Danny Dorling and Jess Miles talk about his concept of peak injustice – that injustice and inequality are now so bad in the UK that it might just be that they can’t get worse.
In advance of 4 July, they talk about Keir Starmer and what the Labour party may offer, why higher taxes aren’t a burden, how fear wrecks societies and the data that gives us hope that getting down from the top of the mountain of injustice might be possible.
Listen to the podcast here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Peak Injustice is available on the Policy Press website. Order here for £14.99.
Danny Dorling is Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Peter’s College. He is a patron of RoadPeace, Comprehensive Future and Heeley City Farm. He has published over 50 books, including the best-selling Peak Inequality: Britain’s Ticking Timebomb (2018) and Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists (2014). Follow him on Twitter: @dannydorling.
SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
01:39 – What are the signs things might be getting less unequal?
5:33 – How far are the parties going to tackle injustice, and are there any standout policies?
9:59 – Why are people afraid of tax rises?
13:01 – What are individuals going to have to accept in order to move away from this peak injustice?
20:57 – When discussing what the next government have to do to move us away from peak injustice, you said they have to want to do it. What did you mean by that?
28:40 – What is the important role the Left have to play after the election?
33:09 – What do you want people, including the new government, to take from your book?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Jess Miles: Hello, my name is Jess Miles and welcome to the Transforming Society podcast. Today I am joined by the wonderful Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. Danny’s forthcoming book, Peak Injustice, contains some shocking truths.
By 2024, a majority of parents in the UK with three or more children were going hungry to see their families, children in the UK becoming shorter and childhood mortality has been rising.
Britain has never had as many spare, empty rooms as it has today, and has spent more on private education per capita than any other country in the world. Most of the poorest people in the UK are in work, but work pays so badly that almost half of UK adults are not taxpayers, and those surviving on the least in Britain now have living standards lower than their equivalents in most parts of Eastern Europe.
I could go on. Despite all this, in his new book, Danny is arguing that it’s worth having hope that transformation is possible and that we are, in fact, at a moment of peak injustice. So we are recording this podcast from two weeks before the general election in the UK, and we’re in the very, very fortunate position of being able to bring you Danny’s thoughts about the election, what matters and how we can make a difference.
So welcome, Danny. Thank you for joining us today.
Danny Dorling: Thanks for having me.
JM: So before we talk about the election, I want to set the scene by talking about the idea of injustice. Are we really at peak injustice? And how do we know things won’t carry on getting worse? Can you talk us through some of the signs that things might be about to get less unequal?
DD: Yeah. I mean, the worry is that this is wishful thinking. things could carry on, deteriorating in ways that we would find hard to imagine at the moment. But we would have found it hard to imagine a situation where within 20 or 30 years ago. You can turn some of this around. So, for example, the proportion of children who are poor is now higher in the south east of England than it is in Scotland.
That’s partly because the Scottish Government has done good things, but it’s still very high in Scotland. But nobody would have believed me 30, 20 years ago if I’d said that the South-East, excluding London, would be a place where you’re more likely to be poor as a child than Scotland. So I won’t go on, what could happen if it gets worse?
It’s not getting worse in terms of one part of injustice, which is inequality. Pay deals. The last couple of years being progressive, for the for the first time since really the 1920s, the highest pay increases, certainly in percentage terms, paying for the people who pay the least, lower pay increases.
So if you look at civil servants, all the pay cuts being that way, top civil servants for the 25% pay increase over the last decade or so, lower grade a 12% now worse off in real terms – the gap is narrowing and that hasn’t been seen for almost a century. So there are various signs that that something odd is going on.
We have extremes of policy. if you want examples of an injustice which isn’t about economic inequalities that we’ve been debating for the last few years, it’s putting people on planes essentially because they’re black. Let’s be honest about it. It’s a racist policy only to get votes, not because anybody involved thinks it will have any effect whatsoever deterring anybody or doing anything. Purely racist policy. Dog whistle politics. And, you know, when I was growing up in the 1970s, the slogan of the National Front was ‘send them back to Africa’. This is why I wrote Peak Injustice. I challenge anybody to say these things. There’s a greater amount of injustice than we’ve seen for decades. But there are hopeful signs, not least an election where you would hope, if the predicted result come comes out, that the incoming government is going to turn some of these things around because not least because they have often in the past, the people who are likely to win have said they don’t agree with this at the moment. I think quite, quite because they want to win votes. But yeah, it would, it would be truly shocking if Labor were to win. And were not to reverse some of the things that have been occurring recently.
JM: Yeah. Wouldn’t it? So it’s almost that things of things have got so much worse than that kind of it almost creates a bit more polarization. And then you get that flip flop. Yeah.
DD: Yeah, yeah. There’s almost a statistical thing in that if you’re the child in, in the class of 30 and you’re doing really badly in school and you’re the worst in that class, the only way is up. There’s a lovely social scientist who was based at Bristol – Peter Townsend – actually he published with, Policy Press. He did at the beginning.
JM: He did.
DD: And Peter identified ten areas that in the 70s that the government needed to invest in because they were very poor. They never did but five of them got better anyway, because if you identify the ten poorest areas by chance, some will and in a way, Britain is in such a dire situation as compared to any other country in Europe, that it actually requires quite a lot of effort and work to make things as bad as these things happen by chance.
JM: That’s both incredibly bleak and depressing and also hopeful at the same time. So yeah, obviously policy isn’t enough, and we’ll talk about that later, but let’s talk about the election and the election manifestos in the context of injustice. So from what you’ve seen in the manifestos, are any of the parties actually going to go to address injustice? And are there any standout policies or things that have surprised you in the manifestos?
DD: The stand out is what isn’t there. The standout is, to me, the standout is that there aren’t clever little clauses, which would mean that if a party was to win, particularly Labour, was to win the general election, they could tell the House of Lords, look, this sentence on page 17 means we’ve got a mandate to do this.
But the manifestos are unbelievably bland. Don’t make commitments, such as reversing the two child policy. Clearly, even though everybody thinks that that is what any different government would do, or if. Okay. Incredibly unlikely. But even if the conservatives had the power, you can’t have the majority of children in larger families going hungry because of your government policy.
Yeah. but it’s what’s missing from the manifestos. The blandness, which is, I think, most surprising to me. Interestingly, the Green Manifesto looks very like Labor’s in 2017 and 2019 doesn’t it? And the other surprise to me, maybe it’s maybe it’s my scepticism but I always wondered why the liberals picked Ed Davey, but if you’ve seen the videos, the more we found about Ed Davey as a person, it’s quite nice to find that it’s actually a nice politician.
JM: He’s likable isn’t he?
DD: He’s likable and again, kind. The liberals have they’ve got a space again where they can be a bit more progressive over what they say. But they had that space before in 2009, but then joined the coalition with the Conservatives and did all the cuts and increased tuition fees having promised to abolish them.
So we’re in a very sort of sceptical, well, the big hope on the on the left, the British, the left half, but it really crudely the big hope is, well, we know that Keir Starmer repeatedly says things which are not true. He breaks his promises. So everybody expects him to do things that he hasn’t said he’ll do, does it good because he serially lies though.
But what’s a sad situation to be in where your great hope is that the person who you think is going to win, you hope is still lying, but that that is, is to sum up the peak of the sort of sad situation of a country that that is this the state that we’re in. The majority of the voters, the majority of voters in Britain who vote, always vote progressively. They vote green or they vote left or they vote Liberal, they vote SNP. But all those parties, yeah, that’s the majority vote. The conservatives never get 50%.
JM: Because of the way it spread out. That’s why they don’t get the seats. Yeah.
DD: Oh because we don’t have democracy as most people know it. We have an ancient system that’s unfair. Yeah. So we actually have a progressive electorate. All those parties supported getting rid of tuition fees. Yeah. For example, in previous elections and more people voted for those parties and for the Conservatives. So yeah, given those parties have all supported more progressive policies in the past and given that’s what the electorate want, given the situation in which you really can’t say that anything else is going to work, then looking after more those whose needs are greatest at the time when it looks the cost of food and fuel has gone up by a quarter in two years, and it’s not going to go down, we’re not going to get negative inflation, so nothing gets easier. The fiscal study, you know, it just says, whoever wins is going to have to raise taxes. Yeah, but we’re worrying about the votes primarily of out of older people, who have been made petrified by small boats. I mean, that’s a bizarre thing. Yeah. It’s one of Sunak’s five pledge. They’ve polled people and they really do say they’re very, very scared of this immigration, particularly people who live in the areas with no immigrants. They’re really scared of the thing they cannot see.
JM: I mean, it’s absolutely classic, isn’t it? And also, this is a side, but people are really scared of paying taxes as well, aren’t they? Yeah, people are really scared of tax rises. And I think probably for a lot of people that might be what the vote comes down to. And obviously it’s been in been covered in a lot of debates and everything…
DD: Yeah, 2,000 pounds more. Yeah. Again and again and again.
JM: All of that. But there’s this kind of it’s like people don’t want taxes to go up, but we also want good public services. And I don’t really understand why people don’t. I suppose it’s a lack of trust, isn’t it? People don’t quite believe that by paying more tax public services will improve.
DD: We’ve been taught that tax is bad, but rather than that, the point of tax is it’s pooling the spare money, the money you don’t actually need for things, people who can afford it, to spend it more efficiently than it was but we’ve been taught repeatedly, it’s theft, you know, taxpayers money. And the thing that’s more plausible is that those who take the tax will not spend it on things of interest to us. So it’s a bit like life under the Ottoman Empire. Where you knew, you know, you would avoid trying to pay your taxes. It was just rational not to pay your taxes and yet, classically, those countries that were governed by the Ottoman Empire had a history of not paying taxes and then finally they, they pay tax to your electricity bills. So you, you get no electricity if you don’t pay your tax. But there were other countries in Europe where paying tax is actually popular. When we asked people about it, they could they can see the uses to which it’s put. Academics in Nordic countries, for instance, all Germany or France know that they are taxed more than academics in Britain, but they get to live in a society that so much nicer, where their children go to same school as somebody else, and they’re not demanding high salaries so they can segregate their children where the cost of housing is less and their other costs in life are so much less because the society is better. But the higher taxes are actually not a burden. It’s the opposite. By paying higher taxes, they have a better life than they would if they paid lower taxes. And they’re clever enough to work it out. Enough people, the majority to vote for the politicians that tax them more. Yeah, it’s the case in every country in Europe apart from Ireland and Switzerland have taxes higher than we do. Well, our taxes are at a 70 year high, but they’re still very low. yeah. Ireland and Switzerland only look low because they both have inflated GDP, as Ireland has lots of American companies based in it. So it looks richer than it is. And the Swiss have pharmaceutical companies. Yeah, so I’m not making these statistics up. You’d take those two countries out for a reason that we are the lowest, lowest tax and spend country on the continent.
JM: Yeah. So it’s no wonder, really, that we’re in such a rubbish, awful state. This takes me on to kind of one of another question I wanted to ask you is that if we are going to make this turn and start moving away from peak injustice, in the book you have the metaphor of a mountain, and you talk about finding a path down the mountain, away from the peak of injustice. What kinds of things are we going to have to accept as individuals, in order to be able to do that as a society?
DD: Yes. All we can base this on is what’s happened in the past when we’ve come down before a vote, of which the most recent period was 1918 to 1978, 50 years of coming down from some incredible injustice. I mean, 1918, the richest point, zero 1% had 400 times more income per person than the average they had country houses. Being a servant would be the most common job for women. But we take you back, to a hundred years ago, you would most likely be a servant for a rich family and as a job, that was seen as normal, for the middle, middle class. You had one scullery maid, and people had to give up that. They had to give up their servants, their privileges. It was very difficult. And the 1920s and 30s in which half of this occurred with times of great strife in Oxford, the residence of two private estates literally built a wall eight foot high with steel spikes on it to keep the poor children away from their area, at a time of rapidly increasing equality and falling injustices.
And you could see the same in other countries when things were coming together because you don’t all get better off. What happens is the rich get dramatically worse off and the poor get a little bit more, which means you don’t go hungry, but you are still poor. You’re just not as poor. And then very slowly, your children are less poor.It’s decades. And then yeah, going back to 1918 to 78 period, by the time they did the poverty survey in 1952, in York, they found almost no poverty and were a bit shocked. Then you suddenly get the 1960s and the world has changed. my favourite example is at the start of this period, D.H. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and it was banned at the end of this period. A judge at the obscenity trial for it said to the jurors it was a book you’d like your wife and servants to read. And they laughed. The judge said, yes, well, we haven’t got servants, by the way. But the kind of the big hit to win comes decades later. And the real win is when your children grow up with each other, with similar experiences, seeing each other as human, behaving decently.
We don’t have to do it so slowly and painfully as we did before, because we at least we could learn from other countries and from ourselves. And be a little bit quicker about it. And I’m only talking about aiming to become an averagely unequal European nation, you know, not being a shining light to it. This is just let’s be a bit more like Germany and France. Yeah. and what would we have to do to become a bit more like Germany and France and to have the standards of living, and the services that people have in and those countries.
JM: Yeah, yeah. Let’s just not have so many children unable to eat when they get home from school.
DD: And none of this is ridiculous. So the best place to look in the whole of Europe for how to stop children going hungry is Scotland. When the cost of living crisis began there was a £10 Scottish child payment for any child under six. It then increased it, about a year and a half ago, it was £25 pounds a week for every child that the 16 of any family getting any form of benefit, about two sevenths of all children, the family of three children getting any benefits in Scotland now gets an extra £4,000 a year. Nothing else is taken away because you get it. They also get the full child benefit as Scotland is part of the UK. No child in Scotland has to go cold or hungry right now. So the idea that this is somehow utopian, it’s happening in the UK already. Yeah, it’s entirely possible.
JM: And then you of the knock on effects of children not being cold and hungry. So I look at my kids going to school every day and they’re in a big school like this that works out a thousand children. They’re probably quite a fair few of them haven’t been able to have a decent breakfast. And then they turn up at school and it can be a bit chaotic. And you just wonder how life would be different for everyone. Just if everyone had that as a baseline, it’s not much to…
DD: Oh yeah. For the teachers there may well be, it may well be happening quietly in secret in your in your children schools, in some schools in a lot of secret teachers are organizing foodbanks in schools. Yeah. But, you can’t concentrate as much on being a teacher when you’re having to do that kind of thing.
JM: Yeah. Trying to teach people who are hungry. I know what I’m like when I’m hungry. It’s just a basically really difficult thing to do. I mean, yeah, I didn’t actually know that they’ve done that in Scotland. It almost makes it frustratingly easy. And I would pay my taxes over and over. yeah.
DD: To Scotland as a high as 53%. I think it is high rate of tax. And you’ve got to explain things really simply to people that isn’t that your pay 53% on everything. It’s only on your money over something like £100,000. Yeah. You know what? You got your first hundred thousand. but not that many people get £100 grand. But, you know, honestly, you don’t need all of the extra money. Yeah. at the bottom of, of this in Britain in some ways, on, on the political right is an absolute hatred of giving anything to anybody else. That’s why the policies just come down to how can we, me and my friends, fund the party and get enough votes so that we don’t have to share the money we’ve managed to grab in various ways from other people?
It’s just a really nasty meanness that somehow, for some reason, has been more successful in Britain than the mean, selfish, nasty, greedy people have been in other countries. Yeah, it’s as simple as that.
JM: That’s our meritocracy, isn’t it? Like I’ve worked hard, I deserve this, I shouldn’t have to share it with other people who haven’t worked so hard.
DD: Yeah, and then lazy, feckless below me. Possibly not as you know. Maybe they never had it in them, but we’d be a waste of money giving it to them. People actually believe this. Is that that their version of a morality? And you’ve got to understand, that’s what you up against. This kind of selfishness exists everywhere. But at some times in some places it becomes the dominant narrative.
And then you’ve got to find a way of how do you sell this to enough people to vote for it when they don’t have enough money. So you’ve got to give that they want, they might have that money. The you need to be against inheritance tax just in case you become really rich or you’ve got to sell so many fears and lies and they become hard to sell.
So you have to find something else to get people to worry about. And that’s a concern I..
JM: Mentioned the boats. Exactly. Yeah.
DD: Yeah, the migrants, the boats, and they’re all coming to get you. Yeah. at the end of the day, if you do this enough, you completely wreck a society. If you if you if you keep on doing it and you’re successful, you end up with a fearful, unproductive, unhappy, cold, hungry, miserable, selfish society in which things fall apart. And that’s what we’ve managed. That’s what we’ve achieved. Yeah.
JM: When we were talking, when we were preparing for this podcast, I was talking about what you would say that the next government had to do to start mapping this route down the mountain, away from injustice. And you said that they have to actually want to do it. What do you mean by this?
DD: This is my fear. My hope is that they’re just being politically very clever and hiding their actions. That’s what I’m saying. My fear is that they don’t realize, people at the top say, just be honest, the Labour Party, the people at the top of the Labour Party do not realize how bad it is and honestly think that a little more economic growth is all we need, and somehow we’ll get it because they’re in charge of the other side, and they’re so good at looking as if they believe it when they say that and you sort of think, oh, you might actually believe it.
And the danger is that what’ll happen is, Labour or a coalition of Labour can take charge, within a few days. They say we’ve seen the books. They’re much worse than we thought they were, which is a bit of a lie, because they just open anyway, you can read that. You don’t hide the government accounts, then they might a little bit the raising of taxes and use that as the excuse.
But they quite like the way things are. They don’t actually mind the level of inequality. They’ve got a house in London because they’re an MP, their children are doing okay, family too okay. They’re helping the poor in a kind of charitable way. The thing is having this wealthy London set of folk who were, you know, Rachel Reeves turned up at this university at 18 and went to Johns. In a way, that’s when you leave society. Keir Starmer says a lot about how he could only go to Leeds because he got a government grant, but then he chose to come into his Masters at Oxford. So he left society at 21, 22. My worry, my worry is the effects of my university on helping young people leave society. Leave normal society. Liz Truss came to Merton, Sunak came I think to Lincoln Johnson came? Liz Truss came to. They all came. All came here.
And you come to Oxford and it’s easy to think, oh, I’m poor because you meet so many rich people, but you actually join an elite and you can. That’s my worry. My worry. I would like if only a few of the people at the top of the Labour Party hadn’t been to my university, I would. I would have a bit more faith. I’ve had conversations with people on this site, lovely people, progressives who have asked me how much money do you need to be in the 1%? And I tell them, well, as an individual, you used to be about £120,000 income. You’d be in 1%, but literally so they said ‘oh no, that can’t be true, because that’s what our daughter gets and we’re having to help her so much’.
JM: Wow.
DD: Right. Yeah. Yes, yes. And that’s somebody on the Left. This this is a problem of divided society. And, you know, I’m almost breaking taboos by discussing this because we’re not supposed to. We’re, it’s almost Victorian. We’re back into it.
JM: So when you were talking earlier about the people having them servants. So you had the lords and the ladies and the servants.
DD: Yeah. And we have servants. But then they’re not anymore. We have a new kind of servant. So one way in which the thing that people most hated about being a servant was you couldn’t have a family. You couldn’t. You have to live in the you couldn’t get married, you couldn’t have children, while you were a servant. Now, a lot of South of England schoolteachers can’t actually have a family.
JM: Because they can’t afford to?
DD: They can’t afford to. That’s happens. But when you order a pizza, somebody cycles on the bike and delivers that pizza to you. That is a servant and on the amount of money that you’re paid when you cycle those bikes, you can’t start the family either. So we have a whole set of people whose position is as servants used to be against a set of people pretty well-off who can’t face the idea of losing that.
And we will be, in this group, we will be the first ones hit. Yeah. by an increase in injustice, you know, it’ll affect things like my university pension. It’ll affect my salary will go down again if we become more just. And which means it will go down in real terms every last year I’m working these are all the things that are absolutely… Now I don’t mind that, but, I don’t know. As long as every other university professor salary does the same as mine, I’m going to feel fine about it, right? Yeah. And that’s why it has to be national policy.
And particularly if people who earn a lot more than me are taxed more than me, I’d be over the moon. Even if I’m paying more taxes and I pay now. But also I want to see things get better for the vast majority. Yeah, 96% of people in this country are worse off than me. And then the people my children mix with, the people I mix with. And I don’t want to spend my old age in some nursing home being helped by some absolutely impoverished person who’s lived their entire life in poverty. And then my last year of life is with them and my struggling children, who still can’t quite get a mortgage. It just is not. There is a nightmare scenario.
JM: It’s worth thinking about, though. It’s like it’s not just the short time of like, oh, I’m going to have to pay more tax next year. If Labour get in. It’s what does it look like right at the end of my life when I’m dying and what who? Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.
DD: And the upper middle class. Yeah. And the upper middle classes. We’re the ones who are going to make it. Well, we know I’m a bit fat and unfit, so probably for me it’s 80s, but you know, if you do go jogging to be a swimming and whatever, well, you’ve got to think about your 90s and what kind of society do you want in your 90s.
And you can see it now. And also austerity affecting some of the best off worst, because it was elderly people living in Covid who relied on bus services, meals on wheels, adult social workers turning up because their children were in Hong Kong. So you haven’t got your children next to you anymore. You tell them, oh, I’m doing fine, darling, don’t worry about me. Almost always a woman, because a man dies and you’re living on your own with a state that’s no longer there and you can’t drive. So the irony. We did a paper on it. Me and my student, the people who suffered most from austerity were those who voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979, because they’re the ones who got to still be alive in in the 2010s, and to die at an incredibly high rate compared to how elderly people normally die. And they were the middle class, middle class Conservative voters in 1979, mostly the ones who were hurt. And of course, they’re the ones who need the health service. They’re the ones on the trollies. Yeah, it. Yeah, yeah. And this this is what annoys me. It’s like, this is not about doing it for the poor. Why? Because the poor die young. The state spends more money on the middle class and it doesn’t poor people because we live longer and we use the education services more and we drive more on the roads. You know, we actually use what the state provides more.
JM: Yeah. We need to be thinking a bit more long term about our own lives, don’t we, when we, vote and think about who we want in charge. I have a couple more questions. And this is quite a personal one, really. So the way Labour’s changed, I think has come at a price in terms of its more left wing policies. And when I was reading your book, I was thinking back to, the defeat in 2019. And when that happened, I it was obviously very difficult. And I felt like, okay, fine, the UK just doesn’t want this kind of Corbyn policy. But when I was reading your book, it left me feeling for the first time since then that there’s actually a really important legacy of that moment and that the left does, despite some of the things that you said about the left, as now they do have a really important role to play. Please can you talk about that?
DD: The Left is still very much there. It’s the belief, okay. Half of the folk who are left in the Labour Party have been purged or left, but that still leaves you 100,000. and if you look at young people’s politics in Britain, they haven’t diluted. If anything, young people have become more radical about what they believe about climate change and equality and the unfairness of that and how bad wars are.
JM: So what is the role of the Left? I can’t remember exactly what it was you said in the book, but you said something about the contribution of that group of people.
DD: Well, it’s not the old socialist campaign groups so much who although, you know, at the last minute, Starmer had let Diane Abbott stand because it became too obvious. And she won by not saying anything. But it was interesting to watch that. There is a new young generation in their 30s and 40s of people who want a whole set of policies, some of which look very, very similar to what John MacDonald and Jeremy Corbyn wanted. And they’re simply logical. And they at the moment they’re very quiet because they’re very well behaved. It’s amazing the silence of the Left, which is a kind of loyalty. You could shout that this is terrible, though. People in Labour supporting private health care coming in, but it wouldn’t necessarily be for the greater good.
So it’s interesting. It’s more disciplined. There have been projections interestingly made, I think, by a spectator right in last two days. So the largest group of opposition, possibly after the election, will be new young Left wing MPs because they’ve managed to parachute some people in who are absolute Starmer supporters. But you can’t have a party full of people representing the poorest in the country.
Only a minority of Labor MPs appear to be ministers or junior ministers. You’re going to have hundreds. Not. Yeah, and it won’t be hard for 120 of them to get together and say, actually, we would like the children not to go hungry. Can we have Scotland’s policy? And if 100 to 120 Labour MPs were to argue for that, and the liberals were at the back of them, and of course the SNP were behind them, maybe some frustrated Conservatives would go, hey, for once we wanted to make life hard. And if I come across with as well, Ireland, something we haven’t talked about at all with the DUP has absolutely imploded.
So there are incredible things that are going on, but those are the reason why I’m optimistic about the Left wing of the Labour Party is because its policies are the same. In Germany, Merkel’s policies were to the left the Corbyn’s what left Labour policies, middle of the road European policies. And we are still on the continent of Europe. We’re trying to pretend we don’t…
JM: Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah.
DD: Except Merkel was more to the Left because she let in 1.5 million Syrian refugees. So all of economic policies. Yeah. Merkel’s policies were so all up, all our politics shifted after Thatcher to the right. And then eventually we get Liz Truss, who when the Financial Times published a graph of all the political parties – it’s in the book – all the parties in the world, in all the middle income countries, in the rich countries, and the most far right party on economic policy on the entire planet is the British Conservative Party. But that’s how it lost, and that’s the FT. Now, interestingly, the FT has taken over from where the Guardian used to be.
It sells across Europe. It’s so you get better news from the Financial Times than the Guardian But yeah, that’ll be the tail part of the shift of whether we’re going over the hill at all. The Guardian will be. Does the Guardian begin to become a progressive newspaper again, as it famously was in the 60s and 70s? Does it actually become interesting? Do young people want to read it?
JM: Last question. Peak Injustice is out in October, at which point it’s very likely that a new Labour government will be bedding in. What do you want people, including the people running the country, to take from your book?
DD: For me, this is very good timing. I mean, because it’s past your first 100 days, it’s past your party conferences. Yeah. You can’t hide anything anymore at this point. And there’ll be a whole series of very difficult decisions to be made and arguments to be had. Yeah. And a lot of it be nitty gritty, like, what do we do with Thames Water. Just today’s issues down here. What do you do with a bankrupt privatized water company? What do we do with I won’t say the number of universities that are said to be in very bad situations. It’s been posited in the Times Higher that whoever wins the election, university fees will be immediately raised and the caps possibly even taken off so ou can charge what you like within a few years, but a debt just becomes a dullness. It’s certainly not a long term state. They are faced with all kinds of things. This current government has given a contract to reopen Europe’s largest pension centre for asylum seekers to keep them behind barbed wire. There’s probably a penalty clause in that contract, but Labour have said that not going to do the Rwanda plan. You know, there’s some hope. At least they haven’t said we’re gonna ship even more people to Africa.
JM: That’s a start, isn’t it?
DD: Yeah, but so what do they do with that land outside Oxford where we have desperate need for housing instead of building a camp to concentrate asylum seekers? So what I’d like people to think is, yeah, the country will well, people will realise how terrible situation we’re in. Things will have to happen that they are not going to expect.
One great thing about Keir Starmer not having wonderful charisma is that people don’t think he’s going to come in and suddenly make everything wonderful, which could be to Labour’s advantage, you know, because you know, you’re not you’re not electing the, the super genius who’s got the magic wand. You know.
JM: I’m smiling because I found him more charismatic recently, but, yeah, it’s me, but.
DD: So the way to give people hope is, is to look as if you have a long term plan. Yeah. And it’s not a ridiculous one. It’s not the same plan that we’ve had 40 years, which is don’t worry about the rich. As long as they pay their taxes and growth and more wealth, we’ll get to that.
Despite that lie has been has been shown to be wrong. It might be useful to tell it one last time to try and win an election. Okay, but please don’t believe it anymore.
JM: Yeah, yeah, well, maybe we can check in again in October and see where everything is. And, yeah, take some learning from your book, then.
So Danny’s book, Peak Injustice is published by Policy Press and will be out in October. You can find out more on our website. Policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk. You can also get 25% off all our books by signing up to our mailing list while you’re there.
Thank you for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And thank you, Danny, it’s fantastic to talk to you. I really appreciate that.
DD: Thanks ever so much. Thank you, thank you.
JM: Bye.
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