Shattered Nation - BookWyrm

Paperback, 288 pages

English language

Published Sept. 19, 2023 by Verso.

ISBN:: 978-1-80429-327-0

(1 review)

Britain was once the leading economy in Europe; it is now the most unequal. In Shattered Nation, leading geographer and author of Inequality and the 1% shows that we are growing further and further apart. Visiting sites across the British Isles and exploring the social fissures that have emerged, Danny Dorling exposes a new geography of inequality. Middle England has been hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis, and even people doing comparatively well are struggling to stay afloat. Once affluent suburbs are now unproductive places where opportunity has been replaced by food banks. Before COVID, life expectancy had dropped as a result of poverty for the first time since the 1930s.

Fifty years ago the UK led the world in child health; today, twenty-two of the twenty-seven EU countries have better mortality rates for newborns. No other European country has such miserly unemployment benefits; university fees so high; housing so …

Britain was once the leading economy in Europe; it is now the most unequal. In Shattered Nation, leading geographer and author of Inequality and the 1% shows that we are growing further and further apart. Visiting sites across the British Isles and exploring the social fissures that have emerged, Danny Dorling exposes a new geography of inequality. Middle England has been hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis, and even people doing comparatively well are struggling to stay afloat. Once affluent suburbs are now unproductive places where opportunity has been replaced by food banks. Before COVID, life expectancy had dropped as a result of poverty for the first time since the 1930s.

Fifty years ago the UK led the world in child health; today, twenty-two of the twenty-seven EU countries have better mortality rates for newborns. No other European country has such miserly unemployment benefits; university fees so high; housing so unaffordable; or a government economically so far to the right. In the spirit of the 1942 Beveridge Report, Dorling identifies the five giants of twenty-first-century poverty that need to be conquered: Hunger, Precarity, Waste, Exploitation, and Fear. He offers powerful insights into how we got here and what we must do in order to save Britain from becoming a failed state.

2 editions

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras reviewed Shattered Nation by Danny Dorling

bleak but on-point

5 stars

"Shattered Nation" as a title could unfortunately fit to so many nations these days, but Dorling explores the particular situation of the UK's shattering over the last ~50 years or so. Using a wide range of statistics, Dorling explores both how the UK ended up in the place it currently is – e.g. the skyrocketing inequality, lack of social services, healthcare, etc. – and also compares it to other European nations and how/why they might fare better. Overall, the book makes a very well reasoned and convincing argument for how a focus on the banking sector and deregulation under the neolib/con dogmas is to blame.

The main limitation I see is that many of the comparison to other European countries seem at times to be too rosy. Between a growing far-right and the onset of the same neoliberal dogmas that cut services, countries like France, Germany and Italy are slowly …

"Shattered Nation" as a title could unfortunately fit to so many nations these days, but Dorling explores the particular situation of the UK's shattering over the last ~50 years or so. Using a wide range of statistics, Dorling explores both how the UK ended up in the place it currently is – e.g. the skyrocketing inequality, lack of social services, healthcare, etc. – and also compares it to other European nations and how/why they might fare better. Overall, the book makes a very well reasoned and convincing argument for how a focus on the banking sector and deregulation under the neolib/con dogmas is to blame.

The main limitation I see is that many of the comparison to other European countries seem at times to be too rosy. Between a growing far-right and the onset of the same neoliberal dogmas that cut services, countries like France, Germany and Italy are slowly but surely on the same path as the UK, just lagging a few years behind.