The kids aren't alright

Key themes from our webinar featuring Danny Dorling talking about his new book 'Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation'

What does declining prosperity mean for Britain’s next generation? In his latest book, the social geographer 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. His new book, Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation, explores the realities facing Britain's children.

Danny’s seven children were born in 2018, at a time when the UK faced its worst inequality since the Great Depression. As they turned five in 2023, their country had Europe's fastest-rising child poverty rates, and even the best-off of the seven is disadvantaged. The book provides insight into the lives of British children living between the extremes of wealth and poverty. It examines questions around parental income, the middle class, and the trends affecting the next generation.

Last week we and the Policy Institute at King’s College London hosted a webinar to discuss the book’s diagnosis and prescription for change, featuring Danny in conversation with Georgia Banjo (Britain Correspondent at the Economist) and Dame Rachel De Souza (Children’s Commissioner for England), with me in the chair.

You can watch a recording of the hour-long event below (it starts one minute in). Underneath the video is a quick summary of the key themes from the discussion.

Event summary

Danny outlined the key arguments and statistics in the book, looking at each of his seven fictional children in turn. Four of them live lives that most better-off people would consider to be in poverty, while the other three are hardly well-off. There’s an excellent summary, including plenty of graphs and a look at the seven children, in Danny’s article for Jacobin magazine, alongside a shorter recent piece in The Conversation, and here’s a short video summarising the book:

Here are some of the key themes that emerged from the panellists’s talks and Q&A.

Poverty and inequality in the UK is worse than in the rest of Europe. The UK has the highest income inequality in Europe; while child poverty rates have fallen in most European countries over the last decade, they have risen significantly in the UK. Danny quoted analysis by the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch that the poorest fifth of households in the UK are poorer than the poorest fifth in most of Eastern Europe. Child mortality is increasing, and the average height of five-year-olds has been decreasing since 2010.

Politicians don’t prioritise inequality and fairness - whereas children do. Georgia argued that our welfare system often exacerbates inequalities rather than alleviating them, and that we need to change our language around poverty and inequality (such as moving beyond the rhetoric about ‘deserving and undeserving’) to build support for action. Danny again quoted John Burn-Murdoch arguing that the previous government had become unmoored from the British people in terms of political and policy attitudes, suggesting that this had skewed the political narrative in this country about inequality. Rachel emphasised the importance of listening to children's perspectives on societal issues, pointing out that many feel unheard by those in power, and that her surveys of over a million children in recent years show that they see unfairness and inequality as a key concern, and see poverty as a fundamental barrier to fairness.

To make progress, we need to be less tolerant of arguments that we can’t afford to address child poverty. Danny talked about his experience of being booed in Norway for congratulating them on their low child poverty rate, by a middle class crowd whose objection was that their levels of child poverty were still too high. (Rachel also spoke about Norway, contrasting their approach to child sentencing - vanishingly few children incarcerated, support from doctors, dentists, psychologists, social workers, volunteer mentors - with the hundreds of children imprisoned in the UK.) Action, or inaction, on child poverty is a political choice, pure and simple, as is shown by the progress made by many other countries in recent decades.