Professor Danny Dorling Peak Injustice: Solving Britains Inequality Crisis

About

Danny Dorling will talk about his two most recent books, why he wrote them and what they state.He is interested in what others think could be done and if they agree or disagree with his summary of what life in Britain for children is now so often like. Most children’s lives can appear very poor to the better-off.Danny Dorling begins by asking this question: "If we found seven typical 5-year-olds to represent today’s UK, what would their stories reveal?”. The book, Seven Children, is about injustice and hope. In it, using a mixture of facts and fiction, Danny Dorling constructs seven ‘average’ children from millions of statistics—each child symbolising the very middle of a parental income bracket, from the poorest to the wealthiest. Dorling’s seven were born in 2018, when the UK faced its worst inequality since the Great Depression and became Europe’s most socially divided nation. They turned five in 2023, amid a devastating cost-of-living crisis. Their country has Europe’s fastest-rising child poverty rates, and even the best-off of the seven is disadvantaged.Yet aspirations endure. When this talk is delivered the children will all be aged six. Danny Dorling puts his story in a wider national context than the lives of children in a second more academic book: Peak Injustice, which asked what happened in the last six years in a wide range of policy areas affecting everyone in the UK, not just children.Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. His previous books include Inequality and the 1% and Slowdown.Before a career in academia Danny Dorling was employed as a play-worker in children's play-schemes and in pre-school education where the underlying rationale was that playing is learning for living. He tries not to forget this. He is an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, a former Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers and a current patron of Roadpeace, the national charity for road crash victims.A Q&A Session will follow.