Peak injustice: Solving Britain’s inequality crisis
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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Good evening, everyone. It's my great pleasure to be able to welcome you to the LSE this evening on behalf of the Department of Sociology and the International Inequalities Institute. My name is Aaron Reeves. I'm a professor of sociology here in the Department of Sociology, and we're here tonight to

to reflect on the kinds of issues connected to inequality and injustice as raised, I think, by Danny's recent book, Peak Inequality. Danny is Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford where he is also a fellow of St Peter's College. To my mind at least, Danny is relatively unusual among contemporary academics. I've actually not spoken to him about this, but this is my own reflection.

But around the Great Recession in 2008, it seems to me that something changed in his work and also in the way that he approached his craft. Before that, he was a well-known and successful academic geographer, working on a wide variety of topics. But since then, Danny has become a consistent social critic, arguing in one memorable turn of phrase that as a society, if we can be slightly less stupid, then we'll all be better off for it.

What makes Danny stand out then is the way he operates within the tradition, I think, of public intellectuals. And as a writer, he seems almost inexhaustible. He has this remarkable habit of writing books, roughly one a year, certainly over at least the last 15 years. Although the eagle-eyed among you will notice that he published two books in 2024. Both are indicative of his core concerns. One entitled Seven Children,

Inequality in Britain's Next Generation, which asked the question, if we found seven typical five-year-olds to represent today's UK, what would their stories reveal? His answer tries to explore how children across the income distribution are worse off than their peers. But alongside this, Danny has also published Peak Injustice, Solving Britain's Inequality Crisis, the main theme of tonight's event.

And this collection of essays reminds us, on the one hand, that Britain remains an unjust society, but also on the other, that there is reason for hope. Indeed, one reason I've always appreciated Danny's work is that he is an optimist, and we look forward to hearing from him in a few moments. But first, let me introduce the other distinguished panellists that we have.

Polly Toynbee is a columnist for The Guardian, a leading journalist who has, I think, an academic bent. Her columns are, of course, well researched, but she also has the spirit of an ethnographer. In the pursuit of understanding life in Britain across the income distribution, she's worked in a variety of different jobs, which I think has produced an incredibly fascinating life, which she recounts in her recent memoir, An Uneasy Inheritance, My Family and Other Radicals.

Last year she also published a co-author book with David Walker, a post-election book with a manifesto for the incoming Labour government, The Only Way Is Up, How to Take Britain from Austerity to Prosperity, still important and needed, I think. Dani Sriskanda Raja is a chief executive of the New Economics Foundation and a visiting senior fellow at the LSE's International Inequalities Institute.

held a wide variety of roles in prominent positions at Oxfam, Civicus, the Royal Commonwealth Society and the Commonwealth Foundation. Danny was actually recently speaking at the LSE on his book, Power to the People. You should listen to the podcast, you should buy the book and you should also take the lessons of it to heart.

And finally, Professor Kitty Stewart, who is Professor of Social Policy at the LSE and Associate Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion. Kitty is one of Britain's leading experts on child poverty. If you have read...

about how giving money to children will boost their life outcomes, then it's probably underpinned by Kitty's work. She's been a crucial voice drawing attention to both the problem of rising child poverty in the UK, but also pointing out the ways that we can address and redress that particular problem.

Later, if you would like to join in the debate raised by the issues that we're going to be discussing tonight, you can do so on social media using the hashtag for the event today, which is #LSEevents. This event is being recorded and will hopefully, but hoping with all kind of technical issues resolved, will be a podcast at some point in the future.

As usual, there'll be a chance for questions at the end and if you'd like to put your questions to the panel, we'll come to you in the room, but if you're online, you can also put questions into the chat and we'll try and draw on those as part of the conversation as well. And then at the end of the evening, we will have a reception in the atrium to the left of the theatre. So after this, please join us for a drink.

Danny's going to speak first, and then we'll hear from Kitty, Polly, and then Danny, in that order. But before Danny gets up, please join me in welcoming all of our speakers. Thank you. Thank you so much, Aaron, for arranging this. Thank you, Polly, Kitty, and the other Danny, for...

Coming along so just in case you get confused. That's me. That's Aaron. That's Polly That's the other Danny and that's Kitty I didn't tell me what he said is that say something about what he thought about why I do what I do But he wasn't gonna tell me before and he's right Something did change in 2008 for me It wasn't actually the crash

I was very lucky. I got to read the very first draft of a book called The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, which was published later. And I can remember reading that. My job was to try and spot errors in it, and there weren't many. And I remember reading it and thinking, this is what we should be doing. We shouldn't be writing very long, turgid things. We should be trying to explain the information that we know and that we're more sure about.

So issues such as why is absolute deprivation continues to grow in the UK? In the short term, it's the cost of living crisis. We easily forget that everyday goods still cost so much more than they cost two or three years ago. This book, Peak Injustice,

is a third new writing, two thirds are articles I wrote over the last six years. Now obviously I picked the articles that I'm not embarrassed about writing, but I'm going to show you some images from these. We very, very easily forget what has recently happened and become transfixed on what is currently happening.

Why does inequality matter so very much? Because when you all become slightly poorer, or quite a lot poorer, 20% poorer, if you have almost the widest economic inequality in Europe, the people at the bottom are really sinking into something which is fairly terrible. If we were not as unequal as we are, we could cope with things better.

And I'm not going to dwell on too many things to depress you. It'd be very easy to go through what is terrible, but simple things such as rising absolute levels of child mortality, more children dying aged one to four, but also infant mortality last year than the year before than the year before. Not due to the pandemic, almost certainly due to rising levels of deprivation. The book is optimistic.

You don't call something a peak, in this case peak injustice, unless you think you might be at a peak. So I'm generally optimistic. There's one error on the cover, so I'll go through it very quickly. The error is that I'm no longer the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, I'm now the 1971 professor.

If you search on the web, you'll find as of this morning, there's no reference to Halford. You can work out yourself why, but things do change. We don't always carry on naming jobs after people who may not have been very nice people.

I like diagrams and I like graphics. This is a ridiculously short summary of what happened between 2016 and now in terms of voting. This is somebody else's diagram, I just think it's very good. The only bit you have to concern yourself with are those four little red people moving towards non-voting. That essentially is what happened between 2017 and 2019.

A lot of people who'd voted Labour in 2017 didn't vote at all in 2019. There were other things that happened, but that was the most important thing that happened electorally. For those watching this in the podcast in future, they can freeze the screen and have a look at the people raising their hands and standing like that, and how Leave and Remain voters in 2016 behaved differently in terms of how their votes shifted between 2017 and 2019.

but these things matter for the landscape we end up in. I like simplified pictures. This may look complicated to you, but each square is a million people and that's the 2019 general election, sorted out by age and by numbers of people. So the red squares are the Labour vote.

and you can see that Labour had its vote going right across the age distribution, higher amongst the young, lower amongst the old. There are more blue squares than red squares, hence Boris Johnson wins a majority in 2019. The geographical distribution matters as well, but it's a summary of where we were in 2019. 2024, I'm sorry the colours aren't quite the same, it changed. Not completely, but Labour lost some support amongst the young,

The light blue squares are Reform. And I'm sure you all know the most important thing about the last election is how many votes Reform got, how they absolutely split the right-wing votes in this country. And so we get fewer votes for Labour in 2024 than 2019, but a huge number of Labour MPs. So that's 2016 to 2024 on one page. There's a lot of these kind of things in the book.

but I do pick other people's diagrams. This, I think, is by far the best political diagram ever produced in the history of the planet. It's drawn by John Byrne Murdoch of the FT. It's based on data from thousands of political scientists who were asked to place political parties on a left-right scale according to their economic policy.

There's a circle for every political party in every country in the rich world and the middling world. Only the poorest countries are not included here. And the key point, in case you haven't noticed it, somebody has to be the most far right on this graph, but it was the UK under Liz Truss.

We really are exceptional and extreme. People are constantly telling academics not to say that the place they're in is exceptional and extreme, but the UK is. It still is. We're not at the extent that we were when the international bankers said you can't carry on like this anymore. But we're not a normal European country. Better than any diagram I've ever drawn, by the way.

Another way in which we are exceptional, and these are sad. This is a biograph produced by the Innocenti Centre of the United Nations. It's their most recent measure of changes in child poverty. In a way, it's an incredibly good news story.

All those green bars are huge reductions in seven years in an internationally standardised measure of child poverty. You can't read the countries, but we're talking Poland, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Korea. If you think of films like Parasite or The Squid Games, Korea's a poster child for inequality.

in Asia, but child poverty has been reducing. Estonia, Canada, Romania, Portugal, Croatia, Japan, Ireland, Malta, Greece, Belgium, New Zealand and so on. It's an incredibly good news story worldwide of people taking child poverty more seriously, but you look down at the bottom and you find that the biggest increase has been in the United Kingdom. These are all the countries they compare.

And the four countries above the United Kingdom, Iceland, France, Switzerland and Norway, which have had increases half the size of us, all have much lower rates of child poverty before the increase. So we are exceptional. We have one of the worst records. Things haven't suddenly got better because we've got a new government in 2014. They haven't...

suddenly improved because of that, the situation that the new government has found itself in is a terrible situation by international standards. And things like child mortality rising, they don't happen often in the rich world. This is one reason for being optimistic. It's a sad reason.

But when you get to extremes like this occurring, almost always things get better. But you have to do something about it to actually ensure they do get better. Part of what I'm trying to do is just highlight how bad the situation is. This statistic of three or more parents with three or more children

going hungry and their children going hungry several times a month. That was produced by the Resolution Foundation. I think it was press released by Torsten Bell. Torsten Bell is now an MP in the government. So the question is, what are they going to do about it? And the iconic policy, which Polly is with them more than anybody else I know, is the two-child benefit cap. The question we have to ask ourselves is, what are they holding on for? Why this?

when the situation is this bad, and they know it's this bad because their members of parliament include leading social policy researchers. Why not act now? The United States, a couple of graphs about the United States. This is a recent one just showing that it was only the very rich who moved to the Democrats at the last election. The United States, you know you're doomed when only very rich people

Begin to shift you the irony of course is that behind Donald Trump when he gave his inaugural speech were five I think of the seven richest people on the planet and this is a graph from 2016 I think just showing I know it's too quick to few to grasp it But the same thing was going on before right these trends in the United States of people with less desperately opting for something completely different are not new and

Similarly with Brexit, if you give most people in the country only one option in their lifetime to vote for change, because the majority live in constituencies where it doesn't matter how they vote, you shouldn't really be surprised. In fact, in a way, it's slightly heartwarming that people care enough that they do bother to vote for change. It's just that the change they voted for, in the case of Trump or in the case of Brexit, isn't going to get them what they wanted.

The 2016 ones had to do with health, the one below has to do with income, but income and health are very closely related. I'm speeding forward because I'm determined to end on time because I really want to hear what the others have to say. A lot of people wrote a lot about Grenfell at the time it occurred. If you remember...

It occurred when Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May both had to respond to it. It seems a lifetime ago, but it wasn't. The inquiry has only just concluded. That's a map showing just how socially divided Kensington was. I have an iconic... There are very few iconic photographs of Britain where you have in the front a rich mansion, at the back, a tower block. But Grenville was one of the places.

The Grenville Tower inquiry concluded that accumulations of decades of failure by central government had led to this. And I just think it's important we don't just move on and on, even though we've lived through a series of crises. That event should have a long-lasting impact. You don't simply say you're going to clear the site and move on.

Individual stories, I could tell you individual stories of children, they're in the press, or individual stories like a tower, they have an effect. But this particular graphic is showing how the Office of National Statistics has repeatedly downgraded its published expectations for how long people are going to live in the United Kingdom.

We thought back in 2012 that our life expectancy would simply carry on changing as it was, as it has done in many other countries. But in fact, what has happened is that mainly due to austerity, partly due to the pandemic and how we handle it, but mainly due to austerity, we flatlined. It's a remarkable thing to have occurred.

Life expectancy for both men and women was lower in 2015 and 2014. It was still lower by 2016, 2017, 2018. 2019, low rates of infectious diseases. It briefly got above 2014 for a few months. And then the pandemic hits in 2020. And still, of course, we have many deaths every week from a new disease. On top of that,

the effects of austerity on top of the cost of living crisis. Maternal mortality rose, both in the United States and the United Kingdom. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the main reason for maternal mortality, mothers dying around the time of birth rising, was increased rates of suicide amongst mothers. I'm not going to try to depress you more, but

It is an absolutely extreme situation to have got into. And the response, this is the forward to, and I forget what the paper was about, I think it was a housing strategy, but the response at the time of this kind of peak was almost visible. These ministers were more concerned about their photographs and so on appearing in this than the actual strategy. I have a chapter in the book just going through how...

unthinking the strategy was. But it was all very important to them that they became ministers and they were ministers. And there was a very high turnover of ministers. At this time, I won't go through the personal failings of many of these people because you don't have to, right? You know the gaffes they've made. You know the comments about you can't live on less than £100,000 a year from one of them. But it was a ridiculous situation to have got into.

I'm a starry-eyed utopian, so I have things in the book such as a banner from 1914. Around 1914 to 1918 was our last peak of inequality, by the way. These were the kind of things they were making in socialist Sunday schools. It took a huge amount of work. This one was made in Bradford. It's sad in a way that this was produced just before the beginnings of the First World War.

that the poppy was a sign of hope at the bottom of it. But you've got the sun rising, you've got ideas that things can be better. And if you want to cheer yourselves up, in the decades after that banner was produced and when it was taken on various marches, inequality fell every single decade. 1920s, 1930s. In fact, most of our fall of inequality occurred before 1939. Things have improved so much

that in effect we had a coalition which ushered in the welfare state. It wasn't simply the Labour Party, if you read the debate in Hansard. The MP for Oxford, Quentin Hogg, spoke in favour of the Beveridge Report, produced, chaired by a Liberal, William Beveridge. And then in the 40s, 50s, 60s and most of the 70s, that increase in equality went forward. It's only...

in my lifetime that it's gone backwards right things do get better but for the 1920s and 1930s when a gap between rich and poor was falling the fastest it has ever fallen nobody almost nobody knew it was getting better it just felt very very bad and that may be the situation we're in

Sorry to do you death by graphs, but I just don't want to talk and give you my opinions without saying there's something behind them. Our public sector spending is the lowest in Europe of all major countries. It's the red line along the bottom. Yes, it's risen over time as our population has aged, but it is so much lower than all these other countries. So there are enormous numbers of things you can do within the normal bounds of what a European country does.

But you've got to be a bit brave. If your stance is we cannot possibly nationalise Thames water because the overseas investors won't like it, then you're simply going to be held hostage, which is the current situation we're in. I got my water bill last week from Thames water and watched how much more they're going to charge because the government are too scared to do something about them.

You probably accept by now that we're on the extreme with the grey bar. We sit next to the United States. We were more unequal than Israel in terms of income inequality. We're a long way above Italy and Spain, but look how close Germany and France are to Finland. There are now five countries in Europe which are more equal in terms of income inequality than the Nordic five.

and five countries, including France and Germany, which are almost as equal. So we're sitting next to a continent with 15 of the world's most equitable countries, which on average have inequality falling within them. We spend far more on health services, have better quality housing than we do. That's where we are. And we sit looking at the United States still for answers, although the United States has done us a great favour.

by electing somebody that it's very hard to take seriously. Still looking at the US for how we should do things becomes, I think, almost impossible. Sunlit Uplands. This is near to where Rishi had one of his homes. This is the one where they had to extend the power lines because they couldn't get enough power to heat his swimming pool or something. Right, Sunlit Upland Promises.

These, you know, trust us, go for growth, we're sensible, we're the grown-ups in the room, and the future will be great, as in that 1914 Socialist Sunday School poster. That's worn thin. That's worn completely thin. It doesn't work anymore. Coming to the end. The publisher...

asked me to list ten things that I would do. And I didn't want to list ten things that I would do, but the publisher was quite insistent. This is the lovely Bristol University Press. So my ten are slightly odd, but I think they matter, because you can list all kinds of policies, but the question is, why don't we do these? And particularly, why aren't we doing them now? You cannot write a book with the title 'Peak Injustice'

and publish it in the autumn of last year and not mention international law. It's just impossible to do that. And we got ourselves into a situation where we look bad in the eyes of the majority of the world. The closest I'll get to getting in trouble with this is I had one line in the book which I said, "As a geographer, it is now difficult to write about rivers and seas

And the publisher said, "Oh, we don't think you can say that." Okay? And we got ourselves into this ridiculous level of pussyfooting around and behaving as a poodle for the United States.

and following US policy. Essentially that's what we've been doing for two or three decades. Looking at their school systems, looking at their innovations, looking at US studies of social mobility. It's completely the wrong place to look. This is just me being slightly childish over I found the rebranding of the foreign Commonwealth and Development Office. We have branding for everything.

as I thought I'd translate the Latin. And apparently since 1348, we've had and still have, "Shamed will be whoever thinks ill of us on our royal crest, and God and my rights since 1157." Right. There's a theme to this, I'm going to finish in just about a minute, but I think this matters. The pandemic

In the wake of a pandemic, a bit like after a war, you want to forget about it, and people have in some ways forgotten about it, but we do need to look at our response to it and what it tells us about ourselves. Johnson's complaint, why are we destroying the economy for people who will die soon anyway? I have a lot of sympathy for what they did in Denmark when they opened the schools up earlier in Sweden, but we now know that the majority of people who died in the pandemic who were largely very old...

15% of all our men over 90, 10% of all our women died from COVID. They wouldn't have died immediately. They would have lived a few years later. It was a callous way of thinking. Brexit. We still haven't worked out why it was us. Why of all of the European countries was it not a small country?

Why was it the United Kingdom that did this? We still don't understand ourselves enough. Hope. You can make lots of arguments for hope. I haven't given you too many. I have a lot in the book about how wage inequality has fallen in the last two or three years.

almost every agreement made between trade unions in the public sector and the private sector has been progressive. No more 3% increases across the board. It's now biggest increases for people on the lowest pay, smallest or none for people on the top. This happened in the 1930s before. It doesn't feel great.

If you're a senior civil servant and your wage has gone down in real terms by 25%, you don't go, "Oh, but at least my junior colleagues have only seen a fall of 12%." But the gaps between our civil servants and every other group have actually began to narrow because they had to. Child poverty. The lowest rate of child poverty on the mainland of Britain is in Scotland.

Scotland had the highest rate of child poverty when I first started working on these issues in the early 1990s. Scotland makes a payment to children or to the families with children receiving benefit, which is not tapered, to ensure that they do not go hungry, that they can pay their rent, that they do not get cold, that they can put the heating on.

Scotland looks at landlords and tries, beginning to try, to stop the rent being increased to make it impossible to live. You don't have to go to Nordic countries to see progressive social policy. You can simply look at Scotland to do it. Similarly with housing. There are so many models of what we could do with housing. We may do them. We have a new town's commission.

which may well do something interesting. Angela Rayner is, I think, quite serious about 300,000 houses a year. It's just that the private sector is not going to deliver them. And the really interesting question for me is, in normal times, you could make promises, 40 new hospitals or so on, live with it. They might chuck you out, but you'll be back in again anyway in four years or eight years' time. But not now. If we don't actually do things in the next two years...

there are other people that the population might vote for. And there's a lot of money from the USA who would like people to vote for those other people. So the incentive to do something is much higher. I've put too many graphs in this, but just to tell you that there's a lot in there. And they tend to show, you know, in terms of going Hungary, USA, Israel, Chechnya, UK, Australia.

It's not always completely simple. France is the most equitable large country in Europe. But still you get the same patterns in general. Until we get to the end of this. Anti-racism. It's so easy to stoke up racism. It's so easy to do it. It's so easy to talk about British jobs. It's so easy to talk about stopping the small boats. It's so easy.

We just simply have to begin to call it out much more clearly. If we don't, we strengthen the position at the far right. We have to keep on recognising where we come from if we're going to understand why we've got into such a pickle. We do have to recognise our colonial past and how it has an effect on what's happening right now and stop pandering to races. And this is very popular amongst young people.

If you just simply say I'm not willing to accept racism when people suggest things which in various ways are racist, that is unlikely to reduce the number of young people who will turn out to vote. If any of you looked at the voting distribution in Germany by people aged 18 to 24, it was quite stunning how positive young Germans are about what they actually want. Health, we're on our way to destroying the National Health Service.

It's a serious threat. We do not yet have a plan for how to deal with that. We have far too many private companies involved in making a profit out of the NHS. If you do head towards being in the USA, this is what you get, and this is the last graph I'll mention.

Compared to other affluent countries, you're twice as likely in the USA to die as an infant, twice as likely to die all the way up to age 10. Then it gets worse. By the time you're 30, you're four times more likely to die simply by living in the United States. It's only until you get to age 100 that your chance of dying next year is the same, because essentially when you get to age 100, that's kind of almost it. The United States is not a model for health. It's quite...

Unbelievable how bad the United States is. More about the past and the point I'm trying to make. I haven't listed a series of policies about schools, about housing, because we have to accept we've got something fundamentally wrong. We've had two political parties that have largely behaved quite similarly to each other

since 1979. The differences may matter to us, we can have big debates about it, but compared to the rest of Europe, our two main parties have behaved quite similarly until this trust took us off to the far extreme. And this way of behaving doesn't work. I lied, here's the last graph for you. Sorry. I don't know, I was shocked when I drew this. This is data from Sweden on every death in the world connected directly with war,

since 1989. So each country is sized by the number of people who've died due to war. With the exception of Rwanda, it looks a little bit like a crusade. It's scary when you see that for the first time. The number of wars were going down, deaths were going down. Just at the point when Steven Pinker wrote "Better Angels Are Our Nature", and almost at the point of publication they began to rise.

They're still not large compared to the past, but the number of people dying in wars worldwide is rising. But that's the global distribution by the best data we have, which comes from academics in Sweden. And we have a part to play in that. Conclusion. Last slide. This is a quote from Dawn Foster, who the book is dedicated to. And it's about the danger of what happens if we carry on along this route.

Labour got fewer votes in 2024 than it did in 2019, despite the chaos of the party of government. It still won, but it got fewer votes because there's almost nobody knocking on doors. There's a picture of Dawn for you. And this is my fear. I attended a Labour Party meeting on Saturday in the county of Oxfordshire of people from the whole county. There were 16 of us there. It's

We're in this incredible situation. We have a party in government with a massive majority representing a political party with very little enthusiasm in that party and what appears to be no really obvious plan. And I don't want to have written a book called Peak Injustice and have got it terribly, terribly wrong. Apart from the fact I live here and have always lived here.

It should not be impossible to do some things in the next few years which demonstrate that government can turn the tide, which is already turning as far as pay is concerned, and make actual achievements that it can point to in 2029. Thank you for your patience.

Okay, well thank you very much Danny and thank you for having me here. It's a great pleasure to be here. It's an incredibly rich book which covers a lot of ground as I think you've seen illustrated and I'm going to make really just two big points which I think speak to its central questions and the provocation essentially that Danny's set for us. How can we make sure that this is peak injustice? How can we do better?

And I'm going to talk about two ways in which I think we need to shift our thinking and change the conversation if we want to see real and lasting change. So the first point is about the social security system.

That people need extra support at certain times in their lives is an insight that we've had for a long time. It goes back at least to Seabourn Roundtree more than 100 years ago, probably well before that. So there are times in our lives, all of us, when we're better able to pay into the welfare state. And there are times in our lives when we have higher needs and we need to draw down.

And a key role for a social security system is to help us smooth our incomes out over our life course, as well as providing extra help for people who have worse luck and need more support than others. Now, that idea is one that we really understand very well in relation to older age, I think. But we really don't get it in relation to childhood or parenthood.

The two-child limit that Danny referred to, so that restricts benefits for families with children to the first two children in the family only, means-tested benefits, that is quite a popular policy in polling.

And when I've tried to understand that and talk to people who support it, a really common phrase is "other people's children". It's about other people's children. Why should I, as a taxpayer, have to pay for other people's children? People shouldn't have children if they can't afford to look after the children themselves. And I find that really interesting because they never say, "Why should I, as a taxpayer, have to look after other people's grandmothers?"

Shouldn't those grandmothers have thought of that in advance and had children and brought them up so that they would be looking after them themselves?

So the huge furore last year around the cutting of the winter fuel allowance, I think, really illustrated this. So the winter fuel allowance, the cuts there, they were for middle and higher income pensioners, so they protected poorer pensioners to the extent that those pensioners were taking up the benefits entitled to them. And for those that they removed the money from, they took away a maximum of £300 per year in a context in which the state pension is rising by more than inflation.

So contrast that to the two-child limit, which removes nearly £300 per month for every child it affects. So that's 12 times as much money, and it includes, it covers, it affects all of the very poorest families. There's no protection.

There's also the benefit cap, which is a distinct policy from the two child limits, which removes several hundred pounds more. So in work that we've done, including Aaron, looking at the effects of those policies, some of the families that we speak to are losing 600 or 700 pounds a month just from the benefit cap. And by definition, those families are among the very most vulnerable in the country, and 90% of them include children.

So of course the difference, I suppose, is that pensioners are seen as having contributed during their lifetime in one way or another. Children haven't yet. But more importantly, their parents are somehow perceived as not contributing, not deserving. And that trumps any concern that people have about the children. The children essentially are in the background. They're less visible. In the case of the two-child limit, you could argue that they're invisible, third and subsequent children.

And when we're making policy, we have the parents in our mind and not the children. The children are peripheral. In work with colleagues, including Aaron, we've called this Adult Behaviour Oriented Child Benefit Policy, which is not a very snappy term, so it hasn't caught on yet.

might need a new term. But what we argue is that, so policy is being made with regard to adults' behaviour and not to children. And we argue that the UK really stands out from other European countries in that regard. So in most other European countries, children and their needs, or in some countries, actually children's rights are placed centre stage and child benefits are seen as being for children, not as a way to change adults' behaviour.

I'm just worrying I'm talking too much but anyway I'll carry on for now until Aaron shuts me up so in fact if we're going down the route of contributions rather than children's needs or rights in fact over two thirds of families in poverty have an adult in their household who's working in paid work and

And many others face quite complicated barriers to paid work, including their own health, their child's health or special educational needs. In our project looking at the two-child limit and the benefit cap, we were really struck by how common children's health and disability is the reason why parents feel unable to take up paid work at that time or to work longer hours.

So in many cases that's compounded by a lack of suitable childcare, but it's also reinforced by what we might call an ethics of care and a commitment to children's wellbeing. A belief that even right now, it's tough financially for the family, but my child needs me at home. That's the decision that I have to make. That's the right thing for my child and my family.

So one of our participants, Laura, who's a lone parent with three children, two of them have autism, she said, I'd love to go back to work, but I just don't know what my child's needs are going to be as he gets older. Right now, I know he needs full-time care.

So families like Laura's need support from the state because they've got temporarily higher consumption needs and in her case less ability to engage in paid work. And that's exactly what social security should be for. And we should be making the case for it. So not allowing it to be framed as kind of personal inadequacy or failure, but making the case for social security as something that we...

There are times when we need it. Our much missed colleague, John Hills, he wrote a whole book about this called Good Times, Bad Times. And my argument is that if we use that language more, if we use the language of reciprocity and of interdependence rather than of them and us, maybe we could shift the way we see our society and our place in it and reinforce commitment to the welfare state.

and to policies that invest in children for the future. Because of course the truth is that we all actually need other people's children. We actually need them much more than we need other people's grandmothers. Although I should be really clear, I am fully in favour of making sure that other people's grandmothers are also looked after.

The second point, which I hope will be briefer, am I doing okay? Two minutes. Okay, the second point is about growth. So we are living within a world in which growth is the fundamental priority. You can't have missed that if you've watched any speeches from Rachel Reeves or even Keir Starmer. That is the primary goal on which Labour wants to be assessed.

And I fully understand why that is. We've got a lot of debt, we've got lots of things we want to do. Health, education, green energy transition, even child benefits, all of these things cost money and a growing economy delivers tax revenues and it therefore delivers money to spend on all of those things.

And yet there are big problems with having growth as our goal. So one is the way that it values some kinds of contributions, not others, like Laura's. It's got no place for the ethics of care that I referred to. A second is a question about whether it can be relied on to deliver improvement in the quality of our lives, which we might come back to because I haven't got time really to go into that.

But the third and most important is the environmental impact of a larger economy. So as we get richer, we're using more and more of the world's resources. We're already using way more than our share.

The transition to green energy is helping and of course that costs money so we kind of need growth to do that and yet we're still way off where we need to be for our carbon reduction commitment let alone sustainable levels of other resource use. So really there's a strong argument we need to be doing more which actually means doing less. So what if we were brave enough to say that we are rich enough already?

And if we look across the planet, surely we are rich enough in this country. That would mean that we need to face really, really difficult questions about distribution and about how we use the resources that we have. Danny asked, you know, why aren't we doing something about the two-child limit? And I think maybe popular opinion is part of that, but clearly feeling that we don't have enough money is also part of it. I suspect that that's going to be the argument. If it doesn't make it into our child poverty strategy, the argument would be we can't afford to do this just yet.

Yet how can it be? How can we say that we can't afford in this country to make sure that children are well looked after and can do well in school and have a decent childhood? So what if we ask not how do we grow, but how can we meet everyone's needs within the confines of our current resources? That's when decisions would get really, really hard. Real trade-offs, reallocating resources. But that's the conversation that I think to make sure that this is peak injustice that we need to be having.

Well, Danny, it's a wonderfully optimistic title, "Peaking Injustice." I hope it really might be. Because, well, I'm much older than you, but I lived most of my life expecting things to go on getting fairer and more equal. You know, what we learned, which was then O-level history, social history, was all about steady improvements. It was about factory ads, not setting boys up chimneys.

and rights and improvements and working rights and you just assumed that it would go on that way. The 1970s

a reviled era because the victors always write history and the victors were the 1980s. Thatcher writes, "The 1970s were a time of greatly growing equality and the strength of the unions then was very much to be praised rather than now regarded, you look back on as, well by the conservatives anyway, as something that did damage."

And I try to think. So everything turned on its head in the 1980s, everything that I'd been brought up to expect, and everything went into reverse. Inequality shut up and has stayed at that high plateau pretty much ever since. I'm glad you see some indications that it might be coming down. That's encouraging.

I think I just want to raise some questions for you to think about really, which I don't know the answers to. Why is this country so extraordinarily right wing? Why on your graphs are we always the worst about everything? Why are we the meanest and the nastiest, bar America, amongst rich countries?

Lots of reasons why. You're right to mention the Empire. I happened this weekend to go and visit an old schools museum. It was absolutely fascinating. Small, voluntary museum in Hitchin.

I just happened to come across. I was absolutely knocked out by the materials these children had been taught about empire, empire, empire. Everything. They were being taught to work for the empire, to do everything for the empire, to be proud of the empire. Their whole identity was empire. And I think we forget how long those things last in a culture. And although now we're having a new wave of thinking again about it...

it's still deeply entrenched in Britishness and a sense of who we are and what our history is. And you see that because any attempt to slightly redress the balance gets such an avalanche of, uh,

hate from the Tory press and the Tory party, all of them saying it means you're not proud of your country, which is of course not the case. You don't have to dislike your country for being honest about its history. What else would I say? Maybe royalty. I think that infects us in much the same way. I think we have a sense of being subjects, not citizens.

that's very deep within us too. We have a voting system that, I mean this time bizarrely, it's held Labour for the first time. But normally it has kept Tories in power for most of my lifetime. Occasional interludes of Labour governments

I think that the Thatcher disaster of the 80s was extraordinarily emotionally powerful. They managed to sell a narrative that again went deep into the country's bloodstream.

And the right to buy was regarded as the cleverest policy politically ever. It was hugely attractive, incredibly popular, with people already owning their own homes and people who wished to. And it's only really now that all those pigeons have come home to roost. Now we know what it feels like to have lost two million social housing units.

Now we see what the privatizations did, you meant Thames water. It's only really fairly recently that the general public as opposed to people who are really interested in those things understand what it did to energy, to water, to everything it touched, to trains, to everything that it touched.

and what a disaster it was. And we've been left with the debts. You know, you say, take back in Thames Water. Well, if it means taking in 16 billion of debt, that seems an alarming prospect. We've been left with things that are very, very difficult to deal with. You can't just turn the switch and put time back.

Certainly the damage that was done by destroying union power was a deep political damage. It wasn't just about what they achieved in terms of pay, but what they achieved in terms of public education. Large numbers of people were members of unions. They had a kind of political education and an understanding of what collectivity can do against the forces of the Thatcherite individualism.

So we are as well, and perhaps always have been. I don't know enough about far-back social history, as you say, a very child-unfriendly country. And I think perhaps we always have been. We really, really don't like children.

So we are quite willing in our benefits system to give triple lock to people like me who don't need it. And I think it was right about the winter fuel allowance, except of course you should have lifted the threshold a bit so that some of the poorer people still got it.

But basically, and still half the population think it was the right thing to do, it is insane to dish out money to the old just because they're old, when the old are least likely to be poor and children are most likely to be poor. I think you do get all the way through society this sense that children should be neither seen nor heard and certainly that they are not of political value. And if you did decide to build a society, at one point Keir Starmer made a very good speech about it,

building a society fit for children, which would be a better society for everybody in the way we lived, in the physical environment and in our values and how we felt about ourselves. I'm more optimistic than you, Sam and Danny, about a Labour government, what it will do, despite the fact that our book, The Only Way Is Up, is really a

a chronicle of their legacy, of their inheritance. We wanted to pin down quite how bad everything is that they took over on day after election day in each department. I mean, things have never been in such a bad state in my lifetime in terms of public services and everything and everywhere you look.

But Labour governments always, always improve things greatly for the people who've got least. And I'm optimistic that this one will too.

I think that Angela Rayner's working rights are going to have much more effect than has quite sort of got through to the public. The fact that a trade union will go into every single workplace to recruit is revolutionary. I mean, you know, employers really sink in with them. They will be quite horrified, but they'll have to do it. And we're going to see, I think, a big increase in trade union membership and activism.

gig economy, jobs turned into secure jobs, fair pay agreements starting with social care. That's very important. It's like returning to the old wages councils in a country where trade union membership is so low. You need fair pay agreements imposed right across sectors. I think things are starting to do after only what, been over six months, breakfast clubs,

I think that the huge increase in nursery places for children from nine months onwards will make an enormous difference. 1.5 million homes, if Raina can do it, fantastic. And she says that she promises the biggest wave of council housing in a generation.

NHS waiting lists are already starting to go down and that's very much a barometer. It's not the best thing about the NHS necessarily, nor the most important. It's what people notice, it's how they feel about the NHS. So when you say, you know, you think it may be breaking beyond repair, I don't think so, because people so passionately support it.

you know any Tory or when Farage puts a foot in the steps a toe into private insurance or anything like that it's a complete disaster so as Bevan himself said as long as people believe in it it will it will survive banning evictions without cause that's another thing Labour's doing um

And I think the skills and employment will be a very good programme, as the New Deal was last time and made a huge difference. The green investment, I think, will make a big difference. We had a report out today by the CBI saying how astonishing it is how the green investment in sustainable energy is an absolute boom in new businesses building these things we need to make them.

to make energy sustainable. I could go on through a list of things I think they're going to do from a new curriculum. We wait for the child poverty strategy with holding our breaths. They won't do it in a hurry, but I am absolutely sure that they will greatly reduce the numbers of poor children because any Labour government that didn't would be an absolute catastrophe and a failure.

You know, last time we had 3,500 sure-star centres set up. They were never promised ahead of time, but it happened. It's what Labour people want to do. And I'm glad you mentioned the spirit level, because that was the seminal work that really explained the damage that inequality does. And what was fascinating about it was all over the world,

It's the better off people who are unhappier, as well as the poorest people who are unhappier in most unequal societies. So let's hope you're right. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy.

LSEIQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSEIQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event. APPLAUSE

Thank you for having me, Aaron. I'm a big fan of Danny, and it's not just because of his name. It's because Danny always writes these sort of books that should be depressing but leave me hopeful, and this was no different. And it's important to recognize the difference between hope and optimism. People often ask me about it because my book is also, I think, hopeful. For me, the difference is hope.

Someone who's an optimist thinks that the future is going to be better, that things will get better. But someone who's hopeful thinks that the future can be better and works hard to build that better future. And amidst all of those graphs that we just heard today and saw, there's lots and lots to be depressed about, but I think there's lots of evidence of how the future can be better. And when reading this book, I thought...

Our job, for those of us who care about inequality, who care about injustice, is to show future historians that this is the period of peak stupidity.

And I think Danny's book gives you some really interesting clues about how that's possible. One, it's full of evidence about how remarkable social change has been. And you mentioned in passing one of your lessons was around racism. There's a fantastic bit in the book about how...

A series of polls done over 30 years show that in 1983, more than a half of white British people did not want to have an in-law who was black or Asian.

that poll was carried out regularly, by 2013 that figure drops to less than a quarter and amongst people born in the 1990s it drops to less than 10%. So in a relatively short period of British history, 30 years, this one particular indicator of racism, and it's not the be-all and end-all of racism,

shows exactly as you said, that what you think is inevitable actually isn't, it turns out, if you work hard enough. And I think the challenge for all of us is to think about this sort of economic system

that we've chosen to have and expose it for its fetishization of growth, as Kitty says, that somehow obsession that aggregate GDP growth is the be-all and end-all of human endeavor. This idea that lies beneath that, that the state, the way that we've chosen to organize our society so that we look after each other and provide public goods is bad and the market is good.

This idea that lies behind our economic system, that of course it's the individual entrepreneur that has to be unleashed

and given every single protection and opportunity to be able to make money while those who don't have that sort of parent entrepreneurial spirit are left to pick up the pieces. This idea that the global economy is trickled down, that everything will inevitably get better if only you allow the billionaires to get even richer. All of these ideas that have underpinned the last three or four decades

of economic ideology, I think it's increasingly clear that they are bust and we have an opportunity, a responsibility, I think, to show that we need not organize our societies or economies in the way that we've chosen to. And I want to sort of share three things that I'm particularly interested in, inspired by, and certainly my colleagues at the New Economics Foundation where I work are working hard on.

One is this notion of social protection that Kitty talked in detail about. Another is this notion of extreme wealth or dangerous wealth. And third is this notion of what democracy in the rest of the 21st century might look like. And just briefly, so I think what Danny shows and many others have shown is humans as a species have thrived, have excelled.

when we've designed ways of protecting each other, of looking after the weakest, of making sure that we're protecting the collective good. And it's time again to rethink how we do that in the years and decades to come. What does social protection look like in decades to come in this country? If you think about 2048, for example, which will be the year that the NHS turns 100, and national insurance 100 as well,

what might the welfare system in this country look like? How do we, how will we

express our obligation to each other and how do we fund a system that will provide for that. It's very few people in public policy making I find today are asking those sorts of questions but it's exactly those sorts of redesigned questions that we need to be thinking about if we're to create a system that is genuinely fit for the future. Secondly on this notion of extreme wealth

We've been sold this lie that there's no point at which wealth is bad. You know, it's not actually a problem, apparently, that something like six or seven men, all men, many of whom were at Trump's inauguration, own more wealth than half the world's population put together. A level of global inequality that was unimaginable. And yet we not only tolerate it, but we celebrate it.

We have a level of inequality in this country where if you happened to be in the top 1% of wealth holders in 2010, by 2024, 14 years later, your average wealth, net wealth, increased by 2.2 million pounds.

because you sat on assets that gained in value, you paid far lower rates of tax on your capital gains and on the returns to your wealth than the vast majority of us who have to work for a living. And yet we've come somehow to normalise that this...

eye-watering, vulgar level of accumulation that we see not just in this country but across the world is normal. We are working at the New Economics Foundation alongside colleagues at the LSE, at the International Inequalities Institute, on trying to introduce this notion of extreme wealth.

a point above which we think, as a society, that any one or any one family can have too much, that wealth becomes problematic in terms of the harms it does on democracy, on the environment, on a whole range of other things. And, you know, you think, well, that's impossible that we'll ever normalise a notion like that. But I say, well, how is it that we've come to normalise this notion of an extreme poverty line? There's a point below which...

no one should have to live. And thirdly, the reason why I think peak inequality translates to peak injustice in Danny's book is because of the failures of the way that we've chosen to organise our democratic system. Polly's talked a bit about the way that we've built an electoral system that assumes that voting once every five years or so on a first-past-the-post system, the

the most unimaginably crazy system of organizing democratic life between parties that look increasingly similar and by the way in a legislature in which the majority of members are actually unelected right the House of Lords has more members than the House of Commons is somehow a fantastic way of organizing a modern functioning democracy it's nonsense and the good news is

The system that we've come to now call normal is in itself only 100, 200 years old in the way that we've chosen to design it. And so it's time again to reinvent and reimagine what social protection means in the 21st century, to, as a society, agree on what we think is extreme wealth and to reorganize the way that we organize politics so that we can make sure that this is seen by historians as peak stupidity.

Thank you to everyone for your insightful comments. We're going to take questions now. I'm going to also look online. Let's try to keep our questions short, but do tell us your name and affiliation. So if people have put their hands up and let us know where they are, we have... Yes, so we have gentlemen in the grey jumper here, and then black at the back, top. If we can go there, and then...

Why don't we go to red jumper at the very back. We'll take those three and then we'll get quick responses as well so we'll try and get as many as we can. So yeah, great jumper. My name's Paul Alexander, I'm a teaching fellow at the University of Portsmouth. My question is, what's your understanding of the impact of inequality on economic growth? Black jumper.

Yes. Would you mind passing it to the green jumper here? Very short question. My name's Tiziana. I'm an alumni of the LSE. I want to ask about one of the graphs you've so kindly shown, Danny Dorling. Why is public spending in the UK so low, but everyone says at least that income tax is at record highs? So I want to understand the kind of the dynamic there.

Thank you. Jim Clark, visitor to the LSE. I was just wondering, a number of the panellists seem to

argue for a higher level of protection and presumably that would result in a higher level of public debt, higher taxes, or a combination of those two. If we're going to do that, we're going to need people to pay for it. And for people to pay for it, we're going to need strong national identity, strong social cohesion. So in an age of more polarisation, more bifurification,

what is the panel's ideas about how we can have a stronger sort of communitarian attitude? Thank you. Great. So let's get answers to those. We'll be brief, I think, if we can, on as many of them as you want to. So, Danny, I'll maybe go to you first and let's say like 30 seconds. 30 seconds to a minute. 30 seconds.

On average growth is higher in more equal countries, there's a higher rate of innovation, more patents per head. As Kitty said, we can't carry on growing at this rate. Public spending.

Why do people... Because if you look at the red graph, it is actually higher now than it was in the past. We are taxing at the highest rate for 70 years. We are spending at the highest rate, just much less than all those other Europeans. So it's possible to do... The two spikes, by the way, are the banking crisis and COVID. You need governments to step in. Strong national identity.

All those other countries on that graph are managing to tax more and spend more than we do. And we have an incredible strong national identity. It may not necessarily be one you may not be happy with, but there is...

certainly pride in Britain more than you generally see, I'd say. And just take one, royal families are one. I think a majority of European countries have one and still manage to do okay. So, you know, you can keep your national identity, be proud, spend more, have a royal family even, but you have to do it. Very shortly after doing it, after spending more, people get used to it.

They don't carry on going, "Oh, that was terrible. I can remember when we didn't do this in the past when we let people be in the gutter." They will accept the new state which they're in. They will argue against it as you introduce it, and two years later, "Well, of course we tax the rich more. What else do you think we would do?"

Does anyone else want to respond to any of those? Just quickly, I'll go quickly on Jim's question about how we change, how we build more communitarian values which would make people happier to pay taxes to support...

social protection spending. I mean, that's, I guess what I was trying to get at with talking about, I think we need to talk, we need to talk about it differently. I think if you, if all the time we're told that there's a lot of benefit cheats out there and, you know, there's the Skyvers who stay behind their little net curtains while you are hardworking,

of course that undermines people's willingness to pay for this kind of thing. There's a really great book by Tom O'Brady where he shows that the way that Labour talked about, they were actually doing a lot of redistribution, as Pauline said, but they were doing that kind of on the sly and talking about benefit cheats and, you know, and

talking about the system in that way. And I think that that, he shows that that sort of, that itself changed people's opinions. So it kind of undermined people's support and we've seen that in recent years as well. You remind me, I forgot to say, amongst the reasons why we're so horrible is our press.

We do have probably the last news press in the world. We have three press barons who own most of the newspapers and although newspapers' dead trees are not read as paper anymore, they are still remarkably influential online all the time. So you've got Murdoch earning 40% of the readership

You've got the Daily Mail group, you've got the Telegraph group. And the noise that they make and the sort of extreme right-wing views they take, far removed from their readers, which is interesting, far to the right of their readers, is not matched anywhere else. There are conservative papers across Europe, but they're not like ours. I'm going to go and get some more questions, but one I'll hear from Danny maybe in a moment. We have...

Great. So the Green Jumper. I'm also going to read one of the questions online and then we'll maybe if you could pass the mic down to the black hoodie just down the road there. But let me read this one. This is from David Walter online. There's a preamble which I won't read in detail. But why is it now that with industrial in the industrialized world, if population decline, that we don't understand that civilization or society costs money to maintain? And then Green Jumper.

Thank you. It's Patrick Newman from Stevenage, and you'll see the relevance of where I come from in the question I'm going to ask. Basically, the last time this country built 300,000 houses was in the late 70s. Of that 300,000, 93,000 were social homes. What I don't see from this government is

is a serious plan to build large volumes of social homes. They seem to be stuck into the

the terminology of affordable this and affordable that. Thank you. If you could pass down to the gentleman, oh sorry, black hoodie there. Great, thank you. So my question was about the wealth limit. Wouldn't that limit the amount of investment and of FDI in the country and wouldn't also sort of forward the limit, the aggregate demand and wouldn't also limit

limit their employment because with less investment in FDI we'd have less firms and therefore less employment and therefore higher inequality.

Sorry, you couldn't repeat that, could you? Yeah, so I think the question was about whether placing a wealth limit would undermine the level of investment, the kind of spare capacity to drive the economy forward in terms of innovation. Is that a fair summary? Yeah, the level of investment in FDI and therefore the amount of firms and therefore the amount of employment available. Yeah, employment and then also productivity growth as well. Yeah, and also maybe people moving their money from the UK elsewhere.

Great. Yeah, let's take some... Well, that's perfectly linked to Danny first, and then we can maybe grab a couple of other brief responses.

And please, Hans, if you want to ask a question. So I do think for it to be truly effective, any sort of wealth tax needs to be globally coordinated. And some of you may have noticed that the G20 in Brazil a few months ago, for the first time in G20 history, leaders came to the conclusion that wealth inequality is a problem and that they want to do a coordinated move to raise taxes on the super-rich.

And it's that notion of the sort of super-rich about which the sort of notion of, for the question that came from online from David is, you know, as one of sort of an Austrian heiress, Marlene Engelhorn says very beautifully, there's nothing super about the super-rich, right? These are not particularly super hardworking people who are super clever. In many cases, they've got incredibly lucky. And Britain has one of the highest rates of inherited wealthy people in the world, right?

And a recent estimate by Oxfam showed that two-thirds of the world's billionaires have either inherited their wealth or extracted it through some sort of colonial or neo-colonial extraction from the rest of the world. So we've come to sort of valorise this class of people as if they are the epitome of entrepreneurialism. They're not. They're simply free-riding on society's

that are letting them get away with looting our society and free riding on our society. And the point about the productive nature is all the evidence I've seen suggests those people who do have this sort of, who have accumulated huge amounts of wealth, are actually not investing in the productive bits of our economies. They're not...

do it you know investing in job creating new industries that are making society more productive or fairer they're asset stripping and and finding the shortest term returns because that's what their hedge funds and their advisors are saying and we can do better than this we and we have to buy we have to start by challenging this myth that somehow wealth is inevitable and preferable or wealth inequality is inevitable and preferable

Other responses? Stephen H. I wanted to do. Yeah, it's been a very long time.

since we built at this level and we can do a lot on housing by redistributing we have a lot of housing that's empty but we do need to build partly because we're still thankfully a growing population but also some of our houses in such poor quality that's full of black mold and it's not uh solvable it's michael lyons and kate barker are the joint chairs this new town commission and i know a clutch at stores sometimes but normally you'd only have one of them the fact you have

two people who normally chair big commissions doing it suggest it's going to do something. If you remember the first week of this government they invited in lots of very large private companies and house builders. That's rolled back since that first week of the private sector. They have done things about making it easier to build. I suspect when the cabinet papers are released in 30 years time it will reveal that one of the biggest arguments they're having at the moment

how to build these houses because the private sector doesn't want to do it and may not because it doesn't make the profit and may not be able to do it it might require the state to actually hit these building targets to deliver something and it's really simple things like actually affording to get the steel girders in the labor force to do it and

and the planning controls. And the great thing about Newtowns is they allow you to do the planning controls. I personally would like one all the way around Oxford,

very neatly in for cycling but there's other parts of the country that need them too. This would dramatically change people's lives, like the worst off in society who are badly housed at the moment. We have enormous numbers of people sofa surfing and children in B&B accommodation and they could point to that as a single achievement of a government which, and it's been so long,

Since we've done it, it's possible. In Oxford, we have built or are building 1,000 council houses for the first time in over 30 years. It's been that long since we've dealt with this. We've left it to the market and we've ended up with people on the streets.

I'm going to say we've got five minutes left, roughly. We have two questions online and I've got three in the room, so we're going to try and do two quick responses and then we'll try and grab these three questions. I live just outside of Oxford and not in my backyard.

So, just quickly, so question for Polly, first of all is, in 1979 trade union density was 50% and inequality was within tolerable limits, and yet people voted against their own best interests. Repeat, in 2016, is it time for media literacy to become part of the school curriculum? And then I think a great question from Rosie Newman, who's a year 13 student, I never would have listened to something like this when I was a year 13 student, so kudos to you, Rosie.

Would you expect life expectancy to plateau or do you believe this can be projected to rise over the next two to five years? So maybe if I go Polly, then Danny, and then we'll get the questions in the room.

Sorry, the question was, do you think media literacy, we need to teach that in the curriculum to help people not vote against their interests? No, media literacy is essential. I think, I'm hoping, I have great hopes of the new curriculum, of the curriculum review that's going on, that it will do something, so that it makes schools fun again, bring back the arts and the sports and the skills and the things that people actually remember and love their schools for, which have all been stripped out by grad, grand, gov,

But I also think it will bring in things like critical thinking, like media literacy, all of those things.

Given the damage that social media does, of course, we need every child to know one thing, one thing. The BBC website is brilliant. Click on it and you can get any facts, any information really well, shortly, briefly, simply explained. So that anything you see on social media you think is iffy, just check it with the BBC and it'll always be right.

Life expectancy, it's a very complicated debate which I'm only, and there's somebody in the room who knows far more than me about these things,

One interesting thing is the places in the world where people live the longest, it's now turning out that some of them didn't actually live that long. They just didn't have birth certificates. But the great news for Britain, although sad, because we're in such a bad situation, because our rate of child poverty is so high, because our children are so short and badly nourished, we're one of the places in Europe that could actually see the largest increase in life expectancy in the future. The win from becoming more equal is bigger here

than almost anywhere else. There are only five countries in Europe which have a worse neonatal mortality rate than us. We're down at the bottom. So the scope to do really well and to see people's years of life increase and healthy life increase is more here because of where we actually are.

So I'm going to go beige jumper and then the two questions that are here and I'm going to ask you to be really brief. I'm definitely going to bring in Kitty on this round and then maybe a concluding comment from Daniel will wrap up. So go for it. This is to the second Danny. You've spoken about extreme wealth concentration. What policies do you think would be most effective in preventing wealth accumulation at this all?

Yeah, I was curious about a broader discussion of what zero growth would mean and specifically, well, the pluses and backs of that and why can't we grow our way out of our problems?

Thank you. Maybe two shocking things. One was the shocking stats you presented about child mortality, neonatal mortality, and the other shocking thing is how little I knew of those. And I don't think the BBC covers some of this in depth. And my question is, it's a hypothesis by an economist I know who's saying you need poor people for rich people to get richer. And just understand your thoughts on that.

Okay, so we have two minutes. Love to wrap up. Danny, I'm going to allow you to respond to the question that was directly pointed at you about how we might do that. And then maybe Kitty can bring you in and Danny can wrap up.

Yeah, I think a whole suite of new or better ways of taxing wealth, whether that's raising capital gains tax to be at equal levels to income so that if you work or collect income from assets, it's no different. You pay the same level of tax. Council tax. I mean, we talked about housing and royalty. Why is it that Buckingham Palace has the same amount of council tax as a three bed semi in Blackpool?

We have a most regressive form of taxation there. So changing some of that, but also it's not just about tax, it's about provision and that's where I definitely agree with the gentleman from Stevenage that this has to also be about bringing the state back into the picture for genuine public investment in genuine public goods, one key of which is housing. So we can tackle wealth at both ends, curbing extreme wealth, but going back to this notion of genuine social protection for those in need.

so i guess zero growth would look like just living within i feel sorry i've lost the person to address yes it would look like living within our current our current economy our current means rather than always trying to grow more and as i've said that's really challenging because often we sort of kick the if the economy is growing it's much easier to make all of these decisions you've got all this new money coming in you can spend on new things without taking things away from other people so it means difficult

reallocation. But the reason that I think we need to think about it, and I'm sort of ambivalent on it, but I think we need to be having a conversation about it because we are essentially living beyond our demands on the planet. It's just not realistic or fair for us to keep on growing when there are other countries in the world that

really do need to grow and when we know that we're already way beyond the planetary boundary so we can't keep growing forever so I think we need to at least stop treating that as our kind of goal and stop and have the conversation about well what if this was it how how could we do things how might we do that therefore do things differently and spend on different things 30 seconds 30 seconds um

We're slowly heading towards zero growth. Every decade GDP growth is less than the decade before, not just us but worldwide. So it's where we're going partly because population is slowing down. But zero growth still requires some growth. Universities will still expand. That's one of our big growth areas as other things fall. Otherwise we're going to be negative.

Thank you for your questions. It's amazing. It's the child mortality data group releases data every year and that complete lack of coverage of this, it's November, December, the last two years, is stunning. You probably all remember Baby P and you remember the little lad up on the East Coast. I won't, but it is amazing.

It is amazing. I'm a geographer. There's an amazing thing about the geography of the rich. Wherever you get a concentration of very rich people, there is always, and not very far away, a concentration of very poor people. This is particularly the case in London, where the pattern is almost fractal. One of the greatest concentrations of poverty in Europe. And the simple answer is that there's no point being very rich unless there are people to do what you want.

You don't want to make your own bed or cook your own food or fix your own garden or do anything. So extreme riches create poor jobs. If you can't spend your wealth on that, what is the point of being rich? Where the rich are much, much less rich

And there are many parts of the world which are affluent where the rich have far less. There is much less poverty and greater equality. But you cannot have a cluster of very rich people and not have poor people near them. Somebody has to wash up the pots in their restaurants. And it's just remarkable to look at this worldwide and see that there is nowhere where the very rich congregate, where there are not very poor people very nearby.

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