Danny Dorling Seven Children Q&A change of heart #Short

Q: Is a change of heart what the UK needs – and can the elite play a
part?

Geographer and inequalities expert Danny Dorling (University of Oxford)
talks about his forthcoming book, Seven Children: Inequality and
Britain’s Next Generation (Hurst), out on 26 September.

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“I'm partly hopeful that this can contribute to a general mood to do
what we did a century ago, which was when the upper middle class people
like me wrote things about the rest of society and how shocked they were
when they found out about it.

“So, in a way, there's nothing new here. I'm simply doing what was done
before in the precursor to all the social changes that were made in the
late 1930s and early 1940s, the welfare state, which was done by all
three political parties, Beveridge was Liberal, and the continuation in
the 1950s and 1960s, all that relied on thinking that was done around
time the First World War and shortly after in the 1920s and 30s.

“You could absolutely trace the changing attitudes of the elite, of the
best-off in the country, to the situation of others. They were slowly
realising what that really was, and deciding, or at least the youngsters
at the time of the First World War, deciding that they weren't going to
put up with it. Of course, there were others, trade union movements,
huge numbers of strikes, lots of agitation.

“It isn't just the elite. But if you don't have at least some of the
elite working with you, if the elite, if the best-off are absolutely
determined to keep things very, very unequal and keep most for
themselves and harbour views that they are special and most people are
scum, then it is much, much harder, if not almost impossible, to improve
the situation.”