oxford has become a far happier city. Plymouth is a centre for Luddites; an outlier in a world in which to be green is to be normal. In Wolverhampton, blue-collar workers are now green-collar workers who live in the city with the cleanest air on the planet: all fanciful, all unlikely, all possible.

I have one criticism of Ecotopia 2121. It begins with a world map that still has London at its centre, which is surely not how we will still draw world maps more than a century from now. At first I also thought that New Zealand was missing, which seemed odd, as that is where Marshall grew up before working in 10 countries and 25 cities to really educate himself. Look carefully, however, and you’ll find New Zealand where it really should be on the map.

Ecotopia 2121 pays great attention to detail and achieves what few academic books do: it presents what is most important as entertaining as well as educational. Although it will not be to everyone’s taste, very few academics ever produce anything as stunning and imaginative as this. You can see some of the images here.

Danny Dorling is Halford Mackinder professor of geography, University of Oxford, and author of A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier (2016).

________________________________________

Ecotopia 2121: A Vision for Our Future Green Utopia – in 100 Cities

By Alan Marshall

Arcade, 320pp, £23.99

ISBN 9781628726008

Published 6 October 2016

PDF version of review and further links to the Times Higher where review was published on November 24th 2016

You need to agree that we have failed, because if we are incapable of recognising that we have failed, what hope is there for this country?

Danny Dorling speaking for the proposition – Cambridge Union, Nov 24th 2016

What I would like you to think about is the motion ‘This House Believes That The Government Has Failed Britain’s Youth’ and I want you to think about the extent to which you don’t agree with that. It isn’t about other British governments. My friend here’s point [referring to someone who intervened earlier].

My first point is that many of Britain’s government have failed Britain’s youth over the course of much of my lifetime, but just because other British governments have failed does not excuse this one for its failures. The way we measure whether the British government has failed is to compare its record with that of governments in other similar Western European countries. And if in other similar countries’ children and young adults fair better, then we can say that this government has failed.

The failure actually begins very early on. It begins before children are born. This government allows young people, adults who are about to become parents, to live in circumstances that are so much more stressful than is the case in most of Western Europe that children are born more often damaged than is normal. So the failure is not just about young people, it’s also about what government does for their parents.

The most dramatic statistics are to do with death. We have the highest death rates of under five children in Western Europe. In Northern Ireland infant mortality can only be matched by Romania. Now if that is not a failure of government, what is a failure of government? If you want to claim that government has nothing to do with infant mortality or child health or – god forbid, if you want to claim that somehow this is good because it is survival of the fittest, you may. But given the appalling record of this government and previous governments, they have failed.

Over the mental health of young adults later on in life there are numerous World Health Organisation sponsored surveys that show a correlation that is getting stronger year by year of those countries with the highest rates of economic inequality having the highest rates of clinically diagnosed depression and anxiety amongst 15 year olds, and in particular 15 year old girls. And we will collect more and more data on that over time, but you know this to be true.

You know in your own lives, you know in your own colleges in this university, I know because I teach in Oxford – the levels of fear and depression and anxiety there are amongst those children that have done best; amongst those children who have actually passed the tests and succeeded. And if the worry is so high here, just think what it is like outside. About what is going to happen to you.

Is somebody going to give you a job? Will it be one of those awful jobs that they force you to take so that they can claim to have achieved such low unemployment rates. The “greatest” achievement of this government, when it was in coalition in 2013 was to sanction over one million people: take away their basic benefits, their ability to feed themselves – mainly young people. And the amount of money taken away in sanctions in that year (this is the year in which Sarah Teather resigned in tears because she had a soul), the amount of money taken away in sanction in 2013 was more than the entire fines imposed by every magistrate court in England and wales and very Sheriff’s court in Scotland combined – and mainly from the young. That is how you get unemployment low. You force people to take any job that they can possibly take. This is not an achievement – getting unemployment low – it is a sign of extreme bullying.

On education, we rank the lowest in Western Europe by achievement in numeracy, literacy and problems-solving by the age of 24. We might well treat our teachers better than when I was at school, and we may pay them a bit better than when I was at school, but the end of result of how we make teachers teach puts us at the bottom of the pile in Western Europe for what we actually achieve.

We segregate our children in a way that they are not segregated anywhere else on the mainland of Europe. This is because the mainland of Europe does not have anything like so many private schools on which we spend up to a third of our entire spending on secondary education – on just 7% of children. This is a remarkable situation. A situation we are used to, but it is a failure. There are OECD countries where governments spend more per head on children who are doing worse at school – not on the children who have passed entrance exams to enter into schools!

I have so many examples of how we fail that I know I am going to run out of time. I don’t want to depress you, but our record is abysmal compared to most of Western Europe. However it is not abysmal when compared to the United States, which also does badly. But compared to countries like Germany and the Netherlands and Denmark and Finland and Sweden and Japan; in terms of the mental health of children, in terms of their wellbeing, in terms of what happens to them when they leave places like this and have to pay back those loans for the highest fees in the world. And this is because somehow we have decided that education is a commodity that you have bought so that you can then go and sell yourselves – which the rest of the rich world doesn’t do.

What happens to you when you leave and going to go out and have to pay rent? So that somebody like me can buy a buy-to-let home and guarantee that my pension will be even better in my old age so that I can have five cruises a year, because that is who your landlords are. And what is going to happen when you have to pay back the Private Finance Initiative deals that we have taken out? All of the loans that we have taken out when we mortgaged your future because, to be honest, people of my age want a nice retirement for our generation?

We haven’t just failed you. We completely took the Micky. And the interesting thing, the thing that gives me hope, is that we have taken the Micky so much that it isn’t just poor children, and it isn’t just average children, its children who go on to became young adults at Oxford and Cambridge who are going to enter a world in which their own life chances have been so altered by our belief that only a few great people should rise to the top and the rest can just struggle that we think it is fine if you are going to have to pay these high rents, if you pay £100,000 back for your student loans. On the incomes that you are going to get in your jobs, you’ll be paying back £100,000 pounds for having borrowed £27,000.

Other countries don’t do this. Other countries: Germany, Denmark, … {Interruption from the audience – “Question Do more people go to university in this country or in Germany and Denmark?”} Answer – more people go in the USA and there will be huge numbers going in this country in future – £9000 a time – we will let them in! And of course they are going to come, but the US have even more and their graduates are often in deeper poverty and vote Trump.

You can get as many people to university as you like if you have for-profit universities. In the US for-profit universities spend more on advertising about how ‘good’ their courses are than they spend on their on teaching. It is no achievement getting the number of people into university up. That is dead easy. All you have got to do is allow universities to charge people £9000 a year and give those students the right to borrow money. It’s dead easy. And that is why enrolment in Scotland is lower because Scotland doesn’t do that. Which is why Scotland does it better. Which is why – in the poorest parts of Scotland children are better educated than in the poorest parts of England. Scottish society has a degree of solidarity and people care about each other, which is why Scotland is talking about leaving this god-awful United Kingdom.

Now, I really would like you to vote for the motion as you can tell. But I don’t think it needs to be this way. It is possible to improve this. Somebody has to be at the bottom of the league table in Western Europe in terms of how they treat their children; how they deal with their children; how they help their children; in terms of their health – the physical health – the death rates we can measure – and the mental health which we can diagnose. Unfortunately that somebody is us, but the only way we can move in that league table now is up.

To give you an idea of the difference between us, and the places at this at the top for children, if I was in Oslo with you now then I would be telling you congratulations for having the lowest rate of child poverty in the world! Congratulations on having a brilliant education system where it doesn’t matter which school you go to because they are all good. Congratulations on the good mental health of your young people because they are the soundest, calmest, and least like to cut themselves. Congratulations on what you have created. But the response you would be giving me in Oslo would be “how dare you say that, we are not yet good enough, one in ten of our children are still poor”, because they care. And this is why, in Norway and in other similar countries, they have achieved what they have achieved.

Here in the UK one in four children live in poverty. It is seen as inevitable: “it’s a global race, its their lack of talent”. We’ve got to get out of this way of thinking. It is terrible that we have got into this way of thinking. We have got into it, and we’ve got to get out of it. You need to agree that we have failed because if we are incapable of recognising that we have failed – what hope is there for this country? I will end there rather than depress you any further.

Final statement for the proposition by Danny Dorling, Cambridge Union Debate, Cambridge, November 24th 2016, following two earlier statements made for the motion by Natasha Devon and Lizzie Crowley. The motion was carried.

Keynote speech by Danny Dorling: Placeshapers conference :Building Homes and Lives, Trade Union Congress Centre, London, November 16th.

The Prime Minster, Teresa May, began her speech to the Lord Mayor’s banquet on November 14th with these words:

“My Lord Mayor, My Late Lord Mayor, Your Grace, My Lord Chancellor, Your Excellencies, My Lords, Aldermen, Sheriffs, Chief Commoner, ladies and gentlemen. We meet tonight in a world transformed. A year ago, few among us would have predicted the events ahead. A clear, determined decision to leave the European Union and forge a bold, new, confident future for ourselves in the world. And, of course, a new President-elect in the US who defied the polls and the pundits all the way up to election day itself. Change is in the air. And when people demand change, it is the job of politicians to respond. But it’s also the job of all those in positions of influence and power – politicians, business leaders and others – to understand the drivers of that demand too. And I think that if we take a step back and look at the world around us, one of the most important drivers becomes clear – the forces of liberalism and globalisation which have held sway in Britain, America and across the Western world for years have left too many people behind.”

You may wonder who the ‘chief commoner’ was, but that was not the strangest phrase in the statement above. The strangest phrase was ‘the forces of liberalism’. By which she actually meant ‘growing economic inequality’. And she went on to say:

“Let’s be clear: those forces have had – and continue to have – an overwhelmingly positive impact on our world. Liberalism and globalisation have delivered unprecedented levels of wealth and opportunity. They have lifted millions out of poverty around the world. They have brought nations closer together, broken down barriers and improved standards of living and consumer choice. And they underpin the rules-based international system that is key to global prosperity and security and which I am clear we must protect and seek to strengthen.”

So – our prime minster is committed to protect and strengthen a regime that had increased economic inequality in the USA and UK to levels not seen since before the Second World War. She does not appear to know that the UK and USA have been extremely unusual, the most unusual of all affluent nations, in allowing this form of economic ‘liberalism’ to become so very extreme. She is ill informed about the global and local distributions of wealth and opportunity and how they have changed since the 1970s when both the USA and the UK were at their most economically equal. Her words explain our current dilemma because they reveal the current ignorance of our elite and the beliefs that underlie that ignorance. Beliefs that came to be held in the 1970s among a small group of people as ‘the truth’ and which resulted in an social experience in the UK and USA which has had dire results – cumulating most recently in the Brexit and Trump votes.

The 1970s were far from utopia, but they were the decade in which we first began to address housing for all seriously in the wake of the November 16th 1966 broadcasting of Cathy Come Home. While free marketers, the architects of our current ‘economic liberalism’ and ruthless profit maximising globalization were plotting their take over of the state, others were using the state to ensure that all would be well housed; that all would receive a good secondary education without segregation; that the health system would be properly funded; that the full employment we had enjoyed until then would be maintained.

Full employment was lost in the 1980s; a commitment to housing all well went in the 1990s, in the 2000s we saw school segregation rise, and this decade has seen health funding cuts and the first large absolute rise in deaths in the UK outside of a flu pandemic year. So, like the USA, we have problems – lots of problems and unusual problems. Other affluent countries house their populations better, school them with less segregation, fund health better and do not celebrate growing inequality as our elite celebrate their ‘economic liberalism’. This is why street homelessness is so much a feature of the USA and UK.

So Let’s turn to Housing Associations

Theresa May’s government appears more disposed towards housing associations than the Cameron administration with warmer words about flexibility of support and hints that policy that promoted home ownership alone is now recognised to be flawed. Other European countries succeed with a high proportion of people enjoying good quality renting.

The autumn statement on 23 November will be the test of this along with a promised white paper that will set out a more comprehensive policy approach. Whether that turns out to be genuinely comprehensive and of a long-term nature that would attract wider political support remains to be seen. Given the record of all governments in recent history, I fear more short term unachievable commitments and no appetite to deal with the structural causes of the housing crisis given the vested interests at stake.

It is not all about land supply, green belt protection, planning constraints, high house prices. Fundamentally we have a problem with our commitment to ‘economic liberalism’ and growing income and wealth inequality that results in terrible outcomes for housing.

Whatever is contained in future policy commitments, it is clear that the emphasis on the need for more house-building and pressure to increase supply of all types will continue. What there is no sign of as yet is an understanding that we need to see a much more efficient use of our total existing stock of housing – and that in particular requires the building of housing for elderly people without stairs near to where they currently live and near to large hospitals.

Recent Bank of England and government announcements show an increase in support for housing associations working alongside LAs to do to more and that’s a positive! But any success is dependent on HAs demonstrating that they are doing their best to add to the supply of new homes; and a far better planning regime that takes into account local transport problems rather then the piecemeal – site by site free-market mess that we currently operate.

The individual maximisation of wellbeing – whether it is for an individual family, or even an individual housing association, can easily result in a reduction of wellbeing for all – this is the fundamental free market error. You see it as roads clog up with cars, and school children are pushed into a market for education, as fewer and fewer of our bedrooms in Britain are slept in on any one night – year after year.

Housing association are doing their best to demonstrate they can help – and like so many others – you rightly argue that mixed tenure, regeneration and affordability are just as important as increasing supply. There’s no point just building new homes for sale or shared ownership and ignoring the many who will never be able to get a mortgage even if (as housing ministers keep repeating) ideally everyone (and particularly those who vote) would like to be a home owner… We cannot all be home-owners and in a better housed country many would not prefer to be.

The affordability debate is crucial too with new “affordable” rented housing being no such thing where rents are linked to market levels in the South and are far too high for those on average or below average earnings to afford. Capital subsidy for new social housing was slashed in 2010 on the basis that rents could rise with housing benefit taking the strain. That of course was not a good investment and inevitably the government’s response to the spiralling HB bill has been to cap the amount payable to tenants (and reduce that cap over time). They then require social landlords to cut their rents across the board, without reinstating any capital subsidy, thus threatening new supply.

In other parts of the country where market rents are low, the rent cut has increased pressure on your business plans And the LHA cap will be so low in some areas that many of you face a real challenge in being able to let larger homes and cover your costs.

Of course, a reintroduction of some form of private sector rent control would do much to reduce homelessness and HB bills and improve affordability in high pressure areas but there’s no sign of the political will to go down that route and a buy to let market that would potentially crash if income streams were curtailed. So politicians talk only about trying to increase the supply of rented housing in the apparent hope that market forces will see rents stabilise. Although I often wonder if they really hope for this given that such a large proportion of MPs are themselves private landlords.

In addition to demonstrating that you are delivering new supply, the other key government agenda is ‘efficiency’. There are still those who claim that there are far too many Housing Associations, with too many executives on inflated salaries and hence great waste. If waste was reduced and the number of Housing Associations reduced through mergers then, it is said, hey presto there’d be no need for government support as the capacity released would fill the gap.

Last night I argued in parliament that we did not need half a dozen ‘senior management teams’ to manage half a dozen state secondary schools in one small town. We could just have one team – there are parallels and it is worth asking why there is more than one senior management team for housing associations in any local authority area. In the past – when we have run out of money – we have created far better things: The NHS in 1948, the end of grammars in the 1970s – both due to the middle class becoming poorer.

I know there is no proven link between organisational efficiency and size. Just as with schools there are good big schools and bad big schools, and good small schools and bad small schools – but we need to see an increase in cooperation and a decrease in competition in education, in health and in housing. Fundamentally markets are often very inefficient in areas of natural monopoly – the UK has help demonstrated this by making so many such huge mistakes – just think about the trains. But there is also a case to be made for allowing people choice where that choice does not help others. Because of this I have always supported right-to-buy, but not a scheme that fails to ensure replacement of sold stock

When there is time we need to consider the opposite to right-to-buy more – the right-to-sell and stay put as a tenant.

We are currently in a crisis. You rightly are focussing on flexible responses to local needs and the wider needs you can support in your diverse communities. And you are upping your contribution to new supply and delivering efficiencies. In doing so the signs are that the Government wants to work with you and listen. This crisis includes escalating homelessness and the still uncertain future for the funding of supported housing, an issue I know many of you remain deeply concerned about too. It’s tough out there and some of you will thrive better than others in this fast moving and at times scary world. But it’s even tougher out there if you are homeless or under constant threat of homelessness with little hope of a safe, secure and genuinely affordable home. As PlaceShapers I know you care deeply about this. What better date for you to come together and reflect on what more you can do individually and collectively to help the Cathys of today.

Innovation in Education Lecture by Danny Dorling given in Committee Room 10, House of Commons, London, November 15th.

Let’s start with the conclusion of the March 2016 final report of the Compass Inquiry into a New System of Education:

“The big problem is this – how small our education system has become. By small we mean narrow, restrictive and lacking in ambition and imagination. For both learners and teachers the space in the system is claustrophobic and does not allow people to stretch and expand, to push and be pulled, to know a life without limits. Schools have become factories of limited learning to fit with one dominant view of what it means to be human – the worker–consumer in the competitive global economic race at a time when for so many work no longer pays enough to live by – let alone provide work that allows us to flourish. It is small in the sense that too much of it is selfish and self-serving at a time when success increasingly comes from collaboration and cooperation. It forces us to look down at short horizons, not up at the vast landscapes of what a good society could be like.”

In 2005 Stuart Hall wrote about New Labour’s “double-shuffle” , the disingenuous way in which Tony Blair’s governments had managed to take us backwards while claiming to be making progress. The double-shuffle occurred partly out of a lack of bold proposals to take two steps forward again. Hall bemoaned that there had been no “re-invention of the state education system”. The first academy schools, like the first university student fees (for £1000 and then £3000 a year), simply made worse to come possible. Hall was explaining that we often step backwards before taking two steps forwards.

Suppose we decide that no school should be a ‘sink’ school; that state education in the four countries of the UK should be at least as good the average on the European mainland; so good that fewer and fewer upper-middle class parents choose to pay for private schools and private tuition; suppose we decided that fewer lower-working class pupils will be excluded from our schools each year; suppose we recognised that public support for grammar schools in England is a call for help, just as the Brexit vote was a call for help – what would we do?

Comprehensives schools improved our lives. The evidence that they are better for our children and for us is overwhelming. This is why 60 organisations including the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce put their names to a letter in The Times in October pleading for the ban on new grammar schools to remain. So why (in the face of such overwhelming expert advice) do so many of the public, some government minsters, and the prime minster want to press ahead with new grammars?

It is possible to select a sub-set of grammar schools and to suggest that the minority of children from poorer backgrounds who attend that small set of grammar schools do go on to get better GCSE results, but that does not provide evidence that the grammar school model is good in general. It also does not question the English orthodoxy that it is always better to get higher grades in exams. If we needed lots of adult who were especially skilled at exam technique it would be – but that is not what we lack as a country!

Introducing a grammar school into an area does not just harm schooling in that immediate district but also in neighbouring areas. Despite this, more people are in favour of creating new grammar schools (38%) than would be in favour of ending selection in those that still exist (23%). Among those who attended grammar schools 61% would like to see more being built. Thus it is the old who are most in favour of selection in education.

The argument for grammar schools is very similar to the argument for Brexit. It is about people wanting something better than what they currently have and believing that somehow a return to the past will make things better, that the “experts” are not to be believed, and that the elderly know best. However it is also an argument against just carrying on as we are, and an argument against the massive rise in economic inequality of recent decades that has resulted in school selection by house price.

The majority of people in England do not want to defend 1970s comprehensive schooling, just as they don’t want to defend 1970s council housing, or having a health service treating elderly people as we did in the 1970s. People want something better than what is currently on offer. They are also not all stupid enough to believe that their children will all pass the 11 plus although unfortunately, a little like those Americans voting for Trump, the rise in individualism in the UK has harmed our collective thinking.

Because our education system is poor, fewer of us understand how ability, luck and chance work as compared to our counterparts in most other European countries – by age 24 we are worse at maths, at problem solving and at literacy as compared to most of the young adults in Europe. People of my age (48) or older who are now in positions of power, were far more often educated away from children of a ‘lower’ class than them. Our current Prime Minster, her chief advisor, the majority of older people whose views are well aired – were not able to benefit from a comprehensive education because one was not available where and when they grew up.

Comprehensive education has improved so much since its widespread inception that today, in the majority of areas where it exists; it makes little sense to send a child to a private school. Often the calculations behind that decision are based on past probabilities of both university entry and what a graduate wage might be. Had I gone to the nearest elite private school to my home in the 1970s, I would have been over ten times more likely to go to university. Back then the gamble may have made sense if you were not concerned with segregating your child. Today, if you send your child to an elite private school they will most probably fail to get into the university they are told they should aim for, and will then apply to a small number of universities where they think they might feel safe, because they have become so afraid of the children they almost never meet.

Today the educational differences in life chances between children by class are orders of magnitude lower than they were in my childhood; but that does not mean that our schooling is good – just that it is better than it was – and that non-graduate careers now appear far more rare and more precarious. Our schools need to be feeding children into a different society, but we also need different schools to what we currently have, if we are to become that different society.

People do not want their child to have to attend a local comprehensive that is severely underfunded following years of cuts hidden under the pretence of having “ring-fenced education”. They do not want their child to be assigned to the one in which almost all the teachers are very young because staff turnover is so high, in which hardly any children have middle class parents – the school which those “in the know” avoid.

People may also not want their normal child to be forced to attend an average comprehensive, an exam factory in which every C and B that can be squeezed out of them will be squeezed out of them, in which not going on to university is categorized as failure. It is not impossible that some parents (and probably more grandparents) see the return of grammar schools as an opportunity to have more secondary moderns for the bulk of children who are bored with being continually pushed along a tedious national curriculum path, given so much homework, and treated as such a problem for “the school”.

Just like Brexit, the offer currently on the table is ‘business as usual’ or ‘change’. Business as usual is now a complex competing set of schools, most often academies controlled by a dubious board of trustees often dominated by ‘business-people’ (and who chose them?) Business as usual already includes selection at age 16 because academies can and do refuse to accept pupils who do not score high enough GCSE marks across a very wide range of subjects.

It is the market that decides what makes a child’s grades high enough for them to be able to stay in their academy school at age 16. The child and their parents find out if they are winners on the day the GCSE results are released. If their results are not good enough they have just a few days to let the educational market in their town find alternative provision for the child – unless they were persuaded to jump earlier to a vocational ‘university’ technical college at age 14 from which they are quite unlikely to go on to university – so why put the word ‘university’ in their title?

Different children need different challenges at different ages. Other countries understand this, but that does not mean having to be in very different schools from each other. What has not been put on the table is an alternative to ‘business as usual’ which is not a return to the past. Exactly the same mistake was made when the electorate where given a ‘remain’ or ‘leave’ choice over the EU.

Labour offer the 1970s (defend comprehensives) the Tories offer the 1950s (grammars and ‘out of Europe’). Teachers want stability, and a liveable workload. Parents want some certainty and for their children. Children want to go to school with their friends and be able to stay at school if they like their school. They are shaped by how we treat them and often grow up to think that the way they were educated was good – because they know no other way. But that is, of course, the same of all of us – we only have one childhood. And this is why education matters so much and why the market cannot work in education. Markets only work by repeated failure.

The UK has historically made serious changes to public service provision when it has been forced to do so. The NHS was introduced in 1948 partly because the middle class could not longer afford private doctors fees in the 1930s. Comprehensives schools where introduced across most of the country in the 1970s partly because at a time a very high economic equality the upper middle class could not longer afford to pay for private education if their children failed the 11 plus. We are facing another financial crisis today. Not just as a result of a falling pound, but because of the long-term fall-out of the 2008 financial crash.

Selective education is inefficient and hence expensive. Private schools are incredibly expensive (a third of our secondary spending goes on them). Academy schools and chains are also expensive, prone to allegations of corruption and paternalism because of how they are governed, and to the negative effects of short-term competition to increase grades.

Children are served best in countries such as Finland where there is no equivalent of Ofsted, no league tables, and only a small random sample of pupils’ work is occasionally tested to monitor school performance (rather than pupil performance). We are a long way away from achieving anything like the success of the Finnish model of education, but how could we begin to move towards it, and could we begin to do so while also saving money?

British school senior management teams are large and expensive. Do two neighbouring schools really need two separate senior management teams or could one team do a better job than two, with the ability to move teachers and eventually pupils between sites. If we were to remove competition between neighbouring schools that were geographically close to each other in Britain we could begin to reduce the stigma built up over decades between many of our local schools. That stigma only began to grow to be significant with the widespread publication of school league tables in the 1990s.

If the state schools in a small town were combined under one governing body then only the town as a whole would be ranked. And when catchments began to become less meaningful, the housing price differentials across a town should fall. To achieve this, as the UK funding crisis depends, we need to think of the positives of combining the management of pairs of schools. The different sites can keep their own names, but the school slowly becomes the school of the borough, of the town, just as all the hospitals in a town are often run by a single NHS administration. Such changes may be resisted while housing prices in rich quarters remain high, but they cannot remain high forever – and they are mostly only now as high as they are because we have stoked up such fears over schools.

Eventually we should aim to fund our state schools as well as they are funded in Finland – per child, but that is a long-term aspiration. In the short-term, unless we know what it is we want – new Finnish cooperation rather than old-English competition – we stand little chance of getting there, and a good chance of moving back to the bad old days of selection. You might think such cooperation can never happen. However there are already 800 co-operative schools in the UK up and running today. And they are beginning to organise regionally with more plans in place for 2017.

The first comprehensive school was up and running long before the comprehensive movement became mainstream. The first co-operative schools are already here – now we need to explain again and again why co-operation trumps competition in education.

Almost any fool can taught to be awarded an A* if enough resource is thrown at them. We need children who become adults who understand that there is so much more to learning than simply achieving high grades in an exam.

The most recent and comprehensive study of a cohort of children in England concluded: “Eliminating social class inequalities in educational achievement thus requires the elimination of social class differences in school effectiveness.”

The alternative, described 58 years ago, is Michael Young’s 1958 nightmare vision of a 2033 meritocracy in which he quipped that a few ‘gifted’ children from the labouring classes could be extracted from the masses so that: “No longer is it necessary to debase standards by attempting to extend a higher civilisation to the children of the lower classes”

If we really wanted a ‘higher civilisation’ to result from how we educate, then we would remember these warnings from when we were more economically equal, and also what Richard Tawney wrote almost a century ago when we were beginning to work towards greater quality in education”

“The fundamental obstacle in the way of education in England is simple. It is that education is a spiritual activity, much of which is not commercially profitable, and that the prevailing temper of Englishmen is to regard as most important that which is commercially profitable, and of only inferior importance that which is not. … We should provide, not merely, as hitherto, for a small minority, but for all the nations son’s and daughters, an education generous, inspiring and humane”

Our current education system is not generous – we spend so little and segregate so much compared to other countries. It is not inspiring – teachers are forced to teach a set curriculum and to concentrate on exams constantly tinkered with by politicians thinking of their own leadership ambitions and trying to demonstrate their own apparent prowess. And our education is not humane – children are units, products in a model of competition aimed at producing a docile unimaginative workforce. However, our education system is more human than it was when I was a child, when it was legal to beat children in schools. What do we do today that we will look back on with horror in a generation’s time?

All segregation harms the imagination, children do not emerge from the most expensive of private schools with enquiring minds today, but instead are fine tuned to try to second guess exam questions., because the private schools are forced to compete by exam grade. And the private sector already has many secondary moderns, private schools for children who fail the entrance exams of others schools. What kind of an education is that?

We need a cooperative, collaborative comprehensive system. We need to move towards it slowly, area-by-area, funding crisis by funding crisis. We need fewer examinations and to treat those at age 16 as ‘within school tests’. We need fewer senior management teams and we need governing bodies on which sit teachers and parents and children, not ones dominated by local worthies and accountants.

I’ll leave the last word to Caroline Benn: “Once a sound and universal comprehensive system has been established for everyone from 11 to 18, a fractional percentage of selective schools or a hangover sector for the rich is not necessarily alarming.”

—————————-

Sources of information:

http://socialwelfare.bl.uk/subject-ar...

https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/sites/defau...

http://www.economist.com/news/britain...

https://www.thersa.org/discover/publi...

Do grammar schools close attainment gaps?

Grammar schools contaminate comprehensive schooling areas

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/08/15/...

Theresa May: We have selection in state schools already, selection by house price

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-3...

https://www.teachers.org.uk/files/exa...

https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/...

https://www.theguardian.com/education...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/...

https://www.theguardian.com/education...

Co-operative Schools – A quiet revolution

http://co-operativeschools.coop/devel...

Hobb G. (2016) Explaining social class inequalities in educational achievement in the UK: quantifying the contribution of social class differences in school ‘effectiveness’, Oxford Review of Education, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03054985.20...

Michael Young (1958) The Rise of the Meritocracy 1970-2033, London: Penguin.

Tawney, R. H. (1917) A National College of All Souls, Times Educational Supplement, February 22nd, Reprinted in “The Attack and Other Papers” (1953).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obitu...

Comprehensive schools have improved our lives. The evidence that they are better for our children and for all of us is overwhelming. Which is why 60 organisations, including the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, put their names to an open letter in October pleading for the ban on new grammar schools to remain. Why, then, in the face of overwhelming expert advice, do so many members of the public, some ministers, and the prime minister want to press ahead with more selective schools?

It is possible to select a subset of grammar schools and to suggest that the minority of children from poorer backgrounds who attend that small set do go on to get better GCSE results, but that does not provide evidence that the grammar school model is good in general. It also does not question the English orthodoxy that it is always better to get higher grades in exams. If all we needed was lots of people who were especially skilled at exam technique, it would be – but that is not what we lack as a country. We lack rounded adults with a wide range of skills who respect and understand each other’s abilities and contributions.

Introducing a grammar school into an area does not only harm schooling in that immediate district but also in neighbouring areas. Despite this, more people are in favour of creating new grammar schools (38%) than would be in favour of ending selection in those that still exist (23%). Among those who attended grammar schools themselves, 61% would like to see more built. It’s the old who are most in favour of selection.

The argument for grammar schools is similar to the argument for leaving the EU. It is about people wanting something better than they currently have, and believing that a return to the past will be an improvement and that “experts” are not to be believed. However it is also an argument against carrying on as we are, and against the rising inequality of recent decades that has resulted in selection by house price.

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A Better Politics

Click here for a free low resolution PDF copy of the 2016 book: “A Better Politics”

Housing is fundamentally a debate about
 social goods and social evils – TAP blog 6, 11 November 2016

The provision of housing is a moral issue like the provision of food, fuel and water. That we should not be afraid of using the word “wicked” to describe the selfishness of an immoral minority who profess a moral superiority while profiting from the housing crisis.

We need to rekindle our understanding of kindness as our normal responsibility for each other in spirit and in law. A few people have grown very rich, in monetary terms if not in social standing. They have almost always done this by being greedy and having been allowed to be greedy.

A few more people have third and fourth homes. Millions of others pay far more to be housed than their parents did, often with less security of tenure and peace of mind, often more overcrowded, often in worse material condition, and increasingly beginning to understand that this is not due to immigrants (getting on their bikes!), or welfare cheats, or their own lack of entrepreneurial spirit – but because they are being ripped off by the immoral minority. When they come to cut first they come for the weakest.

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Illustration by Joseph P Kelly