The geographer on class, crisis, and why inequality in the UK might finally be cracking — just not in the way you might hope. Danny Dorling is a British social geographer and Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford who specialises in inequality research, particularly focusing on health, wealth, education, and housing disparities. His prolific academic career includes authoring numerous books on social inequality, including “Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists” and “Peak Inequality.” At the same time, his distinctive use of innovative data visualisation techniques has helped make complex statistical information more accessible to broader audiences.

What sound does history make?

“The silent scream from that Munch picture,” Danny Dorling replies quickly. He means The Scream by Edvard Munch — although one suspects a monk screaming into a pillow might not be entirely off.

“Right now there is probably more confusion worldwide than there has been since the late 1930s. And in the late 1930s, for the most part, we didn’t know what was happening or what was about to happen, whereas this just feels like a continuous crisis.”

However, despite the grim comparison, Dorling — Britain’s best-known geographer — resists the impulse to catastrophise. After three years of writing a book about crises (The Next Crisis), he has learned to think in longer arcs.

“If you step back, you can put a very positive slant on things,” he concedes. “Really important things like child health or how fewer babies die in the first year of life — that’s still getting better every year, which is amazingly good news when you think about human suffering.”

He reels off a list of positive changes in the world: declining global poverty, falling inequality in most countries, slowing population growth, reduced pandemic frequency, historic lows in war deaths, and rising global education levels.

“But we tend to ignore what’s good,” he says. “We zoom in on the war, the country that votes for an idiot… but hardly celebrate when a country votes the idiot out.”

Possibly (I think) because the idiot then signs a six-figure book deal and starts a podcast.

Unlearning the official version

Dorling’s tendency to doubt the official narrative of British history started young. Growing up in a mixed-race household in 1970s Oxford, he learned early that the version of Britain taught in schools left a great deal out.

“From as young as I can remember I was aware that what they were teaching at school wasn’t what actually happened,” he says. “But that’s not because I’m clever, it’s because I grew up with two Black brothers and one white brother… in a time of acute racism.”

His sixth-form standard room had one portrait: Lenin. “I was just lucky,” he says. “Most people think their view of the world is right, and I think my view of the world is largely right. However, knowing the history I know about racism, I have learnt that the story of British history is that Britain wasn’t a particularly good country to be proud of if you knew what had happened.”

At Newcastle University, he encountered the work of sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, whose alternative global history was eye-opening for him. “That is now a standard interpretation of world history,” he says. “It is very different from what had been taught in schools, where students had to memorise the date the British invented everything in the world.”

A slow collapse of denial

Dorling pauses when I ask if Britain’s deep-rooted denial about inequality is finally cracking.

“We are the most unequal [country], give or take Bulgaria… certainly the most unequal of all large countries since about the 1930s.”

He believes inequality has fallen slightly since 2018–19, though not for any reason that inspires much optimism.

“Everybody is  getting poorer –  much poorer – with the cost of living crisis.” Prices are up 30–40% in just three years, and more people are skimping on food, getting cold, and slipping into debt.

At the same time, there is a real drop in high salaries — or at least a decrease in raises that fails to match rising inflation. “Britain is getting more equal but it’s  mainly because we can’t afford not to,” he says.

Equality, then, but through shared misery.

As for public understanding, Dorling says denial is ebbing. He recalls doing research in the late ’80s and early ’90s when even using the word “poverty” was frowned upon. “Margaret Thatcher said that poverty didn’t exist in Britain anymore.”

Presumably, along with society, and free milk.

Class: Britain’s most enormous divide

Dorling says the most misunderstood and underestimated divide in Britain continues to be class.

Ethnic disparities exist, but Dorling is quick to note: “All minority groups ever mentioned in Britain have moved through the class system and upwards.”

However, class divides remain enormous. “When you measure differences between men and women and differences by ethnicity, you’re talking about maybe a 10–20% chance of difference. When you look at social classes, you’re looking at two, three, four times as much—100, 300, 400% differences.”

His most haunting statistic? “Your chance of dying as a baby could be three, four times higher for the lowest social class. There’s a penalty for being born to a black mother, which might be due to slightly worse care — but it’s tiny compared to the penalty of being born to a poor mother.”

Oxford: Empire in miniature

Dorling has worked at Oxford University for over a decade and offers a candid view of the institution. “It’s profoundly conservative — because it’s ever so polite.”

It is polite enough to stab you with a dessert fork and apologise for the inconvenience.

At matriculation dinners, students are told they are “specially chosen… the crème de la crème.” Dorling’s verdict? “Basically 1930s eugenics.”

Unlike most European universities, where students live at home and attend the nearest university, Britain’s system, he says, is designed to produce Empire managers. “You jump up a class immediately… it makes you able to make decisions that will be quite nasty.”

Eugenics in everyday language

In response to my question about what language most distorts our view of inequality, Dorling singles out a familiar phrase: “realising their potential.”

It assumes that people are born with wildly different capacities — a quietly eugenic worldview. “If you start off from there, you end up in bad trouble. Helping those with very little potential at least achieve that little potential, and helping those with enormous potential reach theirs.”

He traces it back to the Fabians — founders of the LSE — and even Labour’s Clause Four. “It’s in the UN charter. Most people were [eugenicists] back then. It was the modern theory of the time — that the working class were over-breeding, the upper class weren’t, and we were all going to become thick.”

A recent book, Born to Rule, shows how tightly elite networks remain connected. ‘It looks at everybody in the book Who’s Who and determines how many are related. Family connections are incredibly important.

However, the myth of meritocracy persists. “There’s this huge stage of thinking you’ve done it on your own. When in actuality, you almost certainly would have had some advantage… which other people didn’t.”

Hope (cautiously)

Despite everything, Dorling maintains a kind of ambivalence. “We’ve got a much younger cohort who abhor racism. That’s an incredible thing to watch… they would hate to be called a racist, might be one, but would hate to be called one,” he says passionately.

On other fronts, he is less hopeful. “It’s quite easy to be anti-immigrant now… whereas before, if you were, you were at the far right edge.”

Still, he believes historical amnesia has a shelf life.

“You can’t hide world history. You can hide it when you’re the centre of an empire and print the textbooks. But when you’re a tiny country heading toward half a percent of the world’s population, you can’t keep hiding the truth.”

If inequality had a soundtrack

Finally, which album best sums up his worldview?

“It would be from the 1970s or 80s because you get stuck with music from your youth,” he jokes. After some thought, he decides on “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye. It is political, soulful, and still painfully relevant.