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 A 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opportunity has been replaced by food banks.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 conquered: 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.
