One of the highlights of this year’s Festival of Politics was a wide-ranging ‘In Conversation’ session with the social geographer Danny Dorling, currently 1971 Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford.
The well-attended event was organised in collaboration with the Edinburgh Futures Institute and the David Hume Institute. The event took place in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament, with Liam McArthur MSP, Deputy Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, chairing the event.
Central to the discussion were the themes of Dorling’s latest book, The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future. In it, Dorling argues that the most urgent concerns are economic and social, with inequality at the core.
Alongside his extensive academic output, Dorling has contributed extensively to public debate on issues including inequality, health and poverty. This event was part of Dorling’s desire to reach out beyond the academic sphere.
Education and upbringing
Dorling admitted that he found it disconcerting sitting in the centre of the Debating Chamber, with all eyes fixed on him. The audience included a large number of high school pupils. This was appropriate as themes of education and upbringing featured prominently in the event.
McArthur began by quizzing Dorling about his early years. Though he was someone who had gone down the academic route at an early age (“I basically went to university at 18 and have never left”), he did spend some time working with children.
This gave him some insight into the very different lives being lived by people in the same area of Oxford in which he grew up. As the son of the local GP, he was aware that his was a somewhat privileged upbringing in comparison to some of his schoolmates. It was an area where “rich and poor were abutting each other”.
His subsequent academic work has looked at how life chances and health vary greatly in different parts of the UK and indeed within the same city. This is for instance, a theme explored in his classic short text on London, The 32 Stops, which told the stories of the people who lived along The 32 Stops of the Central Line to illustrate the extent and impact of inequality.
For Dorling, it is an inescapable truth that we are “affected acutely by your upbringing”. This includes our basic views on society and political sympathies. not least in your political perspective. According to Dorling. our basic attitudes are formed by the age of 15, hardening by the age of 18. Students’ attitudes are largely formed prior to university and not, as many claim, at it.
In Dorling’s own case he had grown up in a political household with social democratic sympathies. Dorling’s own views were also affected by growing up in a mixed race family which, in the 1970s, was not easy. As a result, anti-racism was hard baked into him.
Scotland doing well?
In a number of spheres, Dorling believes that Scotland is doing better than other parts of the UK. He understood the scepticism evident in the chamber when he said this. In his experience, countries who do well in any sphere (education, health, inequality etc), rarely see this themselves. They always feel that things could be better. As indeed, they always could.
His positive take on Scottish school education was at odds with the more sceptical views expressed by the likes of Lindsay Paterson, one of Scotland’s leading authorities on education.
Cycling and progress
While Dorling did praise what was happening in Scotland, he did feel that it was still well behind comparable countries in Scandinavia. For Dorling, it is very much such countries (such as Finland) that should be the model for Scotland and the UK. For Dorling, the USA was a model to avoid, in economic structure nor way of life.
For instance, the dominance of the car in the US was not something we should emulate. Dorling was happy to see that, among some young people, not learning to drive was becoming “normalized”. Public transport (and active travel) was the real future, not the motor car. Dorling had seen this evolution in China. It had swiftly gone from a country where bicycles were the number one means of transport, and then became dominated by the car. More recently, there had been a definite switch back to cycling. Cycling was not evidence of a backward country but actually of a progressive one.
More broadly, Dorling’s general sense that Scotland was doing better than England in a number of ways, was something he found resistance against in both countries. In his interactions with policy makers south of the border, what was happening in Scotland was often “unmentionable”.
In defence of politics
Central to Dorling’s perspective is a positive view of politics and of government intervention. However dire certain aspects of inequality and health are, they can, Dorling argued, be addressed. This faith is built on the fact that they have been successfully addressed in the past and in other countries. He basically rejects the idea that what is currently the state of things needs to continue. The potential for significant change was often underestimated – “things can change very quickly”.
In positing this positive vision of politics, Dorling is contesting the idea that some of the inequalities and social problems we have are irresolvable. Dorling is aware that his optimistic vision of politics very much cuts against general trends which have seen growing skepticism about politics. The growth of an anti-politics mood is often associated with the rise of populism.
A key theme in the conversation was how to translate the insights of experts into public debate. The wide areas of consensus among, for example, health or environmental experts was not reflected in public debate and public opinion.
Dorling felt that attitudes towards climate change had been an area of broad consensus in the UK, with all the main parties signing up to much of the agenda. This was also reflected in the media and public opinion. However, things were “slipping” with scepticism about net zero on the rise.
Fear of the future
For Dorling, what was behind some of our current politics was deep fear about our future. For Dorling the problems we face are, at root, economic. If these are not addressed, the current political trends will only get worse. If parties of the radical right, such as Reform, get into power this will only increase economic inequality.
In Dorling’s view, Reform’s rise is a symptom of our current crisis but they offer no sort of real solution. Instead, they offer a way of keeping attention away from the primary causes of our present malaise. In essence, Dorling offered a counter to the view, expressed by figures of the radical right such as Matthew Goodwin, that our present ills are primarily the result of mass migration.
In terms of ways of addressing dire economic inequality, Dorling believes that some form of UBI (universal basic income) “will come in” at some point. It was a fairly obvious way of avoiding all the bureaucracy involved in means testing the various benefits.
Caring
For Dorling, the most important thing was for people and politicians “to care” about the deep inequalities in British society. To stop doing so was to accept the status quo and believe that deep inequalities were inevitable, reflecting the true nature of society. Dorling fundamentally rejects this.
One aspect that Dorling feels is holding back UK politics was its “hardly democratic”voting system. Under FPTP, “hardly anyone gets what they voted for”. Given the unpopularity of the Labour Party at present, it was quite possible that Reform could come to power with only about 33%. “I don’t want to depress you”.
Dorling rejected the idea that Reform was some sort of grassroots movement, but instead represented an attempt to buy a British election, through money from the United States. In Dorling’ s view, Reform represented the interests of the rich and already powerful.
Chaneling anger
Dorling felt that it was legitimate for those wanting to see progressive change to be stimulated by anger. For Dorling, great figures of the past, such as Aneurin Bevan, were fueled by anger. The deaths of his siblings and the general hardships faced by the working class in his community, particularly the prevalence of tuberculosis, fueled Bevan’s passionate commitment to social reform.
However, it could also be argued that the populist wave is built on anger and grievance. So far at least, the radical right has done a better job of channeling anger about the state of the UK.
Looking back at British politics, Dorling was unconvinced by the thesis that the Conservatives’ electoral dominance in the UK was a product of the right’s strength but more a weak and divided progressive left. Too often divisions (such as the Labour/ SDP split in the early 1980s) had allowed the Conservatives to dominate electorally.
Dorling ended by focussing on why Britain had not reformed sufficiently. He felt that “losing a war” was the “best way to become progressive”. That, if your country is invaded you often lose your elite, or at least lose faith in it, providing the space to implement thorough reform.
The Festival of Politics ‘In Conversation’ event with Dorling was a good example of an academic audience reaching a wider audience. All those attending will have found it stimulating and, in the faith in politics that ran through it, uplifting. However, some of his analysis of the worsening levels of inequality in the country was deeply sobering.
