Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of A Failing State

by Danny Dorling

Britain is broken, but how did it become so divided?Britain was once the leading economy in Europe; it is now the most unequal. In Shattered Nation, leading geographer and author of Inequality and the 1% shows that we are growing further and further apart. Visiting sites across the British Isles and exploring the social fissures that have emerged, Danny Dorling exposes a new geography of inequality. Middle England has been hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis, and even people doing comparatively well are struggling to stay afloat. Once affluent suburbs are now unproductive places where opportunity has been replaced by food banks. Before COVID, life expectancy had dropped as a result of poverty for the first time since the 1930s.Fifty years ago the UK led the world in child health; today, twenty-two of the twenty-seven EU countries have better mortality rates for newborns. No other European country has such miserly unemployment benefits; university fees so high; housing so unaffordable; or a government economically so far to the right. In the spirit of the 1942 Beveridge Report, Dorling identifies the five giants of twenty-first-century poverty that need to be Hunger, Precarity, Waste, Exploitation, and Fear. He offers powerful insights into how we got here and what we must do in order to save Britain from becoming a failed state.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, Current Affairs, Sociology

289 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 19, 2023

About the author

Danny Dorling is a British social geographer researching inequality and human geography. He is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford.

Danny Dorling has lived all his life in England. To try to counter his myopic world view, in 2006, Danny started working with a group of researchers on a project to remap the world (www.worldmapper.org).
He has published with many colleagues more than a dozen books on issues related to social inequalities in Britain and several hundred journal papers. Much of this work is available open access and will be added to this website soon.

His work concerns issues of housing, health, employment, education and poverty. Danny was employed as a play-worker in children’s summer play-schemes. He learnt the ethos of pre-school education where the underlying rationale was that playing is learning for living. He tries not to forget this. He is an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers and a patron of Roadpeace, the national charity for road crash victims.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of A Failing State is an angry book, and rightly so. Dorling has been researching and writing about inequality in the UK for decades, during which time it has steadily got worse. Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists (2010) and All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster (2014) were really good. Compared with what I recall of those two, Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of A Failing State has a broader thesis and is a little repetitive in places, but hard-hitting and well-supported by evidence. Among Dorling's most memorable points concern the rise of food banks (I'm old enough to remember when those did not exist), the scourge of privatisation (fucking Thatcher and her cross-party heirs), and the much greater amount of public money spent on prosecuting benefit 'fraud' compared with tax evasion. He also makes clear what a stupid idea brexit was. Way to put trade sanctions on ourselves!

The most enraging point that Dorling makes, which is very easy to forget when predominantly reading UK news and listening to UK politicians, is this one:

A different world is not just possible, it already exists in Europe. Much of what appears impossible to us is already happening elsewhere. We simply have not looked. What is missing is the political will to change, and the understanding that change has happened elsewhere successfully.

The Overton window for economic policy, social security, and public services in the UK is so much further to the right than the rest of Western Europe. In some policy areas, the UK is even more open to privatisation than the US. This has been a compounding multi-decade disaster for the health, wellbeing, and economic security of the British population. I am not just being a grumpy old woman when I say that quality of life has deteriorated in easily observable ways over the past two decades, most notably in public services and the cost of essentials (food, housing, utilities). To be fair, air quality in cities has improved somewhat, but not as much as in mainland Europe. And then there are our precious universities:

There is a tendency for people to think that students are better educated in the UK, when they are unaware of actual international comparisons. If those comparisons were known, it would not be so easy to be lulled into believing that the status quo is the best that can be achieved. People would not fall for the story that the UK is a remarkable country stocked full of world-leading universities and schools. In recent decades these claims have been repeated so often that most folk have come to believe them.

The alternative interpretation is that the most exclusive private schools and some courses at UK universities are extremely expensive, rather than extremely good at helping people to think more openly or skillfully. England has the highest university fees in the world. Average UK undergraduate feeds are 33.8% higher than the next most expensive country, the US, and those are just fees for tuition, not accommodation. England's tuition fees are also 138% higher than Japan's, 144% higher than Canada's, and 157% higher than those of the very unequal South Korea.

The precipitous rise in student fees has occurred since the turn of the millennium; these days UK universities devote a lot of money and time to branding and advertising to potential students. I had to take out student loans myself some 20 years ago, but borrowed much less than today's students as a ratio of my starting salary as a graduate. However, the most viscerally alarming policy area is health:

From being above all other large European countries for life expectancy in the 1950s, the UK has dropped below all of the rest of Western Europe by 2021. From being nearly first worldwide for child health in the 1960s, when measured by neonatal mortality rate, the UK had dropped to seventh place among 28 European countries by 1990, and nineteenth by 2015. According to the latest data, by 2020 the UK had fallen further, to twenty-third out of the same 28 countries. Only Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and Malta had worse neonatal mortality. [...]

Our relative fall down the health league tables has been speeding up in recent years. It affects people of all ages, from shortly after birth to old age - from the cradle to the grave. In a 2022 article published in the British Medical Journal, a colleague and I charted the remarkable fall since 2012 in the UK's projected life expectancy. The effect of the pandemic was large, but not as large as that of austerity. [...] The UK is now in a continual health crisis, just as it is suffering continual crises in housing, education, poverty, and, since 2016, politics.

This reinforces the point Dorling and others have made elsewhere, that inequality makes everyone's health worse, even the rich. The UK is heading in the direction of the US, where the well-off live about as long as poor people in more equal nations. Dorling's argument is so depressing because he demonstrates both how shitty things have got in the UK and that there is no shortage of policy solutions, but politicians in recent decades have chosen to continue the downward spiral. The book doesn't explore the complex historical, social, and cultural reasons behind this, which would take many more volumes. Factors I consider relevant would include the monarchy, the first past the post voting system, the geographical distribution of 19th century industry, colonialism, the cultural dominance of the English language, the fall of the Iron Curtain, Reagan's presidency, the Murdoch media empire, etc, etc. Although Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of A Failing State is not as systematic as an academic analysis, it is an accessible and powerful polemic. I can understand why some points end up repeated - because it's all connected. The rot has spread everywhere and it's difficult to feel hopeful that things will improve.

[Oscar Jelley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd love to read a properly systematic work of political economy focused on 21st century Britain - this isn't that, and doesn't claim to be, but in its slightly scattergun way (loosely structured around an update of Beveridge's Five Evils) it covers most of the major issues that you need to come to terms with if you actually care about what is happening to the vast majority of Britons and what will happen to more and more of us if nothing changes. I suspect that the not-all-that-radical stance he adopts is partly strategic - e.g. there are some Ezra Klein-ish references to the inherent badness of 'polarisation', but his support for many aspects of the failed Corbyn project (which some centrist commentators like to adduce as evidence of polarisation) shines through very clearly. Not sure I feel as sanguine as Dorling claims to about certain aspects of the global picture either (especially the climate crisis)! But the fact that he can make the points that he does just by describing how Britain underperforms relative to its European neighbours is a pretty decisive demonstration of how comprehensively the country has been fucked up by the greed and incompetence of a very few people. Written with savage (Brechtian?) irony and an admirable lack of cant - not exactly 'hopeful' but of course, as Mike Davis says, "hope is not a scientific category".

[Steven R · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written overview of the development of inequality in modern Britain. Points to exceptionalism of British policy since the 80s, when compared to similar European countries. Through, with good statistics and anecdotes to back up the argument.

The author's view of European politics is far too rosy and appears to be from a different era. Little mention if the growth of the far right in Europe, though it is useful to point out how we are still to the right of most of Europe when this is accounted for.

The theory of political change that is presented is quite weak amounting to sit and wait for a better thing for which to vote. It is very strange to emphasise voting for a change when earlier in the book Dorling explains cogently the strangeness and undemocratic nature of the British constitutional arrangement when compared with its peers

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5. Dorling writes about how the UK has been heading in the 'wrong direction' since the 1970s in just about every way. His left-wing politics come through very strongly, and a major theme is rising income inequality. Unfortunately I found the book quite disorganised - at best it felt like a randomly cobbled together collection of facts with insufficient analysis, and at worst it just came across as a rant. Given the sheer number of facts and figures I am very surprised at the all-out lack of tables and graphs, but I was mostly disappointed by the lack of analysis behind the figures. The book covers too much in a very shallow depth and ultimately I didn't learn very much.

[Andylay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an interesting book as all Dorling's book are!
BUT the section on the pandemic was appallingly bad!:
1. The British government along with several others (Swedish, Dutch and US for example) decided to allow Covid to freely circulate (whilst limiting the mass death it would cause) - Johnson called this "taking it on the chin". This was a choice, not a necessity. Unfortunately Dorling believes that British capital, unlike Chinese, New Zealand, Vietnam, Taiwan,, Australia, etc, had no other option available (his explanation for this was extremely weak.
2. Covid infections lead to two kinds of long term problems:
A) Chronic long term symptomatic illness known as Long Covid develops in 10% of all infections (despite vaccinations). For some sufferers, this is simply life destroying. 2 million sufferers in the UK alone.
B) For another large, but as yet unknown percentage, the immune damage caused by the infection leads on to other chronic conditions (heart, brain, kidney, diabetes, etc). Dorling casually mentions this in passing.

Dorling is so wrong to state that levels of immunity "rise with each infection" - on the contrary, each subsequent infection actually increases the chances of long term health problems. Two large studies have proven this (one by the US VA and one by CANSTAT)

Dorling thinks that Covid will become seasonal - it hasn't and won't (at least for a very, very long time) as it continually evolves new variants (each more infectious than the previous one) and launches a new wave of infections and Long Covid sufferers. It's virus evolution driving the waves, not seasons.

With hindsight - he thinks that allowing the infection to spread would have been a better idea than the feeble attempts at slowing spread that the government did make. He is clearly a supporter of the Great Barrington Declaration without overtly saying that. He clearly doesn't realise the impact this virus has on previously healthy children and working age people! This news is getting out, and Dorling should really be aware of this by now (there are higher rates of morbidity and mortality all around us now).

Great book spoilt a bit by very poor analysis of the pandemic!

[Thekirkiepirate · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this having come across Danny Dorling in an Open University course a few years ago, and felt at the time that he was worth listening to. Unfortunately, the book fell far below my expectations.

Firstly, he harks back to the 1970's in Britain as an era we should aspire to recreate, due to greater equality at that time. Whilst incomes may have been more equal compared to now, mainly due to progressive taxation, having grown up in that period, unlike the author, it was a period of strife, high inflation and struggle. Whilst he talks of the social housing of the period in glowing terms, I would refer him to the BBC 'Tuesday Documentary' at that time which covers social housing in London, where tenants were forced to live in squalor and many of the Council officials interviewed seemed to find the tenants plight amusing/

Some of the points made in the book are valid, but tend to be lost in a diatribe against the 21st century, from a man I suspect has no direct experience of living in the golden age to which he refers.

[Tom Bain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feels like a thorough overview, well-researched and focused on its theme, which are also its weaknesses - a bit too self-contained and consciously limited in its rhetoric. Inadvertently made me think of Elden Ring every time Dorling mentions "the shattering".

[Tom Fielden · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read and well worth picking up. Where it fell short for me was that it didn't teach anything new or package it in a way that drove the conversation.

[Tharin · Rating 4 out of 5]

no stone left unturned, very thorough and concise highlighting every problem with this country

[George Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coruscating analysis of the inimical problems facing the UK today. Dorling analyses precarious work, economic exploitation, poverty and hunger, the waste generated by UK political economy, and the politics of hard-right fear generated therein, all honing in on the common denominator of Britain's mass inequality. Should be required reading for every MP, mainstream political correspondent, and elite civil servant.

[Isaac Wade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely inhaled this book. The terminal decline of the nation you call home is morbidly fascinating and backed up with really interesting stats