Comment by JimDabell
13 hours ago
This is what I was going to say. Back then, a book like this would have been perceived as the UK making fun of itself. Now it’s perceived as being cruel to those less fortunate.
I think it’s worth putting into context that the economy was doing great in the era this book was first published and huge progress was being made with things like homelessness, inequality, and poverty. It felt like the country had turned a corner from the lows of the 80s.
Since then, we’ve had the global financial crisis, local councils being bankrupted, and a huge rise in homelessness and inequality. The rich have more and the poor have less.
If you published that book today, the contents might be the same, but the story it tells would be quite different.
Good point re: facts versus story.
One problem may be that the UK is very London-centric in a way that is markably different from France being Paris-centric.
Just my perception (and I know London much better than Paris) is that in France, if you are not in Paris you are seen as "living in the 'province'", but politicians still fight for farmers there etc. In contrast, in the UK, on the surface there is the appearance that yes, London is the capital and more important, but that people are trying to do initiatives like moving part of the BBC to Glasgow and Manchester - to decentralize a bit.
Yet the wealth concentrated in Greater London and its commutable satellites - as contrasted with the rest of the country - is many orders of magnitude bigger, also due to the financial industry there.
If you live in Knightsbridge and commute to your trader job in Canary Wharf you will never see how derelict Portsmouth or Blackpool really are (the only time I went to Portsmouth, I recall some people sitting in the street with nothing to do).
You can walk out of Canary Wharf, within a mile or two you'll see much the same.
Not that the Knightsbridge set ever do.
Heck, even from Knightsbridge itself you don't have to go that far. North End Road is what, two, three miles?
I don't know of anywhere in London that has quite the profound sense of hopelessness you find in Blackpool, but a lot of it's really not great.
Fun UK fact. only
>One in five civil servants are based in London (20.1%), down from 20.7% in 2022.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-service-stati...
Meh. As someone who's in the opposite situation (familiar with France and not with the UK), I get the feeling that what you're saying applies here, too.
It's funny you should talk about farmers. Yes, politicians say they'll move mountains for them. Yet, in practice, farmers are still barely making ends meet. And we also have the EU on top, which is run by bureaucrats even more removed from the actual "bas peuple". Just look at the whole situation with the Mercosur treaty.
Politicians keep yapping about how ICE cars are the devil and should be banned. After all, you can take a bike or ride the metro, right? It's not like anybody lives outside Paris or its close "satellites". It's very easy when you don't even have an idea how much a ticket costs, since you're carted around by police escort on the people's dime.
We've also had a push for "decentralization", with all kinds of hilariously bad results.
I don't know about Portsmouth nor Blackpool, but I ride around France a fair bit, and outside the biggest cities, many small towns have empty, run-down centers, with mayors fighting to get stores and whatnot back. But people simply move out for lack of jobs.
The Gini coefficient of the UK is about the same now as it was then:
https://equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed/
What has actually changed? A whole bunch of other economic malaise, but also perceptions, amplified to your personal taste by social media.
What has actually changed is that thirty years ago, the ratio between house prices and average earnings was about 4. By twenty years ago it had doubled and, most importantly, it has been at that level ever since with no real sign of dropping [1].
This is a structural change. We now have at least one, and perhaps two, generations of people who can't really alter their economic situation through hard work. That's the classic recipe for populism to thrive.
[1] https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-...
Interest rates were much higher back then which accounts for most of the change. The base rate was around 6% through most of the nineties (it hit 15% at its peak).
And as with so many modern issues, the housing problem was largely created by Thatcher - her Right to Buy policy.
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Gini coefficient usually only measures income inequality. Wealth inequality is hard to measure for various reasons but…
https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/
“for the UK as a whole, the WID found that the top 0.1% had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9%.”
“If the wealth of the super rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP.”
Etc.
> by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP
Those things are measured in different units, which automatically throws doubt on the ability of the source to be statistically rigorous in any other way.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
Very little change in U.K. over 20 years
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Highly unlikely because the rich are now just running away from UK pulling all their cash with them; it's likely that leftists will get what they want - reduction of wealth inequality - just not in the way that pleases them: with the cash being simply gone.
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Switzerland and Afghanistan have an almost equal Gini coefficient.
My point is: the Gini coefficient might indicate what your country's income distribution looks like, it however does not tell anything about actual life conditions.
Quality of life encompasses many factors, e.g.
The Human Development Index, on the other hand, does. Switzerland is #1 at 0.967, improving at 0.25% per year. Afghanistan is #182 at 0.462 and dropping, the UK is a respectable #15 at 0.940 (between Finland and New Zealand) and also improving.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
Sure but that’s a bit silly. Switzerland’s GDP is something like 50x that of Afghanistan. UK GDP in 2025 is much higher than in 2003, too. Of course not 5000%
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>What has actually changed?
The value of grants paid from central government to local government have fallen by over 80%. In 2005, the poorest local authorities received most of their funding from central government; today, they're dependent on council tax and business rates for the vast majority of their income. During that time, demand for social care has vastly increased, disproportionately so in the poorest local authorities, eating away at the already shrinking resources of local authorities.
The result of those cuts have been drastic for people living in poorer communities, particularly the poorest members of those communities. They quite justifiably feel abandoned by society. Youth clubs and children's centres, social work, homelessness provision, subsidised bus routes, parks and libraries have all been cut to the bone. None of that is captured in the Gini coefficient, but it's felt acutely by the people who rely on those services.
The wealthy are largely unaffected by this, because they live in local authorities that were never particularly reliant on central government funding and because they never really relied on council services anyway. For the very poorest, the impact of austerity is often dominated by one big failure of provision - being stuck in unsuitable temporary accommodation for months or years because there's no social housing available, being denied support for a disabled child etc. For the majority, it's just a slow but pervasive erosion of their quality of life - their kids have nowhere to go after school, their street is full of potholes, the bus they take into town has been cut from four an hour to one an hour, their back alley is full of rubbish because the council can't afford to deal with fly-tipping.
https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/NEF_Local_Government_...
https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cbrwp51...
The share of the middle 40% has fallen sharply according to the bottom chart on that page.
The bottom 50% is unchanged in aggregate , but there will be groups within in that have done a lot worse.
I would also guess (I cannot find numbers) that the proportion of income that is spent on essentials has risen.
I think the argument is less that inequality has increased overall, and more that the country is increasingly stratified by geography - with greater concentrations of wealth in the South East relative to the rest of the country.
This is especially true in formerly undesirable areas of London (e.g. Hackney, #10 on the 2003 list) and towns within commuting distance of London (e.g. Hythe, #3).
Presumably this is due to the gradual shift to a London-centric services economy as well as the increasingly ludicrous price of houses in Central London.
Oh, lies, damned lies and statistics. One could also say that the Gini coefficient rose, reached its peak ~2006 and now is going down...
“About the same” is not “the same”, and there are tipping points. The gini coefficient has still seen a decent bump.
But anyway, gini is a coarse measure. Look at the chart below that, showing income percentages going steadily upwards for the top 10 and 1%.
Most worryingly, look at the decline of the middle 40%. A healthy middle class keeps countries stable. You need a good chunk of society who feel like the system works for them.
And it’s not just perceptions, it’s fundamental stuff. A teacher could afford a house in the 90s; they can’t now. For all the boomers bang on about mobile phones and flat screen TVs, in the end those are luxuries compared to clean, secure accommodation. The days of getting a mortgage on one income, or having access to nice council housing are gone.
Gini coefficient of what? Income or wealth?
Is borrowing money with appreciating assets as collateral treated as income for purposes of thsese calculations?
Look at the graphs as a whole, not just individual points. Compare the 90s to the 10s.
Not sure about homelessness rising versus the 90s. Possibly the rate is similar to 1998. I looked at ourworldindata, but their graph only goes back to 2010. Wikipedia has wildly different figures from the charities Shelter and Crisis because they're counting different things. It then gives government figures: just over 100,000 in 1998, 135,000 in 2003, 40,000 in 2009 and 2010 (so ourworldindata gives a chart that begins with this low), and "record levels, with 104,510 people" in 2023, though that's less than 135,000 so the way in which this is a record is not specified.
In summary, it goes up and down a lot, is counted in different ways, was (counted to be) far lower in 2010 (two years after the financial crisis?), but pretty much the same as now in 1998, although the kind of people who have an interest in saying "homelessness has hit record levels" are saying that homelessness has hit record levels.
This makes me nostalgic for 1991 when the Big Issue was first published, and there were songs like Gypsy Woman by Crystal Waters and Walking Down Madison by Kirsty MacColl.
Edit: was your "80s" a typo for "90s" perhaps?