Unequal Britain

Abstract

Divided Kingdom writes the history of twentieth-century Britain through the lens of inequalities, divisions of wealth and power among Britain’s four nations, its relationship with empire/commonwealth, whose fault-lines – class, generation, gender, ethnicity, religion and region – shape how people live and what they can hope for. Aspiration and hope figure strongly in Pat Thane’s description of modern Britain. Writing in the long aftermath of the 2007–8 financial crash, during the austerity policies of the Coalition and Conservative governments with the clamour of Brexit ringing in her ears, Pat Thane – a contemporary historian of social policy whose previous work tracks the limits of liberal democracy across two or more centuries – asks how did we arrive at the present vertiginous economic, political and constitutional crisis? Why despite higher living standards and longer lives, does poverty continue to blight lives in Britain, the fifth richest nation in the OECD in 2017? The twentieth century opens with world events which were to mould and fracture Britain throughout the century: South African and Irish wars of colonial liberation, Scottish and Welsh devolution, the challenge to Britain’s imperial and economic power from Germany, Japan and the USA. Women’s suffrage, the formation of the Labour Party and the poverty surveys (initiated by philanthropists) marked the sea-change in domestic political economy. ‘Why are the many poor?’ was the starting point of those architects of Britain’s welfare state whose political careers began with settlement work in the 1900s. Poverty and its effects on human lives come into sharpest focus in Divided Kingdom, with the complex relation between people and social policy under closest scrutiny. In 1900 Britain was a world imperial and economic power ruled by a tiny propertied elite. One percent owned forty percent of Britain’s wealth – invested in empire, the City, business or mining the mineral deposits of their land. Yet some thirty percent of urban populations lived on or below a poverty line of bare subsistence. In 2015 the richest ten percent – financiers and elite professionals –owned forty-four percent of wealth. Five to six million people worked in the gig economy – jobs outsourced to the lowest