Jade Calder, History at St Peter's College
Interview with Professor Danny Dorling 44
Professor Danny Dorling is a social geographer based at St Peter’s College. His research interests include income inequality and homelessness and he has published numerous books, including his most recent work, Finntopia, which argues that we ought to look to Finland and learn from its successes in social policy. I spoke to him recently about the effects of the pandemic, the Conservative government, the failures of the British left and the housing problem in Oxford. Before you proceed, please note that no offence towards the good people of Texas was intended.
CW: death, suicide
Could you please introduce yourself - explain your work and your academic interests for the readers of Look Left? I’m Danny Dorling, I’m from the Geography department at Oxford University, and I've been doing Geography for 30 years, though just seven years in Oxford. For the last 20 years I've been looking at inequalities between people, between areas and between countries and how they've been changing.
You focus on inequalities a lot in your work, so what do you think the most obvious truths about social inequality in the UK are which have been laid bare by the Covid pandemic? We have enormous ignorance of our inequality in Britain; it’s quite staggering. Few people know that the UK is by income inequality the most unequal country in Europe. I often say that we’re like the Texas of Europe if you think about how people stereotype Texans as having a rather brash way of behaving! There was an article in the BMJ and what they said was this: “the pandemic has seen an unprecedented intergenerational transfer of harm and costs from elderly socio-economically privileged people to disadvantaged children”. This disease has hit the oldest the most but the better off tend to live 10 years or more than the worst off, so if you have a disease that hits people in their 90s more it will actually hit the middle class more. We’ve done not everything but quite a lot to protect this group like shut down schools which has had massively damaging health effects on children. In the 2019 election many less well-off communities voted the Tories in. Do you have any faith that the Conservative government will do anything to ‘level up Britain’?
What people often don't realise about the Conservatives is that they're not always lying. Sometimes they actually believe they've done something good. Yes, there was quite a lot of lying with the Conservatives, but they also fool themselves, they actually think they make lives better. They don’t. I’ve spent 30 years measuring this, and we've got international studies telling you how more people kill themselves when the Conservatives are in power than when Labour is, all else taken into account. There's huge amounts of evidence that the Conservatives are damaging to society.
