Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield. Photo: Photo: Trish Carn.
Salter lecture: The top one per cent
Symon Hill was surprised to be absorbed by a passionate comparison of national statistics on inequality and public expenditure
‘How do they get away with it?’ asked Danny Dorling, one of Britain’s top geographers, as he spoke about the government. ‘How do they get away on telly, night after night, with telling you how much we’ve spent?’
Speaking to about 300 Quakers on Friday 25 May, he drew on graphs, maps and statistics to argue that the UK’s public spending is low ‘compared to what is normally spent in a normal European country by a government for the good of the people’.
Danny Dorling, professor of geography at the University of Sheffield, accused the government and media of debating British economics in isolation. When the financial situation is compared with the rest of Europe, he said, the facts tell a different story.
He was giving the 2012 Salter Lecture, an annual event of the Quaker Socialist Society. He took his audience step-by-step through graphs comparing European countries. Most spend a higher percentage of GDP than the UK on public services.
He nonetheless acknowledged that spending in the early 2000s had been high. He said: ‘The increase you’ll see in 2003, 2004, 2005 was the additional cost of the Iraq war, so there was no need to spend that money.’ He encouraged his listeners to be careful of graphs that show only one country or are separated from background information.
Rising inequality
Danny Dorling has shot to prominence in recent years with books and studies that analyse inequality in the UK and, to a lesser extent, around the world. Keen to make academic geography accessible, his recent books include The No-Nonsense Guide to Equality. He was described somewhat sarcastically by the columnist Simon Jenkins as ‘geographer-royal by appointment to the Left’.
On Friday, he drew on the language of the Occupy movement to speak about the wealth and power of the ‘one per cent’ at the top of society. In the UK, the richest one per cent receive eighteen per cent of income. While the figure for the USA is twenty per cent, it is lower in every other European country, save Portugal. In Denmark, the top one per cent receive four per cent of income.
Rising inequality in some countries has triggered outrage long before it has reached British levels. Danny Dorling explained: ‘In Japan, the top one per cent have now got eight per cent of all income. If you go to Japan, people will talk about how terrible this is.’
Comparing various countries, he said: ‘The less that the [richest] one per cent have, the better we control our elites, the better that society is organised, the longer on average people live’. He said that more equal societies have lower rates of mental ill-health, drug use and distrust, an argument popularised by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their 2009 book, The Spirit Level.
Employment and education
Danny Dorling insisted he is not calling for ‘perfect equality’ or ‘utopia’ but ‘greater equality’.
‘You can’t have full employment or anything like it when you’re paying a few people enormous amounts of money,’ he said. As an illustration, he compared the difference in income between the top ten per cent and the average earner, both today and in the 1970s. The rise in income for the richest was so disproportionate that, if the disparity was changed to what it was in 1977, the money saved from salaries to the rich would be enough to employ every unemployed young person in the UK ten times over.
He became particularly passionate in his denunciation of the government’s decision to treble university tuition fees in England. He argued: ‘When you get used to things like allowing the richest one per cent to get richer, it’s also possible to get used to ideas like allowing seventeen-year-olds to sign up to a hire purchase agreement, when they spend £27,000 that they don’t have to buy higher education.’
He said that many European countries with higher public spending have a greater percentage of their young people at university yet still fund higher education through the state. He described the new tuition fees as ‘stealing money from children’.
Optimism
Despite all this, Danny Dorling is determined to remain upbeat. ‘Please don’t get depressed about inequality,’ he said. While inequality is getting worse in Britain, the reverse is true for most of the world.
‘My most cheery statistic of all is the infant mortality rate in the world,’ he said, pointing to a five per cent drop in just a year. He attributed this to ‘greater equality for poor women’. He predicted that the situation would mean that world population would peak at 9.5bn before falling again, because on the whole ‘women choose to have fewer children when they’re more equal’.
Questions after the lecture covered issues including taxation, activism, language and the arms trade. Danny Dorling argued that ‘a land tax is the only way I think we’re going to solve the long-term problem of massive wealth in this country’. He admitted that it was likely to be introduced only in a time of grave economic emergency. He forcefully criticised the arms trade, which ‘makes very few jobs by making things to kill very many people’.
Several Friends spoke of the need for political engagement. One argued: ‘It doesn’t matter who we vote for unless we become more politically engaged ourselves.’
Another Friend was applauded when she said ‘people misuse the word “earn” very seriously sometimes. Would it perhaps help public debate about proper pay levels if we spoke more honestly about what people can appropriate?’
The Salter Lecture is named after Quaker socialist Alfred Salter, who served as a Labour MP from 1922 to 1945 and campaigned for the introduction of the National Health Service.
Ian Flintoff of the Quaker Socialist Society, who chaired the lecture, used the opportunity to encourage Friends to join the society and engage in activism. He referred to the tradition of ‘speaking truth to power’, but said he also wants to see Quakers ‘seeking power for truth’.
Comments
Excellent stuff. Only equality is really sustainable.
By Rycro1 on 3rd June 2012 - 6:08
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