Stretched Apart
Seven Children: Inequality and the Next Generation by Danny Dorling
(Hurst Press, 2024)
Katie Joice
In 2016 Annie Liebowitz took a 90th birthday photograph of Queen Elizabeth II with two of her grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, one an infant seated in her lap. Far from being a cosy family portrait, the image conveyed a morally ambiguous, even sinister, message about British society. The older children, dressed in the Royal Family’s preferred postwar garb: plain blouses, woollen cardigans and knee-socks, stand ghostly against the luminous gold and green furnishings of the royal apartment. Behind them, the ever-receding reflection of gilt mirrors suggests the infinite progression of generational power. The opulent setting undermines the photograph’s human subject-matter – the pride that grannies feel for their descendants – and leads us to doubt the sense of possibility that accompanies the birth of each baby. Yes, every child is a unique and irreplaceable individual. Yet that child’s life experiences – their future security, health and personal flourishing – will be tightly defined by their parents’ income. All children are born equal, but in twentieth-first century Britain some children are born much, much more fortunate than others.
The following year, 2017, saw economic inequality peak to new heights. In his new book, Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation, Oxford sociologist Danny Dorlingcasts light on this issue by creating seven fictional children born at precisely that historical moment. Dorling has already explored Britain’s new status as a ‘failing state’ in Shattered Nation (2023), detailing the deprivations and indignities endured by an ever-expanding section of the population known as the working poor. Seven Children covers similar territory but focuses on the lives of small children and their parents, using the vast amount of statistical information collected every year by the Department of Work and Pensions to create vignettes of ordinary life across the income spectrum. What becomes clear is that as the state slowly withdraws its investment in public institutions and cuts its provision of supplementary benefits, the quality of children’s everyday experience is increasingly shaped by their families’ status in the pecking order.
As Dorling underlines, this is a shamefully British story, although it follows trends in that other ‘rich-poor’ country, the United States. Compared to other Western European countries, British children are more likely to die before their first birthday, to feel hungry at school, and to suffer stunted growth. In 2018, when the UN Rapporteur for Poverty visited Britain to deliver a report about the population’s dependence on food banks, the country was in no mood to listen. Caught up in hand-wringing over Britain’s declining global position during the last spasms of the Brexit crisis, Tory governments were too preoccupied with a lost past to worry about planning for the country’s long-term future. Ironically, the postwar world for which both right and left expressed such nostalgia during that period was determinedly open-handed and future-facing. From the closure of orphanages and the introduction of Family Allowance payments to nationwide playground-building and free school milk, Atlee’s legislative programme of the late 1940s and early ’50s was keenly attentive to the needs of children. It makes the current Labour government’s offering of another thousand mental health counsellors in state schools look like damage limitation.
Dorling’s book echoes many of the concerns of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s influential study, The Spirit Level (2009) which examined the social and psychological effects of inequality at a global level, making the argument – striking at the time – that inequality was not just bad for the poor, but for the well-off too. Under the readable surface of Dorling’s text lies an armoury of statistics which unsettle readers’ assumptions about their relative social position. A kind of psychological distortion takes place in highly unequal societies, where even the wealthy feel embattled and inadequate, or at best, consider themselves ‘normal’. Because the income gaps between not just poor and wealthy, but wealthy and wealthier are so huge, all of Dorling’s fictional parents feel anxious about their children’s future life-chances. Using data from the government’s Family Resources Survey he sketches out the limitations of everyday life in Britain, from Monday’s Child, Anna, whose family lives – after accommodation costs – on £16.86 a day, to Sunday’s Child, Gemma, whose family lives on nine times as much, £140.57.
Dorling’s adherence to statistical averages and the commonality of experience leaves little room for an analysis of the extremes. Each of his seven children is the median child in one of seven income brackets, with each bracket comprising 2 million of the country’s 14 million children. In other words, Anna, in the middle of the bottom bracket, whose mother cannot afford a bicycle or felt-tips, is not the most deprived child in the country (6% of children are poorer than her). And Gemma’s parents, in the middle of the richest band, who have to run their small business all year round and forgo holidays as a result, feel hard done-by in comparison with the wealthiest (the top 6% above them possess 34% of the nation’s wealth). Statistics also reveal that this is a society which is skewed against its youngest members. Families with children are worse off than those without, so Thursday’s child, David – the statistically average child – lives in a poorer-than-average household. Bringing up children is in itself expensive, time-consuming and usually leads to a long-term loss of earnings. Within Europe, the UK has the most children living below the poverty line, including from the poorest parts of Eastern Europe.
We know that young children naturalise the peculiarities of their own upbringings, so the book focuses on how parents struggle to provide rather than Anna or Gemma’s own rudimentary class awareness. Dorling points to the pervasive psychological harms of stressful jobs and financial insecurity: Freddy’s father’s anxiety and depression; the system of averted glances and non-greetings on Candice’s street, where affluent and struggling families live uncomfortably alongside each other. The feeling that citizens are no longer bound by collective projects, and in hard times, by a collective fate, is perhaps the biggest cultural sickness of all. There is also a sense of established identities slipping away. For many decades, popular studies of Britain’s class system, from Jilly Cooper’s farcical Class (1979) to David Cannadine’s Class in Britain (2000) and Kate Fox’s Watching the English (2005), focused on working, middle and upper-class culture, on the special rules dictating behaviour in fox hunts, dinner parties and the local pub. There was huge snobbery and what Pierre Bourdieu called ‘symbolic violence’ at play in these analyses; clear divisions between those who possessed cultural capital from birth and those who failed to understand ‘the rules of the game’. Yet it was all framed in a humorous, tongue-in-cheek way, suggesting that the British were weird and highly class-conscious, but bound together in a coherent system of needs and aspirations.
Dorling’s book leads us to reflect on how these cultural differences have been smoothed away, or at least have taken on a secondary importance compared to the value of hard cash. Class has not been destroyed, as some disingenuous politicians claim, but like everything else, class increasingly takes on a purely monetary exchange value. Quite deliberately, there is no discussion of distinct social and educational cultures in Seven Children and no anthropologising of the poor. Sometimes this class-blindness sounds a false note, as when Dorling shoehorns some unlikely artefacts into his fictional families’ lives. He places a well-read copy of the 1913 social survey ‘Round About a Pound a Week’ on Anna’s mother’s bookshelf and a print of Charles Booth’s London poverty maps on Candice’s living room wall; a Radio 4 sociology programme is wistfully listened to by Brandon’s parents while their stomachs rumble.
These cultural touchstones neatly contextualise Dorling’s study for his academic readers (and one wonders where left-wing intellectuals and their children fit into this seven-part system – are they fated to disappear into the precariat or will a few be preserved in a tiny, vocal elite?) The point to underline here is that when most people feel that their children are downwardly mobile, the class system isn’t funny anymore, even for the educated middle-classes who used to satirise it so well. The old class codes have been replaced with adolescent dreams of limitless wealth – heavily glamourised in popular culture – and an ongoing battle to secure everyday pleasures and dignities, a battle which is being lost by increasingly large sections of the population. Ordinary comforts are both belittled and longed-for. Dorling draws repeatedly on questions asked by the Family Resources Survey to make us think hard about what an ordinary, adequate childhood looks like:
Can you afford to decorate your home?
To go on holiday?
To save £10 a month?
To replace worn-out furniture and broken electrical goods?
Do you have outdoor space for your children to play in?
Can you afford to celebrate on special occasions?
To buy a bicycle?
Can you afford for your children to have a hobby?
For their friends to come round for a snack once a fortnight?
For your child to go on school trips?
To eat fresh fruit and vegetables every day?
To buy a warm winter coat?
Does the family have enough bedrooms?
There are a million teenagers in Britain whose homes do not have enough bedrooms and who have to share with another teenager or adult of the opposite sex. At the other end of the scale are the million super-rich kids whose houses have excess bedrooms, playrooms and studies. Dorling has already coined the term ‘supernova’ class to describe the stratospheric wealth generated by new forms of financial speculation (although the old ruling elites, including the Royal Family, now also fill their coffers with the help of hedge fund managers). As he elegantly outlines, these supernovas cast a shadow over everything below them, creating “radically different norms” which destabilise our sense of shared citizenship, leaving us “obscured from ourselves” and “unable to see the shape of our society”. Amongst the 6% of children richer than Gemma, the enormous wealth of the top 1% is dwarfed again by that of the top 0.1%, who possess the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50% of the population. How can this be the case when in the ’60s and early ’70s, Britain was one of the most equitable societies in the world? Dorling describes how Britain became “stretched apart” from 1974 onwards, as a consequence of changes in tax distribution and housing policy (especially the massive expansion of the private rental market, a consequence of the ‘right to buy’ council homes), and the new and enduring social norms we associate with Thatcherism. Those middle-aged adults who were Thatcher’s children, born between 1975 and 1980, are now much more likely to be in the bottom two fifths of society. As for the future, Dorling raises the spectre of Britain becoming a plutocracy propped up by menial workers. Or, he wonders, will the billionaire class, like the supernova star, burn out and explode in a violent reordering of society?
Dorling’s own politics are peaceable, albeit revolutionary. He notes that both identity politics and anger about generational inequality are distractions from the economic differences that really matter. It is currently unthinkable that a minimum income could ever be a ‘protected characteristic’ and included in the Equality Act. Dorling contrasts this class-phobia to the postwar period when mansions were turned into flats and stately homes were sold off to pay tax bills. He weaves in other familiar counterpoints and roads-not-taken: the greater equality (and better quality of life) in Europe and Scotland; the alternative futures we might have had if Labour had won in 2017 or 2019. Dorling’s inspiration for Seven Children was Michael Apted’s 7Up, the iconic 1964 TV series which followed the lives of a group of seven-year-old children every seven years, until 2019. The mid-sixties was the moment of peak equality in Britain, when Harold Wilson declared that we had “never had it so good”. Apted’s films told a complex story, illustrating the predictive effects of education and wealth while also showing that biography can never be reduced to class. Individual temperaments and talents, as well as uncontrollable twists of fate, shape happy and unhappy lives. Compared with Apted’s living and breathing protagonists, Dorling’s statistical children appear thinly drawn and strangely alike. But perhaps this lack of colour also underlines a new social reality: that most parents’ lives are now marked by fear of precarity, even when they are not poor, and that old conceptions of childhood – as a protected realm in which imagination and idiosyncrasy might flourish – will inevitably wither away in a technocratic, market-driven society.
At the end of Seven Children Dorling asks himself why the government collects so many statistics about everyday life if nothing is done about the inequalities they reveal. His book marshals these figures in such a way that they could be used as the basis for a new manifesto for the child. The next step after Dorling’s diagnosis is a political cure, and one which fast reaches the ear of both the public and ruling elites. He concludes that “it is through children that we best express our hopes for the future, as well as our fears about the present.” By fuelling inequality and shrinking state funding for child benefit, education and early years support, has Britain given up on the idea of its own future? We urgently need a legislative programme which addresses the material and emotional needs of Britain’s fractured child population. Dorling dedicates the book to Sunday’s Children, the wealthiest ‘seventh’ of future adults, with the most power to change the status quo. The challenge will be how to make this group of young people care about the majority, when they are less and less likely to live, learn and play together.