 Fy enw, mae gennym ni, ac wedi ôl i gael y cerson ddigon rheswm lanc ysgrifiad. Fy enw yw'r gweithio, dwi'n credu y gwmpaeth ychydig oedd gael eich ran oedd. Rwy'n gydig i chi'n gael fod yma, a byddwn i gael gwn cyffredinol. OK, great. I don't think there actually are any. OK, well, it's my great pleasure to welcome you this afternoon. We have Professor Danny Dawling here from the University of Oxford, who is our main speaker and Dr Alpeshaw from the LSE, who is going to act as a discussant. Professor Danny Dawling is Professor of Human Geography at Oxford. He's also worked at Sheffield Newcastle Bristol Leeds in New Zealand. He went to university in Newcastle-Pontaine and grew up in Oxford. He has published over 40 books, including many atlases and population 10 billion. All that is solid, injustice, why social inequalities still persist, a better politics, how government can make us happier, and the equality effect, which was this year. Professor Dawling's latest book is being sold just outside. If you go outside and turn to the right, Rani, who is from the Soas Tumor Society bookseller group, is selling it, but you should also have a leaflet as well if you want to order it. We also have Dr Alpeshaw. Dr Shaw is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology in the LSE. Her research and writing focuses on poor and marginalised people in India and Nepal. She explores the processes of inequality people get caught in and various ways in which they try to subvert them. She's lived for several years as an anthropologist amidst the people that she writes about. Her first book in the Shadows of the State was on Indigenous rights and politics of adivasis in Charkand in India. She's currently writing a book on India's Maoist-inspired naxalite revolutionary struggle. She's also leading the programme of research on inequality and poverty, which has been funded by major research grants from the ESRC and the EU, along with our own Dr Jens Lerker. So, without further ado, I'm going to ask Professor Dawling to start speaking. He will have 40 minutes, give or take, and then Professor Shaw will come and discuss his presentation for around five minutes, and then I'll turn over to the audience. So, do you want to go ahead? Thank you. Can you hear me okay at the back? Yes. Yep. I promise to keep to 40 minutes, maybe less. The map up there is just to give you something to look at. Well, I'll waffle on for a couple of minutes at the beginning. I'm going to start with the punchline. The punchline is that the insurrection has already begun. What you normally hear when people give talks about inequality and insurrection is an argument about why things are very terrible, why they're getting worse, and why as a result of that, you need some kind of uprising to make them better. That was the kind of story I was taught when I was the age that many of you are. I was taught it by a man a generation older than me who did their work in the 1960s and 70s and said everything was terrible. There needs to be an insurrection. There needs to be a revolution to make it better. And there wasn't. Now, I could be as wrong as them. There is a very good likelihood that when I say the insurrection has already begun, I'm wrong. But it would be a shame if it has begun, if I couldn't share the idea it has begun with some other people. So we could be the only people in the world who know this thing has started. What those men, they were almost all men in the past, got wrong was that inequality actually wasn't awful in the 1960s and 70s. It wasn't to utopia. It wasn't great if you're female. It was even worse if you were black. But working people had never had it so good. We had never seen the degree of equality in incomes in modern times for centuries. At the time when people were saying, this is absolutely terrible. They went on to start magazines like New Left of You and so on. You can look back and see those quotes. Now they weren't entirely wrong. Things were not brilliant. And they weren't stupid. We simply didn't have the data then. Or it wasn't as accessible to be able to tell that in fact it wasn't that bad. Okay, enough of the world map. Inequality and insurrections go together. You can make a claim that almost all of the major religions in the world were started in a time of great inequality and were often started because of that inequality. People were told that riches won't get you into heaven. You need to believe something different. And if you believe that different thing, everything will be better. Or in the Quran, they're told that the merchants moving between cities are bad and they are immoral. You can go through the world religions and look at the time and place they're started and you can say that was the kind of insurrection. You can look at revolutions. You can look at the American revolution, the French revolution and so on. Obviously we're on the 100 year anniversary of the Russian revolution. You don't tend to get revolutions unless there's something very unequal about your society. Otherwise there really isn't something worth revolting about. Things go wrong when you have high inequalities. But they don't necessarily alter that quickly. When people began new religions, it could take decades if not centuries for the religion to catch on. I always feel sorry for people who started religions because most of them must have failed. There are about 32 major religions in the world, but of course there would have been many, many others. Let's bring ourselves up to date here. Thomas Piketty says the reason that the elite ought to worry about inequality is that there will be trouble ahead. Otherwise, if you read Piketty, it's not that animated about it. He had an effect. If you look at what the world's business leaders in Davos said this January, they only had one thing on their minds, it was inequality. That was because of Trump, but they associated Trump with rising inequality. The year before the business leaders in Davos had said it was unemployment, which we keep on forgetting, climate change and inequality as a top three. Barack Obama had inequality as his number one problem of the world. The President of China, the same about a year later, the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, about a year later, the Pope had it. It's not that new. The last point there, and I find this really interesting, and it really does apply to Theresa May. She's the best example of this. Politicians are very good at talking about inequality and utterly failing to even pretend that they care convincingly. That seems odd to me. The thought they'd worked out a way of making it look as if they care, but it's still for some people, particularly on the right, anathema. Inequality is good for them. It rewards talent. It allows those with ability to rise to the top and rule. It keeps the drops down. It stops things going to back and ruin. There are people who like inequality. If there were not, we wouldn't have so much. We would stop it. We get the most incredible arguments today for inequality. My favourite argument for inequality is student loans. Student loans is an argument for future inequality. The student loan argument goes like this. You lot need to take out a loan to come and study in this university. Because you're going to be paid so much more in the future, because we are determined we're going to have a really unequal future in this country, in the world, and because we're determined that the future is going to be unequal and you're going to be the winners, honest, believe me, it's a lie, by the way, but because we're determined that you're going to be paid more in the future, you have to take a student loan out now. It wouldn't be fair otherwise on the poor. It's the most stupid argument I have ever heard in my life, and I am stunned that it carries any water. It's an argument for future inequality. It's almost a eugenic argument. We've selected you with the special genes and abilities to come to this place, and we're now going to give you the knowledge over three years, and a few lectures, not that many noticed, but we're going to give you the knowledge over three years, so that you can get out and efficiently run this country and the world. Remember, it's so as if you've got the rest of the world, well, half of it, at the same time. And because of the great burden, used to be called the white man's burden, but now we just call it the multicultural burden, because of the great burden you're going to have to have running other people's lives for them, you're going to have to be paid a lot more than the people you give orders to. Oh, and by the way, we need you to take out a student loan because of this. We can talk about this later. I promise not to go on and on and on. But this is the kind of ridiculous thing you get. You of course only have these student loans in very unequal rich countries. USA, Chile, us, not elsewhere in Europe. People don't treat their children like this elsewhere in Europe. I was talking to a group of students at my own university last week, and trying to explain to them on average 8% of students have no loan. But in my university it will be higher, here it will be higher. 8% have no loan, they have nothing to pay back. The rich are actually allowed not to have a loan because somebody pays their fees for them. The idea that this is something which is about redistributing between rich and the poor is laughable given that 8% of students across all of Britain and many more in Oxford and many more in Salas don't pay a penny. Their parents pay. And then I have to explain because we're in a very unequal and strange country that those students did nothing to make their parents rich. It's not that you've worked very hard as a toddler or a school child to make your parents rich. Sorry, let's go on. This is the graph of inequality. For the UK. There are many different ways of measuring inequality. They all tend to show the same thing. This is the share of income of the top 1%. The top line is that share before taxes. The bottom line is the share after taxes. 100 years ago, around the time of the Russian Revolution, the top 1% 1 in 100 people took a fifth of all income in this country, in this city and in most rich countries of the world. That's why that starts up near 20%. That's why you've got these big houses around here with rooms for the servants in the attic and rooms for the servants in the basement. The most common job for a woman was to be a servant. And Britain was not that different from other rich countries. And then something happened. And that something began to reduce inequality. You can see the lines beginning to go down. And nobody knew it was going down. And that maybe, just maybe, what is happening now. But with a less impressive something. The something back then was the First World War. Inequality hit its peak in 1913 when the Titanic sank. In the First World War, it was supposed to be a war that just lasted a few weeks or months. The rich got it wrong, it went on and on and on. It's only one group of people who got any money when you have that kind of inequality. It's the richest 1%. They had to be taxed because the war went on. Then there was a revolution in Russia. That's really scary if you're in the top 1% and it actually happens. Inequality fell, it won't go into why. It fell a bit later in the USA, but that patterns most of Europe. It fell and it fell and it fell. It fell even faster after the Second World War because the elite really showed they didn't have a clue what they were doing when they took people to war for a second time like that. They entirely lost their credibility. And it got down to the point when I was a child with the best of 1% after tax, took just 4% of all income. That's the equivalent of £100,000 a day. £100,000 against an average income of 25. That's what happened in this country when I was the age that you are. I grew up in that place. It was a different place. I think it was a nicer place in many ways. Then for the late 70s onwards, inequality rose and rose until recently where something may have happened. But that's in the UK. It is different in other affluent countries but people in the UK and the USA don't know this. The most equal large rich country in the world is Japan. That's its inequality ratio for the best of 10th to the worst of 10th when we try to include all the income of the rich. Then conveniently Finland, Norway and Sweden, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, South Korea, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland. Switzerland is a kind of average country for inequality in Europe. Swiss bankers are paid half as much each as bankers in London. And where do we need bankers? We don't need them in London now. Do you have to pay them so much to stay in London when you don't need them in London anymore? Anyway, something's going on. France and Evelyn's Island kind of agree Spain, Italy, New Zealand, Australia and Israel going up in terms of the inequality stakes. Israel the best of 10th every year after tax have 13 times more than the poorest 10th in Israel. Israel is a very unequal country. It has big divides within it. I never say much more about Israel than that. And other people say things about Israel. What I like to say and what people don't say is that the United Kingdom is more unequal than Israel. If you think Israel's got a problem, right? But we've kind of got used to our problem. This went up subtly, cleverly. It went up by rewarding talent. That was what it was called. It went up initially at a margo fathur who made sure that the top third of society all benefited from squeezing more towards the top. Portugal, which has now changed the United States and then Singapore. Singapore's a lovely little test case of what happens. We don't have enough really unequal places to study. Forgetting about people's lives and misery. We have lots and lots of more equitable countries that we don't have enough unequal ones. That's the third slide. Just in case we need to come back to it later if somebody wants to argue with me about the stats or they've changed and so on. Nobody ever does. It shows that I am particularly nerdy and you are normal. But there you'll notice. Oh, annoyingly. Israel has just picked us, but it's basically the same. So you're living in a weird place. But you don't necessarily know it's weird if you're used to it. Just as people in the United States do not know that they're living in a really strange place. Right? Unless they travel out and see other places. This is the second most nerdy slide. David Goodheart has a letter in the London Review of Books this week. You can see how posh I am. I'm in the 3% in case you wondered. The 3% is the entire professorial salary range, by the way. So I'm not giving anything away. But I read London Review of Books. And in David Goodheart's letter he makes about seven mistakes and an amazingly short amount of time. One of which is to say that inequality in Britain has been falling since the 90s. Now that bottom graph is where he gets it from. And it isn't just David Goodheart. Everybody to the right of David Goodheart says this as well. That bottom graph is the ratio of the medium of the richest fifth to the medium of the poorest fifth and it peaked around about 1992. Nobody noticed. Nobody noticed that we were slowly becoming more equal in the middle because of that great big thick line above which David Goodheart ignores which is the take of the 1%. Going up and up and up and up. So if you have a small group of people I ought to work out how many national health services this is. By the end, when you head up towards 15%, that is 15% of all national income of everything going to just 1% of people. But look, something happens around about 2012. We're not quite sure what did happen. There was tax avoidance going on as well. But it's interesting. And then we got August this year. And August this year was a time for celebration. August 3, there should have been street parties. People should have got the bunting out. They should have pulled out the trestle tables and they should have celebrated. Forget the Queen's silver or gold jubilee. This was the most dramatic thing that has happened since I was born in Britain. And nobody noticed. And why don't they notice? Well, they may not notice because it might not be true. The average boss of the 100 biggest companies took a pay cut of around about a million pounds last year. One reaction is to say, oh, they've found another way to take the money. We then trust them. That's a perfectly normal reaction. They are not particularly nice people. But the lovely thing about the analysis showed that in fact the men took a bigger pay cut than the women and the 25% of highest paid people which were almost all men, took the biggest pay cut of all. So we even have growing equality amongst chief executive officers. Part of the reason that nobody noticed was that the inequality is still far, far too high. It's a little like sitting in 1919 and saying, oh, it's much better than 1913, isn't it? It didn't feel that much better. In fact, you just lost 50 odd million people due to a flu pandemic. So it didn't feel good. But nothing like this has happened in the last 50 years. By the way, it happened a year earlier in the United States. And again, around about a million dollars for the Fortune 300 chief executive officers. And what happened there, which is different to here, is that the average worker in the United States saw a pay increase of $900 a year. Only $900, that's the thing about inequality. You have to take a million away from the top to get $900 at the bottom. But it happened. It may be happening. There are lots and lots of other signs of this. Before the banking crash in 2008, you used to see news programmes showing bankers celebrating deals and buying bottles of champagne. In one case, for £30,000 for one rather large bottle. We did have a diamond in it, but the diamond was only worth £10,000. All that kind of behaviour has ended. It's gone. The moral sentiment has changed. You have a Conservative minister of universities calling on vice-chancelors to get their pay down to £100,000. This is really good news. This is the kind of thing that happened before. It happened in the 1920s and 1930s. There's a banker called Oswald Folkes, who had a friend called John Maynard Keynes, who lived very near here. Oswald Folkes told John Maynard Keynes that what Keynes had done wasn't to invent some amazing new theory of economics. All he'd actually done was contribute towards the changing moral sentiment of the times. It's happened before and it's happening now. When the moral sentiment changes, that is what it's normal to believe, how it's normal to act, what it's normal to think. You don't notice it changing because you change with it. I'm just going to show you a series of graphs very quickly about why this kind of thing matters. It was very hard to know how important inequality was 100 years ago, because all the rich countries of the world were almost identically unequal. It was very hard to know how much inequality mattered in the 1960s and 1970s, because they all became in a similar way more equal. The inequality measures were similar. But then the most wonderful thing happened. Some countries stayed equal. Norway, Japan, the Netherlands, and got a little bit more equal. Other countries, the UK, the USA, became rapidly more unequal. They created an environment in which we can see what happens. Now, it isn't that inequality causes things. It is the kind of cockup associated with allowing rich people to get richer and richer is associated with many other cockups. This isn't about correlation and causation. It's about an amazing set of coincidences. Richard Wilkerson and Kate Pickett in the spirit level almost 10 years ago first showed these kind of things for certain variables. Now we have many, many more. But this little double chart is showing you the propensity of people to walk or cycle to work. Now Americans do not wake up in the morning, check their inequality statistic and decide to get in the car. But America is a country which is based on individuality, where it's seen as fine if people have no other option but driving to work. That doesn't happen in the Netherlands. There are reasons why the UK and the USA became more unequal. It's not something fundamentally wrong with us. We had the disadvantages of not being invaded and the disadvantage of having been countries number one and two in the world, economically in the last 150 years. Just some more things to show you. A lot of these are very speculative, but they're interesting. We already know that obesity is very closely correlated to inequality. The people in your country are the fatter you are amongst rich nations. In the UK, Public Health England have produced the most beautiful graphs a couple of months ago for every desert area showing obesity rates with children aged 11. Children aged 11 in the poorest 10th areas are twice as likely to be as beasts as children aged 11 in the richest areas and the gap is growing. Quite an incredible graph. One of the difficulties is that they're all living in the UK. If we looked at another country, you'd find that the poorest children are not getting much fatter than the richest children. I'm putting meat up there because those of you who are interested in the environment will know that the planet burns if we carry on eating as much meat. The interesting question is why people in more equal countries are better at not eating meat as opposed to more unequal countries. Water. This is domestic water consumption, which I'm always running out of. What's going on there? The kind of thing that's going on there is that in the United States, when there's a drought warning because there might be forest fires over, let's say, California, a significant group of African people decide they're going to ignore that ban because hell, they know what's best for them and they're going to fill their swimming pool because it's their God-given right. That's the kind of behaviour you get in a very unequal country. In more equal countries, people worry about what their neighbours think of them. Maybe almost too much in Japan, but people do behave very well. Not everything always finds that brilliantly the United Kingdom is a bit cold for swimming pools. Waste collection. If I want to know how much all of you can chew, what I need to do is work out how much goes out of you when you go to the toilet. That tells me largely about how much you eat, a bit of energy. I need to know about your jewellery because you tend to keep that, but everything else, everything you're wearing, everything you've bought, two or three years it'll all go in the bin. All we need to do is weigh what goes in the bin. Again, you'll see consumption is higher in more unequal countries. Denmark and Switzerland may be better at measuring waste. These things have only been measured twice for these countries ever. The data is often very long, but I'm showing you even the things that don't look too good. Carbon dioxide, exceptions to Australia, but Australia could have arranged itself differently. These get more complicated over time. This is carbon footprint. People often say, oh, it's all just generated by the United States. That one big red blob. That's what makes this pattern. Well, just take all the states in the United States, treat them all in separate countries and see what happens. The most unequal states have higher carbon footprints and you get a nice pattern. The little graph that's far away from me is patents. People in unequal countries like to tell themselves lies to make themselves feel better. One of which is that they're more inventive and entrepreneurial because the inequality has allowed the gifted to rise to the top. Okay. Who's the most famous inventor in the UK? I'll leave you with that for later. It's not the man who did the internet. That was the American military. You might find something in your toilets here. Dyson, aren't we just a nation of entrepreneurs? Right? It's a vacuum cleaner. But we managed. You know, somehow we managed to turn that into a heroic story of British manufacturing. More seriously, infant mortality is very low, very closely related. Same again with the United States. Infant mortality is going up in Mississippi at the moment. It's not just that the things are related. Should they're getting worse? Singapore, by the way, looks like an exception. Singapore doesn't allow the 100,000 poorest women to become pregnant in Singapore. We only know this. This is only becoming well-known around the world because of graphs like this, where people go, oh, why is Singapore there? We go, oh, because you can't have children if you're very poor. And if you can't have children, they can't die. Life expectancy is the graph that's further away from me. Only one country in Western Europe has had no rise in life expectancy between 2011-2015. It's us. David Cameron and Theresa May are the worst performing prime ministers by that central measure of well-being that this country has ever had. But people don't know that. Just a few more slides. Pass over to Apple. Like I say, it's already begun to turn. But when it turns in this way, when it doesn't turn fast when you lose a war, you have a revolution. When it turns in this way that it's turning, it can take decades to carry on turning and you need constant renewal and understanding of why. Trust reduces. This is an untrustful country. The standard kind of trust question is would you ask a stranger on a train to look after your bag when you went to the toilet? People in more equal countries would say yes. We say no. The answer is that your bag will almost certainly be safe if you're picked at random. You've just been made untrustworthy and that is there all the time in your behaviour. We learn less well and we compete more. How many people have been to school in the USA or UK? Minority, but it's significant okay. This is where I tell you you're not as clever as you think you are despite the grades you've got. We think competing makes us clever. I'm going to show you maths but we get the same thing for solving it and for literacy. These are PISA tests, international tests of mathematical ability. Along the bottom you've got inequality. Along the side you've got how well children around about age 15 do at maths. We could do you a maths test now and we could see wherever you are like. It's greased in the United States alone. This is what's really fascinating because you're not 15. You're a little bit older. Same test done at people age 24. Same maths test. It's just a clue we're just beginning to learn for what's going on. Well, think about your maths. We're in SOAS. How many courses has SOAS run that really requires you to be any good at maths? What maths do you actually need? I won't ask who got an A or A style at maths. But in this country in the United States we teach people how to get grades on a particular day. Now that is not the same as learning maths. And we don't know that. In all these other countries they do a better job of teaching this thing called mathematics. Which is about understanding how abstract quantities and notions can be related to each other. And if you're presented with a problem you haven't been presented with for several years you might be able to solve it and even possibly enjoying it. That's what teaching maths is actually about. Teaching people to get high grades is a brilliant way of not teaching them how to do maths. I'll leave that there but it's really hard to understand if you've grown up in a place like this. And it makes it stupid. It makes it possible for a man who left school at age 15 or 16 from Dulwich College to stand in front of a poster like this and get his way with 52% of the population. It makes it possible for Trump to win in the United States. It's why the Front National didn't win in France because they're cleverer. It's why the Fascists didn't do very well in the Netherlands. It's very hard to take but inequality really matters because it actually makes you stupid. And that, we're in a university. Far right voting. Far right voting according to the New York Times. 20 rich countries down here I haven't fixed the data, it's all the data for which the World Income and Wealth data set gives you data and I call voting Trump far right. Without Trump I couldn't have drawn this but you see a kind of relationship the more unequal you are in your state the more likely you are to vote Trump the more unequal your country the more likely you are to vote Trump. France was voting too high luckily it's gone down and thankfully for me if not anybody else the Germans have jumped up to 12% for the far right recently so they've come back on the line where they ought to be. Lots of countries don't even have a far right party. Down at the bottom. If you find that hard to take and it is dodgy I think would be the technical word but interesting to do the other graph there is simply turn out in elections and you see that the more unequal a country the less people bother to vote. Of course in Australia you have to vote by law but a good plucky 9% of Australians don't and Singapore it's a similar edict. You don't have to vote but if you don't you have to pay a fine if you ever want to vote again. It's quite clever. This is a segregation index of the Conservative Party it's how many Conservative voters you'd have to move to get an even spread of Conservative voters around the country I've run out of time so I haven't got time to go on about it but it's very likely an inequality curve that's what just happened to it in June of this year which excites me but not any of you this is much more exciting again the graph is hard to understand but it's the average strength of public opinion supporting a Labour Government how many people would vote for Labour during the election tomorrow plummets plummets plummets with Corbyn worst ever leader of the Labour Party how can we have an idiot like that in charge of the Labour Party until March 2017 when it begins to turn and then in May if you average all the polls you get a 6% swing the biggest swing that's ever happened in any polling in British history it goes up to the 1st of June up to 36% by election day we're up to 40% we've never seen anything like it before that's a form of insurrection very boring form of insurrection actually bothering to turn out to vote but I call it an uprising because it's never happened before not that fast, not that quick not that many people it resulted in the swing which was only smaller than the swing in 1945 and the swing in 1945 was a swing over 10 years not two that's involved a world war it was quite incredible what happened in June of this year we are an extremely weird country this is how much of GDP we choose to spend on public services and other things like private schools that a decent country doesn't have in a decent country your children go to school everybody else and you care about the schools it's not rocket science and they're cleverer all of them collectively including the rich kids we segregate our children and hence we go down and we don't spend and that's my last slide that's the student debt in USA and we're going to the student debt now now I could be wrong but I'm almost certainly wrong in many many things it's possible that this is just a blip that the futures blade run that the rich will carry on taking more and more after this one year off that we'll just buy lottery tickets take out our student loans get sanctioned and believe them and even vote for them as they take away more and more and more that's possible it just hasn't happened elsewhere as bad as that it's possible that next summer the cities of Britain will be full of youth there will be barricades everywhere the police won't be able to cope there will be an emergency election and the new revolutionary party to left the Corbyn will sweep in and take power it's possible I could just tell you statistically it would be quite an event but it doesn't happen it's possible and this is where I worry about being more likely to be wrong that we get a few nods a few kind of old student fees we'll bring them down to 8000 and make a market we'll get some caps and energy prices we'll get somebody talking about rent regulation but it won't actually happen we'll leave the EU we'll become a treasure island we'll be really nasty to people who are not allowed to be here to try to make other people feel better about themselves think about Beijing whether you're allowed to work in Beijing or whether you're somebody who comes in from elsewhere in China and you have fewer rights that's how you keep the population of Beijing happy you treat other people worse we could do that alternatively we could actually learn from all the evidence that's coming out that it's not in anybody's interests including the very rich including Philip Hammond including Theresa May including the people who banked on the concerted party it actually isn't even in their interest to carry on being such an embarrassing extreme of a country anymore and the insurrection which has already begun will carry on and on and on as it did in the 1920s and 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s to eventually we become a country where somebody may say look at how they do education look at how they house the population look at their working week look at the things they've invented isn't that really interesting that must be a nice place to grow up in and to try and start a family thank you very much I'm going to hand over now to Alpa who will act as discussant for around five minutes and then over to you guys thanks so much Nithya thanks so much Professor Dawling I will not take five minutes I just want to let out a few thoughts while you're in the audience get your own thoughts going to maybe expand some of our discussion I I totally agree with you Professor Dawling that the insurrection has already begun but I would perhaps expand your analysis both temporally and spatially I think that to take the temporal to take the spatial first I think that in today's world of perhaps even well much earlier too we can't really afford to think about inequality without thinking about the global south alongside the global north and I think today we cannot afford to think about inequality without placing the analysis of China and India central to our analysis of inequality in the countries that you've shown here so I would like us to think about what would happen to some of your arguments if we took some of these countries especially China and India centrally into our analysis and I think that if we did then we may see that yes the insurrection has already begun but it actually began much earlier so in the 1960s when there wasn't allegedly an insurrection here in fact people were fighting against inequality I mean it was a time a subject that's dear to my heart is the spread of the Naxalite the Marxist-Leninist Maoist insurgency in India which actually began in the 1960s in the late 1960s and today is one of the well it is the longest standing armed revolutionary struggle in the world but that's just one example of many other things were going in China the cultural revolution etc many of these revolutions the anti-colonial revolutions they may have turned into something very different later on but this fight against inequality has been alive and kicking for a very long time so I think one of the things that your presentation makes me think is that one of the things you said is there comes a point when people can no longer be fooled into believing that all this is fair and I think that I would argue that people have never been fooled into believing that inequality is fair. The real issue is when is it that they're being listened to why what are the forces driving that so I would possibly slightly amend your central messages as the insurrection having been around much earlier and also that that people have never been fooled the question really is when and why are they being listened to so in relation to that I would love to hear a little bit more about your own analysis of these amazing figures that you showed especially with last year and the one million pay cut that the CEOs took so it would be great to actually try to get a deeper understanding from you about why this happened and how this happened and what you think are the reasons behind it so yeah I guess another major issue for me has been the form of insurrection and what your thoughts might be on the kinds of struggles that we are seeing now and that you think are really important now to challenge inequality because of course for a long time many leftist movements have been waiting for that working class struggle that's going to take over and spread across the world that move from a class for itself to a class in itself to a class for itself so we're not seeing this form of working class struggle in many parts of the world do you think that we're going to see it emerging here now or how do we expand what are your own theories of insurrection do you take inspiration from E.P. Thompson for example who argued that class struggle can come across in many forms what are the different forms of struggle that you think are going to be kind of central to the insurrection that has already begun yeah I guess on that note I also wanted to draw your attention to the audience that is to this exhibition that we've got going on in the Brunai Gallery here which is focusing on India which is very much about inequality and the insurrection against it and which shows many different forms of struggles that are central to the fight against inequality okay yeah I think I'll probably I'll probably leave it there but yeah I think the China India thing is really significant because the number of dollar billionaires for example has significantly grown in China and India so now the four countries that have more dollar billionaires than anywhere else in the world is US, Germany, China and India so what's happening there and what is the in so many parts of the world we see actually the rise of the far right as opposed to our wonderful kind of Corbyn uprising here so how and it's actually the working classes that are so often supporting that movement so you know where what is the whole what form of struggle do you think is going to be key now okay I'll do a very short answer and then we'll open up for questions I began with that map of the world to try to remember to remind me to say something about the rest of the world I do fixate on the riches countries but that is partly because they are particularly interesting little experiment now I wrote a book earlier this year called the equality effect published by a new internationalist who force me to look at India and China in particular the difficulty is that the Chinese statistics are completely flipped from China five years ago apparently being a more equal country to India to China now being a more unequal country as the Chinese state becomes a little bit more honest and when this kind of thing happens it is very difficult for somebody like me to deal with what I'm dealing with both countries became more unequal so although the Marist Revolution spread across India at the same time the rich in India took more and more in recent years it is likely that the rich in China have begun to constrain how they are behaving and what they're doing not least of force from above otherwise they're doing an amazingly good job of pretending that they are beginning to turn the key and the last thing to say is it often is the middle class not the working class when you look at it when you look at who it is in villages who are actually involved in the Marist Revolution it is the more middle class child rather than the working class child and in Britain in that great period from 1920 all the way through although the trade unions were very important and the strikes were very important the driving force for the middle class the middle class could no longer afford a doctor in the 1930s so they helped to create a national health service so they could actually be treated the middle class couldn't afford private schools by the 1950s and 60s so they brought in a comprehensive movement so their children didn't have to go to secondary models and the left in Britain is never quite understood even though the left is so middle class like Corbyn, like me the left is never quite understood how important the middle class has been in the left it's when you really screwed a middle class that things really start to happen quite quickly the danger is that somebody comes along and looks after the top 30% which is what Thatcher did and then the middle class work against the working class anyway, questions let's go for it let's try and bunch two or three together so let me take three for now could I have the gentleman at the back please could you speak up sorry the class that you give us doesn't actually provide the points that you made I think we could make a point from the fact that period which you became of the kind of instance of turning to the future two points firstly, in the case of unemployment there is a statistical change which interferes with our public policy in this 28 times between 1979 to 1988 the unemployment figures would change and after those 29 times 28 would reduce the official figures unemployed and of course there was an inverse relationship between vacancy rates and unemployment and that was in the post-war period that broke down after those changes so we don't have the kind of educational furniture to understand what has come about the statistical rates that we use of focus upon about Japan I think it's slightly misleading to present it as an equal society as asymmetrical zones in Japan which are good tests on some of the ghettos in Japan are good tests you have 18, 90 year old men who are having to work one to four days in a year just to get one to four days of rent to pay for their hotel and they've been forced to work at the age of 80 or 90 years of age I mean we should be careful how we use these statistics but just on a political point we could deal with inequality at a constitutional level if we wanted to I mean just at the sexual level in terms of gender we could make it a constitutional convention in the UK to have alternating prime ministers you know a fixed term male prime minister next term a female prime minister none of our political parties are interested in that one is the green party possibly so okay thank you could I just ask you to just in the interest of getting as many people as possible just try and sort of keep it a little bit brief I had a gentleman over here thank you I'm not entirely sure that the common effect was on the reasons it went forward I think it was important and it is a cultural reaction to what was happening in the mainstream media and the various types of parliamentary actors for people who are just rejecting that as much as I actually want to say that Congress raised these or anything like that that's where I've got a question in it another thing is that there's been a lot of discussions of the last couple of years about who where could people in some of the society do X, Y, Z and there seems to be a growing consensus that at the grassroots level that we're actually at a lower point than we were in the 1930s to fight say something like the fascist and cable street and you've got the same thing happening the same thing being expressed on left the fascist movement and other things as well so I'm wondering if there's even if you're really a bit according to stuff I'm not sure about where it can go from now I'm not a cognitive skeptic I'll do those two I'm not very good at memorising three thanks very much I'll take your argument about statistics but just because they can be manipulated doesn't mean they're worth ignoring it is possible to get statistics to tell you who really was unemployed in the 80s the lovely thing now is that people are beginning to realise that when it comes out and says we've never had more people unemployed people just go so what it's not good employment and he wants to have three jobs so the population is partly becoming cleverer I'm stuck with using numbers but checking them which I do with Japan the Japanese government by the way have different sets of numbers and say that Japan's more unequal and I do occasionally go so my experience of a ghetto in Japan I asked my Japanese colleagues if they'd take me to the poorest part of Japan geographers do this and it was an area of Osaka so I might have gone to the right area it's what they called a ghetto in Osaka which is Korean and I said great when are you going to take me and they said I don't know if you can go on your own I went no I'm not stupid you don't go to the poorest part of a country on your own they said okay may not be but that was the one the geographers who had had numbers said I went there it was very poor I'm very big I didn't go when it was dark but what shocked me the difference between Japan and Britain was that half the bicycles were not locked up there are fundamental differences and it's when you see things like that Japan is not a utopia in many ways but it is very similar to Scandinavian countries and we often ignore it it's also done this without resources like oil and interestingly it's done it because of what the Americans did to Japan and they ironically made it this equal Corbyn is interesting over he really isn't charismatic so it isn't him it will be a bit worrying if he had slight Tony Blair qualities Tony Blair whatever else you might think about him could get people just to support him because he was him whereas Corbyn is the very opposite of this so that's why I agree with you it's many other things going on it's not him the left has this kind of sigh of relief because the alternative three to him all has skeletons in their cupboards whereas Corbyn is the MP with the lowest expenses and the most boring social life you know that was just luck but what I think if you think about the future what happens until three or four years time when instead of it being Corbyn who after all is really supposed to have retired by now that was his plan before he got elected leader suppose it's somebody half his age and she's female and she is a bit charismatic there are only 35 women in Labour who could do this imagine that versus Boris or Theresa right? and then you've got the charisma factor in hope on top great could we take a couple more I have the lady I'd like to think that's a really encouraging sign for everyone I'm quite concerned however that maybe that's because there's been a lot of difficulties in the wake of the crisis which I kind of deal with is an ongoing thing I always think it's funny what people say about the crisis in 2008 I think it's still not going on but I wonder if maybe they're just taking a chance so that the dividends which angles can be higher or maybe it's just a kind of temporary thing because they're in the spotlight and they've preferred to be able to keep their position for longer etc and they just know that it's just going on Just take one more Jens I'm from Denmark and there's a place to see in Scandinavia in the heart of this Utopia there but one thing that struck me was your argument that it was the middle classes that pushed this kind of internal policies now why understanding of the ancient history and Scandinavian histories that was the labour movement and the labour parties in Scandinavia that through a particular reform policy where they compromised the capital achieved extreme improvements quite early on and I do not see the middle class parties in Scandinavia as classically being put forward as the ones that changed the extreme situations inequalities ok, let me do those it could be temporary but a lot of why these very high 5 million pound a year salaries were taken is purely people competing with other people on their salaries you can go to four, you can go to three you can go to two it doesn't actually change much of what you can do unless you can pay yourselves to people inheriting large amounts of money which began you don't want to be picked out as the greedy one who's a liability you're much safer being in the bottom half of the increase and if it makes sense to be in the bottom half of the increase you'll have salaries that continue to go down if it's dangerous to be in the top half whereas until recently the better you were as a chief executive the more your pay should go up so you're safer in your job if you've got a salary increase that's the kind of madness we still have that madness with house prices the government actually thinks that the higher the house prices are in London the more successful the economy is that can't carry on forever but that explains what Osmo is doing I don't know apart from Dane's smoking which they've now stopped which Denmark was always off our figures slightly because of smoking I don't know enough about Danish history all I'll say about British history is we often forget the middle class people who were in there who were partly not proud of being middle class Owen Jones is the son of social workers that's the middle class position but Clement Hadley was very very middle class in this country it's rarely done by the working class alone but what you end up with in Japan people call it a 90% middle class which is a 90% working class these class differences cannot be sustained in countries with low income inequalities whereas in a country like the UK with these enormous differences middle class parents will not let their children fall down and take working class jobs because they can't imagine living on the salaries so it keeps the class structure if you're worried about if you're worried about class politics greater equality actually alters it and makes you unified then the great danger is you forget what you've achieved and a few greedy people take a bit more and you don't stop them but we're not talking about how inequality rises again Gentleman at the back Hi, you were talking about inequality leading to higher predominance or right wing voting and you're also talking about inequality leading to middle class promoting more equality how are those two sides of the coin and what influences the way the coin falls I'll do that one quickly inequality rose in Germany in the 30s and the coin went one particular way actually ironically a middle class way lots of middle class votes for the Nazis the worst of all worlds is when the middle class decide to go for your far right party then you're in very bad trouble it's a battle and we're going to have a battle in this country there will be a currently UKIP are on 1% UKIP were on 14% just over a year ago UKIP who are our far right party now who managed to do a clever job at trying to pretend they weren't their votes only rose with every European election and then their popularity collapsed afterwards so they were not a popular movement they were a movement financed by people who wanted us desperately to leave Europe UKIP will rise up again all the equivalent soon because there'll be anger about what happens next we won't be able to carry on blaming immigrants much longer we will carry on for a bit longer than we can but you cannot vote to leave and then either leave or find out you can't leave and still blame immigrants but some people will do that but there will be a battle between those who want a more unequal society back to upstairs downstairs with guest workers in the servants who can come here but cannot have children which is what servants in effect were they could be in the big houses in London but you couldn't have a child I'm between people who've got a more idealistic idea about what this kind of place could be and it's a battle to come it's we're gonna get poorer we're just coming food prices are going up student debt's not gonna work my children can't get houses and I'm in a 3% Empire 2.0 is not gonna happen the commonwealth isn't sitting there desperately wanting to trade with us we haven't got a new set of vacuum cleaners ready to sell our bankers are not brilliant the country is getting poorer and about to get more poor and that leads to vicious politics for a time that's what's coming I've been optimistic about the fact we may be at the turning point but when there's less to go around the people with a lot who are scared don't give it up easily I might say it's really obvious that if you just share a bit more we can all be happier that means not sending your child to eaton and harrow you send your child to eaton and harrow because you want to guarantee their future because you're scared about what might have what happened it doesn't change immediately it doesn't change that that fast gentlemen here it might be related to the question but you talked about interaction and stupidity do you think Brexit was a situation of stupidity or polls I looked at Lord Ashcroft's poll it's ironic that we had to rely on Lord Ashcroft it's more reliable than anything else and the poll the polls are on the exit poll exit polls work on other polls there's polls I was showing you if we ask all of you how you'd vote if there's an election tomorrow you won't answer me that you think you would but you don't what you answer is how you would have voted if there'd been an election six weeks ago so the polls are spot on about six weeks in the past the Brexit poll was I suspect it's got a strange geography majority bigotry and racism that's what fits the age profile people my age and a bit older who are brought up with textbooks telling them that they were superior that their country was superior you've had to go from in my case when a pound would buy you 10 francs to 3 francs to a euro you've got to feel because most of you are younger than me what's it's like to be my age or older in Britain and the country was spoiled the country was great so bigotry racism but wanting a better country for their grandchildren they're going to die a bit of really extreme sovereignty not like in European judges madness that's very small and then a little bit of anything but this because the choices between business as usual with Cameron and the head of Marks and Spencer's leading the charge or something unknown so there's a bit of that but because of it being the old and the middle class most of the lead voters were middle class ABC1 again the maths of it yes working class people in Middlesbury disproportionately voted leave no there aren't many of them what mattered for the vote was all around the Cotswolds the majority of the lead vote was in the south of England and it was middle class and it was in areas where people are white where people don't like people who are not white because they don't see people who are not white but they've been told year after year after year that the reason that things are getting worse is immigration in the express and the daily mail and by the conservative party and by people using words like swamping because when you do have rising inequality for decade after decade making things worse and worse you need a scapegoat you need something to blame you need to explain why housing is becoming unaffordable and you can't say because we're letting the rich get richer so they can buy lots of houses and rent it out to the rest of you even though that's why housing became unaffordable you say oh see immigrants they're using up the housing and you can't tell people the reason why you can't live on your wage anymore even though your parents could and they could start a family and buy a home you can't say that's because I've taken all the money and you can't have it you say oh see immigrants they're taking away your job right it was largely a bigoted racist vote as far as I can see it wouldn't have gone away had it been 52% remain 48% leave it would have carried on what's really interesting is that this kind of lances to boil you know why for everything is going to be magical in 3 years time or it wasn't true the other thing I should say about I don't really say enough about it I grew up in the 70s in a mixed race family we had the national funds spraying on our wall NF go home right and that felt really really bad and most of you will get why and I'm white right why the national front were really nasty and go home back to where you come from I'm amazed that we don't realise that what's going on now with Brexit is just the same to people who are Polish that's what I saw in the 70s what happened to my family in the 70s but that was about black skin not about slightly different accents okay there's a question up here I think it was really doing huge round of circulation after the Brentville tower atrocity of the floor tends to be in what I find around black child so I was just wondering if you could say a bit more about that particular statistic that was really helpful at that time in painting the way which racial inequality operates in such a pilot and in the way in which still have these spaces of exclusion and racial inequality that erupts in such a fine way so I was wondering if you could just say that that was a 2001 census that I am just nerdy 2001 census statistic I just noticed it that the majority of children in England above the 4th floor aren't white so if you see a child's face you're able to tell because it's too far away above the 4th floor but you can tell from the size of the head compared to the window the child probably isn't white the reason is because you try not to put children and families above the 4th floor of housing but that wasn't applied to families who were not white I was a policy so housing officers tried as hard as they could with families this is often families with newborn children you try to put them low down in the tower blocks if you put them in tower blocks at all because you can't get the pram down the stairs when the lift doesn't work it's all very pragmatic there was higher poverty in the 90s amongst families who aren't white more likely to present yourself to need and housing and then the question is whether there was less care amongst the housing officials who were back then more likely to be white but to go back it's very quickly I've talked mainly about income we could talk a bit about wealth but the reason I'm talking about income is income and wealth inequalities I think what helps sustain other inequalities so in countries which don't have big income or wealth inequalities racial differences begin to disappear the differences in the US are essentially wealth inequalities from having great-great-grandparents who are slaves with nothing to great-great-grandparents who are slaveholders the most equal countries in the world places like Iceland had slaves or Celtic and the slaveholders were Viking there was no longer any distinction in Iceland Japan had still has some identified racial groups but there was much more of a hierarchy in the past partly an aristocratic hierarchy now you have the opposite thing in Japan you have a myth of racial homogeneity in a single Japanese genome and we're all identical differences and differences between men and women in how they're treated are very hard to sustain if you don't have income differences if men and women in Britain were paid identical amounts of money on average that would change many other things it's not the be or an end all of it but money is how we show our respect for people money is how we rank each other money is a visceral thing once you do things which happened in the last government of begin to give disabled people the resources they need to live a decent life you're showing through giving them money that you respect them as human beings it's the same with race without the money you're not treating these people as human like you and it's the same with men and women 100 years ago women were not seen as human in this part of London men would gather in rooms in Bloomsbury and occasional women would be allowed in but they were not seen as human so I think there's a really interesting connection between money and other forms of inequality and we often underestimate last thing to say the money isn't the be or an end all because one of my children walks into a school now in England and because of the colour of their skin the schools will be made about them regardless of how much money they've got they're white children my brother walks into a pub and he's not white people make assumptions about him regardless of the money so it's not all about money but the money creates a kind of society which then tolerates certain forms of behaviour given that so many people have been talking about the death of the middle class and then we had states versus I'll do that quickly there's a quote from Roseanne, the comic about your middle class in the United States till they turn their electricity off and the bulb goes people in the states were told they went for Bernie and they're told you can't go for Bernie you've got to go for Hillary otherwise he will get in so it's a really interesting position people are now in and they're just beginning to learn more and more about their country as far as I can see the way in which if you have my job in an American university you don't tell people this stuff what you do is you set your students an essay an essay is in 1000 words explain why the United States has the highest life expectancy in the world and why people do so well you send your students away to the library and then they discover for themselves that it isn't true in fact they have the lowest life expectancy among which countries but that's the problem of learning it's obviously I'd probably get shot to be honest if I was a US academic wouldn't I? for lack of patriotism and cynicism but you're beginning to see it and I think one of the best arguments is clearly voting for Bernie wouldn't have let Trump in in a way that voting for Hillary kept Trump out that particular argument has gone but Bernie bit like Corbyn somewhat boring older man who kind of likes the 60s and 70s there's another generation to come not everything was great about the 60s and 70s there's another generation to come I think it's particularly hard though for the United States because this kind of crashing down is quick for Britain we became the second richest country ran about 1903 to the US but hardly noticed in 1945 Australia overtook us Switzerland had a little bit earlier but it was a kind of slow and gradual kind of jump down to we became seventh at which point we created the G7 so we could still be in it in the last four years we've gone down from 12 to 16 faster than ever before and we're plummeting towards 25th in the moment because of money we're the fattest, unfittest country in Europe so what do we do? we buy medals in the Rio Olympics we're number two which country is more unfit and fatter than us? it's the United States who wins even more medals you've got a feeling these countries have severe problems with how they're conceived but what my worry is the UK is still learning that it's not a special country but it's not a special country with a genetically superior people the United States is going to have to learn this in a much shorter amount of time but by the way the reason why we have these ideas of the British race and our superiority if you ever wondered why Gove and Boris think like they do and quote Kipling why they do it imagine that you were the richest country on the planet and you were published as a book called The Origin of Species the survival of favoured races your elite automatically assume that they have an empire that's bigger than any other in the history of the world because the British is superior no other country was in a position to make that huge mistake that mistake is still there in the elite of Britain it will eventually go but if you're trying to understand why Brexit and a particular set of right-wing Conservative ministers and they're kind of absolute belief that we can do this George Osborne two years ago said if you follow the plan we'll be the richest large country on the planet by 2030 where does that kind of thinking come from it comes from modelling college Oxford it comes from Westminster school it comes from the Osborne family it comes from the friends around them the 1860s and 1870s and 1880s excuses about why Britain is a crap country because the ideas were kept alive these were common ideas for eugenics in the 1930s again here in Bloomsbury including the left wingers and then in the 60s and 70s the Mayfair club and another small group of people kept them alive why do you have scores £35,000 a year you have schools this is our boarding schools our top private public schools you have schools that cost £35,000 a year because there are some children who have got special genes who we have to spend that much money on their education because they're going to make the country otherwise you wouldn't have them now the rest of the world has learnt not to do this and the poor pressure that goes on these boys it's largely boys what the average OECD country does is spend more on children who are slower in their state schools because they need more help not what we do I'm going to try and take a final round of questions now and then we actually have a drink seminar after this which you are all invited to which will be taking place in the senior common room so you're welcome to keep the conversation going but can I see a show of hands just a few here and there no? I don't understand the question of immigration and the fact that it's all showing up in the statistics what if we started showing how people in Britain are talking to doing overseas would that influence how people feel about the immigration issue then? OK, let's end on that if we, well we were very bad at counting people out so in the 91 census and 2001 we discovered that a million more people had left than we thought and recently we discovered that almost every overseas student actually goes because it's not that great as a country we've exported far more people than we've ever imported and this gets back to the genetic and the very strange kind of behaviour we kind of still have a role in England that we're going to have to get over which is that you, if you're born here you're supposed to be patriotic if you come here you're supposed to adopt that particular patriotism and that's the cricket test and you should be part of this if you go aboard you should still keep that patriotism about Britain you shouldn't assimilate with anybody else and you're never an immigrant you should be a part now that language and that way of thinking about what other people in Europe call mobility they don't actually say immigrant and immigrant that language that you're always English fits back to those eugenic ideas about the special race William Beveridge helped bring in the welfare state William Beveridge said it was a duty of every middle class Englishman not the working class because they had slightly dodgy genes but every middle class Englishman should have four children for the good of the race when that was Beveridge now there are changes over time but the thinking of superiority is still there when you see those conservative men talking and sitting and strutting what keeps them going is their self-knowledge that inside them they are superior and I don't think it'll ever go from them but I don't think their grandchildren will have it that's my hope and I think we'll get there but this is why it's an insurrection it's beginning but you're battling against something which is very very powerful and it's a core belief among certain people that this is their country they made it great they created the world's greatest ever empire the empire should be grateful to them for it the empire was the white man's burden Britain never made any money from the empire the reason we became poorer in the 1970s wasn't because the last few countries gained independence it was our trade unions and they say that because they honestly think that we ran an empire for the good of the planet and it's been misrepresented by people who don't understand what a wonderful thing the British empire truly was I'm never going to persuade them but they're going to die slightly earlier than me it's their children and their children's children I'm interested in because at some point this has to go for the mentality of this country and it will it's just a question of how much pain are we going to go through before it goes how quickly are we going to learn thank you