Danny Dorling

Danny Dorling teaches at Oxford.

From The Blog
5 October 2020

In the week after the schools went back in England and Wales, an extra 538 people died (77 a day). Over the previous five years, an average of 8720 people had died that week in September, but this year the number surged to 9258. How many more would be dead by Christmas? The next week there was a lull: only 289 excess deaths. But then the universities returned, and the excess mortality count doubled. In the week ending 25 September, 574 more people had died each day. There was a drop to 319 excess deaths the following week, and then a rise to 678 (97 a day). On and on it went, week after week after week. Almost five thousand excess deaths were recorded between the schools going back and the start of December. The year was 2015 and most people weren’t paying attention. No one read the numbers out.

Letter

Labour’s Defeat

27 January 2020

In his novel The Northern Clemency (2008), Philip Hensher described the Sheffield neighbourhood in which I lived at the time (Letters, 20 February). It was in the least affluent corner of the city’s most affluent constituency, Sheffield Hallam. The people there lived secretive lives, as Hensher saw it, and were narrow-minded and selfish. That wasn’t my experience. And in December’s election,...
Letter
Ursula Huws is correct to say that the only way a Universal Basic Income can be redistributive is if it is paid for by taxes on employers and on the rich (Letters, 15 August). In fact taxes on the rich would be enough. When UBI is eventually introduced, it will probably be set at a relatively low level, then subsequently raised. Different states will introduce it in different ways. The countries of...
Letter

Anti-Masochism

4 April 2019

Abenomics, Kristin Surak writes (Letters, 6 June), ‘may have boosted the profits of big exporters, but it has shrunk real household incomes in a country that is now one of the most unequal in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Nearly every country in Europe has a more equal income distribution than Japan, where one in six children now grows up in poverty.’ But one in six...

Short Cuts: Homelessness

Danny Dorling, 20 December 2018

Today​, one person in every two hundred in England and Wales is homeless – either sleeping rough or living in temporary accommodation. In London the proportion is even higher: one in 53. In Kensington and Chelsea it’s one in 29: in that borough alone 5,263 people are homeless. They are unlikely to be the same people (a smaller number) as last year. Most of them will have moved...

Just Be Grateful: Unequal Britain

Jamie Martin, 23 April 2015

There are​ two standard views of the relationship between poverty and inequality. The first is that there isn’t one: how the poor fare has nothing to do with how much better off the rich...

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