Legitimising notions of right: analysis of the recent riots

To settle on a starting point for the riots is perhaps more of a challenge than to understand them. But to understand them with any serious clarity the choice of where to begin is essential. As with any problem, it is always good to establish first principles, or as close to these as possible, and proceed logically. Or as close to logic as our brains will allow.

To see the riots as a widespread reaction among the country’s many xenophobes and racists, synonymously termed ‘far right’ and ‘white working class’ mobs, is no doubt considerably true. That is, it is true by the definitions we (i.e. the media) have agreed upon and applied to these people, reducing the discourse to little more than the truism that ‘bad people do bad things’, and therefore suggesting that what influences, or even causes, people to take popular action (whatever that might be) is not worth serious discussion. Hence the Prime Minister’s vow, in one of his typical references to the authoritarian phrasebook, to ‘get tough’ on the rioters. Thus we could end the discussion and conclude that large groups of people in towns and cities across the UK (almost all former industrial centres) became so overwhelmed by their innate prejudices as to take to the streets and commit acts of violence. But for anyone who has a real desire to understand why the world is the way it is, it is crucial to look at the facts, and not simply to reduce people and their actions to neat categories, no matter how good this might make us feel.

The first question is a general one: what leads people to popular action? For that’s what these riots were. People who, for whatever reason, believe that change is essential and cannot be expected to come from the traditional political channels. The history of democracy in Britain is the history of such protests, or riots, or popular direct action. Thus EP Thompson wrote in his The Making of the English Working Class that, “the eighteenth and early nineteenth century are punctuated by riot, occasioned by bread prices, turnpikes and tolls, excise, ‘rescue’, strikes, new machinery, enclosures, press-gangs and a score of other grievances”, and that “direct action on particular grievances merges on the one hand into the great political risings of the ‘mob’ – the Wilkes agitation of the 1760s and 1770s, the Gordon Riots (1780), the mobbing of the King in the London streets (1795 and 1820)… On the other hand it merges with organised forms of sustained illegal action or quasi insurrection – Luddism (1811-13), the East Anglian Riots (1816), the ‘Last Labourer’s Revolt’ (1830), the Rebecca Riots (1839 and 1842) and the Plug Riots (1842).”’¹

In Europe the images of nascent democracy are more widely known (perpetuating the standard doctrine that the struggle for liberty and freedom in Britain has been a relatively bloodless, riot-free affair, and the corresponding notion that popular action is never the solution to perceived injustice – ‘just look what it leads to’): Delacriox’s Liberty Leading the People, the Jacobins, the storming of the Bastille, Robespierre, The Terror, the guillotine, Napoleon. The same images of the angry uncontrolled masses can be induced under different headings merely by mentioning the Russian Revolution. The same sanitised view of history and revolution is especially true of that ultimate mythology, the United States. This was the revolution that assimilated the role of the state with the individual’s right ‘life, liberty and. . . pursuit of happiness’ into a codified document. But a closer inspection suggests something quite different (but rather more familiar). As the historian Edmund Morgan put it: “the fact that the lower ranks were involved in the contest should not obscure the fact that the contest itself was generally a struggle for office and power between members of an upper class: the old and the established.” Or as Carl Degler writes in his Out of Our Past, “the men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class”,² a conclusion emphasised and underlined in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: “Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites.”³ The loyalty that this compromise bought, when bound together with the language of liberty and equality, could ‘unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality.’ It is no surprise to find that the true history of America is the history of rebellions, riots, uprisings and mobs (and the violence that follows naturally from such events) rather than the Hollywood tale of Great Men doing great things, perpetually flinging the course of human progress forward with their intellectual elasticity and genius.

Even a cursory glance at the history record tells us that popular action does not form spontaneously out of a vacuum but explodes into life when suitable conditions arise. One essential condition is an illegitimate authority which exists to subjugate and exploit one group or groups of people in its own material self-interest. Watered and nurtured by continued and increasing exploitation and neglect to a saturation point, these seeds occasionally sprout the flowers of riots, violence and, if everything is just right, popular action. Thus not all examples of riots and ‘mob’ action are conscious forms of political or revolutionary feeling, but as Thompson noted in his analysis of the era of riots and ‘the rabble’: “behind every such form of popular direct action some legitimising notion of right is to be found”.⁴ Understanding this, it becomes easier to formulate more useful questions about the nature of the recent riots. What are the class interests? Where does the illegitimate authority lie? Answering these will no doubt cast some light on the ‘legitimising notion of right’ to be found in the recent actions of the ‘mob’.

A question of class

That the rioters were working class was almost always mentioned. Though how it is possible to discern someone’s class membership merely from observation is never explained (never mind the inherent problem with defining class in the first place). But the fact it is mentioned suggests that it is generally accepted that this is a class issue (if only for the reason that it is almost never mentioned in the context of any other popular action), but beyond that no further analysis is required. It is enough to know that the ‘white working class’ are a group innately prone, or at least uniquely susceptible, to far right and racist ideologies. To try to understand why this is the case it is useful to point out the towns and cities most affected by the riots: Southport, Rotherham, Middlesbrough, Blackpool, Blackburn, Bolton, Sunderland, Hartlepool, Darlington, Durham, Cardiff. That is, largely Northern, especially North Eastern, towns and former industrial centres. All belong to the category ‘poorest areas of the UK’; all have overwhelmingly white populations. Thus it could be said that ‘white working class’ is merely a euphemism for ‘poor and white’, which in this context is essentially a tautology. The question to ask is why so many poor whites are concentrated in these towns and cities, and why they might be stirred into violent action. This seems like a useful place to begin.

The UK is among the top ten OECD countries for inter-region gaps in disposable income, the result of “long-term processes, related to the legacy of deindustrialisation and the increased importance of property wealth, compounded by shorter-term effects brought on by the Great Recession of the late 2000s”⁵. For example, “in the period between 2007 and 2011, the decline experienced by the economy of South Yorkshire (as measured by GDP per capita) was almost as large as that of Greece; and it has since [2017] experienced very little of the return to growth found in areas such as London”⁶. But inequality is more than a mere measure of GDP; and it would be impossible to find a capitalist economy without it, by definition. Economic activities equivalent to “around 11% of British GDP were directly involved in or associated with the Triangular Trade and the American plantation complex”, for example.⁷ (Or as Zinn writes about the origins of Northern support for the abolition of slavery in America, “the northern elite wanted economic expansion – free land, free labour, a free market, a high protective tariff for manufacturers, a bank of the United States. The slave interests opposed all that…” So economic growth is in itself no great measure of equality, good or bad, nor especially the moral values of those who preach such growth in its name – Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address, for example, was: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists…” Rather change, as always, came from the radicals and rioters like the Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who said that “if Lincoln was able to grow it is because we have watered him”.⁸) In short: subtlety is required. It is useful to disaggregate the inequality to see more clearly in which areas it is most prominent. As the 2020 Deaton Review by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) into geographical inequalities itself notes: “headline figures on productivity, earnings and household incomes may be missing underlying trends and other important aspects of inequality that people care about.”⁹ These are what the review euphemistically refers to as ‘important dimensions’ of inequality. So what are these?

Deaton Review 2020

The review found ‘compelling evidence’ of the North-South divide in ‘a large and widening gap in early mortality since 1995’ (an undeniably important dimension), but noted that life expectancy “has increased in London relative to other parts of the country since 2010, especially for those living in more deprived areas. It has improved the least in the North East and fallen in the most deprived parts of the North East” (my emphasis). This result generalised across the country, such that the best advice, statistically, for a longer, healthier life is simply: be rich. In the ‘important dimension’ of education, the review found that “inequalities in education and social mobility have grown” between rich and poor regions of the country. This inequality is particularly severe when measured against the capital, such that children in London receiving free school meals are “more likely to go to university than children not receiving free school meals in any other region bar the North West” (this alone could go some way to explaining some of the discontent felt by poor communities in regions across the country). Yet this statistic gains added significance when the impact of a university education in determining future quality of life is understood.

IFS New Year’s Review 2021

The IFS New Year’s Review in 2021 found that graduate earnings were “more than 60% above those for non-graduates”, and that the type of work that graduates and non-graduates do differs greatly in its quality and quantity. Graduates are “not only typically able to earn much more, but also have better prospects of progression and often better working conditions”.¹⁰ The segregation was shown starkly by the recent lockdowns: “On the eve of the crisis, 71% of employees without a degree either worked in a sector that was locked down (e.g. hospitality) or had a job that could not easily be done remotely. For employees with a degree, that figure was just 45%.” Put another way, the ‘mass expansion of skills’ – skills here meaning a university-level education – “mean that those without higher-level skills face an increased likelihood of low-paid and more precarious work.” This has been described by an Oxford Open Economics review into political inequality (for the IFS) as the polarisation of the labour market between ‘lovely’ and ‘lousy’ jobs. ‘Lousy’ jobs are ‘often low-paid and more precarious in terms of contract structure (access to benefits, security) and hours of employment… [and] while cities have both a high share of “lovely” and “lousy” jobs, the former are under-represented in many rural areas and smaller towns.’¹¹ This is emphasised by ‘clear evidence of diverging wage profiles by education and by part-time work, and low rates of on-the-job training for lower-educated workers. Employment alone is increasingly not enough to escape poverty and low earnings’ (emphasis mine).¹² In fact, in-work poverty ‘accounted for almost 60% of all poverty in Britain, and around 70% of working-age poverty’ on the eve of the Covid pandemic.

Institutionalisation of two-class society

The ideological commitment to total employment has been accepted doctrine since the 1980s. This is despite the fact that, according to an Oxford Open Economics review into labour market inequality, “the stagnant real wages that have characterised the UK since the mid-2000s in spite of low unemployment levels are at odds with the conventional view that unemployment and wage growth are negatively associated”, suggesting, if we assume those in power are at least as intelligent as the average person, that the push for extreme wage inequality is a conscious decision.¹³ The result of such a policy is that more workers are pushed into what are euphemistically referred to as ‘alternative work arrangements’, which are “usually not covered by certain employment rights, such as holiday pay, unfair dismissal protection, minimum wage regulation, and social insurance provision (e.g. unemployment insurance, health insurance, retirement benefits, paid sick leave, and paid family leave).”¹⁴ Thus not only is there essentially a two-class society, there is an institutionalisation of it. The economy is one of segregation by wealth, and by extension privilege (healthcare, education, working conditions, housing conditions, etc.), whereby a class of people subsidise the comfortable, meaningful (by the narrow standards of the modern economy) lives of another through low-paid menial work; with little prospects of any change. Or as the same review rather tamely puts it: “One face of rising inequality has been a surge of highly paid jobs with good career structures and work security alongside more less-good jobs without career prospects and with greater insecurity and uncertainty and less worker rights.”¹⁵ And in a system which devotes such importance to productivity (as the emphasis of the IFS Deaton Review into geographical inequalities demonstrates: the word ‘productivity’ appears 43 times in a document about inequality), in which virtue and human value are measured by income and a ‘good’ job, large concentrations of people working only to serve those whose work is considered ‘meaningful’ in this limited sense will no doubt lead to, at the very least, some feelings of anger and resentment.

One way of expressing such feelings is through apathy and non-participation. If politics does not even pretend to serve your needs then why vote, why engage with such a society? Just take the current debate in the elite press about the right to ‘switch off’ after work, with all the daring references to the right to a decent ‘work-life balance’. This is in contrast to, say, the right to a decent life for the millions of children living in poverty in one of the richest countries in the world. (The numbers are shocking: 30% of children in the UK live in poverty. The North East and West Midlands have the highest rates across the UK. In the last seven years the rate has increased by nine percentage points in the North East. The highest concentration is in Tower Hamlets in London, where over 50% of children live in poverty, largely due to the cost of housing there.¹⁶) Never mind the millions of workers in precarious work with no sick pay, no paid breaks, no holiday entitlement, and no union representation (or as the business press and the Prime Minister like to call it: ‘flexible’, ie you can be replaced in about a day, and are free to find another job with a disproportionately asymmetrical power structure; all part of a ‘healthy business environment’). Less money; fewer rights. Such disregard demonstrates quite clearly the contempt the mainstream political leaders have for the toiling masses whose votes each election become increasingly less worth even pretending to care about.

Voting

Again the literature shows this quite clearly. Richer people are substantially more likely to turn out to vote than poorer people. “Moving from the poorest to the richest group is associated with a 20 percentage point higher probability of turning out in elections since 2010”.¹⁷ Evidence suggests that this is, “systematic across OECD countries and is higher in countries with relatively high-income inequality… [and] shows a widening of the turnout gap between working-class and middle-class (however defined) citizens.”¹⁸ But this fact is nothing new, of course. Universal suffrage is no guarantee of universal equality. In fact, the response of the US Government to the black revolt and the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement was the Voting Rights Law in 1965 which guaranteed universal suffrage, and which was, as Howard Zinn writes, “the federal government trying… to channel anger into the traditional cooling mechanism of the ballot box, the polite petition, the officially endorsed quiet gathering.”¹⁹ Even this did not stop the protests, the riots, demanding deeper change, and in 1967, in the black ghettos of the country, came the ‘greatest urban riots in American history’. Or as the anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman said on the subject of women’s suffrage: “The history of the political activities of man proves that they have given him absolutely nothing that he could not have achieved in a more direct, less costly, and more lasting manner… every inch of ground he has gained has been through a constant fight, a ceaseless struggle for self-assertion, and not through suffrage. There is no reason to assume that women… will be helped by the ballot.”²⁰ The history of democracy is the history of popular struggle against illegitimate authority. The way to win concessions is to organise and take collective action. And here lies the crucial difference today: the potential to come together and demand change is almost non-existent among a dejected, variegated, atomised collection of toiling workers.

Trade unions

Unions are the traditional (relatively conservative) way of doing that: after voting union bargaining is the state-approved alternative. And whether historically they have had, to quote A JP Taylor, the “outlook of class war, to be fought with the bull-headed obstinacy of the trenches” (e.g. the miners) or a “unionism aiming at compromise or partnership” (e.g. the railwaymen), the fact is that such organisations have allowed working people to come together and play a significant role in influencing and shaping the kind of society they want to see.²¹ That is, in establishing true democracy. But since the neoliberal assault led by Thatcher and the dismantling of “the institutions and political ways of the social democratic state that had been consolidated in Britain after 1945”, working class solidarities have waned, writes David Harvey in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, “under pressure and job structures radically [changed] through deindustrialisation”. Thatcher “further reduced union power by opening up the UK to foreign competition and foreign investment” which together “demolished much of traditional British industry. . .  [and] effectively destroyed the indigenous nationalised UK automobile industry, with its strong unions and militant labour traditions, instead offering the UK as an offshore platform for Japanese automobile companies”, as the rioters in Sunderland were no doubt aware. The overall effect, concludes Harvey, was “to transform the UK into a country of relatively low wages and a largely compliant labour force.” And with this transformation came also the transformation and restoration of the class power “around one of the key global centres of financial operations’ with such force that subsequent generations of political leaders ‘could not help but sustain the process.”²² Or as the IFSreview into labour market inequality writes, “the fraction of trade union members in the UK has fallen precipitously in the last four decades. Union membership rates have decreased across the board from the early 1980s to 2019. . . while 51% of employees were union members in 1983, only 24% were in 2019. The drop has occurred for both men and women, across age groups, and in both the private and public sectors.”²³ And while “the latter remains substantially unionised” (in fact less than half of public sector workers are members of a union), the report does not mention that about 82% of all workers are employed in the private sector (Office for National Statistics), and only 12% of these workers are in a union.

Inequality is the essence

Thus inequality is the essence of the United Kingdom, its fundamental characteristic; and this is no accident. Nor is it any secret. Anyone who walks through any major city sees it. You just have to look beyond the facade of gentrification and green spaces, of cycle lanes and diversity, to see the demoralised and destitute staff working to survive, chained to a job out of pure necessity. The nomadic delivery drivers shuttling food to those better off; the drugs and the crime in the etiolated estates; the invisible army of homeless with a sentry on every street corner; the overwhelming fog of despair licking its tongue into every corner of the country. The 2024 survey carried out by IPSOS MORI for the IFS Deaton Review shows this: “Around three in five Britons say they are worried about a range of issues concerning inequality, including that many people do not have enough money to live a comfortable life (61%), that young people in poorer areas tend to die at a younger age (60%), that the top 1% of earners have more money than the other 99% of people (58%) and that people from wealthier families are more likely to end up in positions of influence (56%). For each issue only around one in ten report not being worried.”²⁴ But since the neoliberal revolution and the subsequent emphasis by every mainstream political party on material culture, that is, the cult of the individual, and the primacy of the individual as a loyal and dutiful consumer above all else, in the liberating, equalising world of the free market (such that even the National Health Service is guided by a focus on consumer choice – healthcare! – ‘yes, I understand the immediate implications of my current heart attack, but the hospital over the bridge has a delightful little cafe’), any impulse to care for our fellow suffering creatures – to not just see what is so clear but to actually care as well, to do something about it – is conditioned out of people. Thus not only has it become nearly impossible for working people to organise effectively, to at least come together to discuss the plight of their situation, but those with the time and energy to do something about it, that is, those with the responsibility to act, are trapped within the moronic inferno: the drip-fed opioids of social media and binge-worthy television; the myriad of podcast prophets who, for only a small donation, reveal the real truth about the world; the endless streams of consumer propaganda projected almost directly into their prefrontal lobes telling them to buy, buy, buy, for in the democracy of the free market the only way to be a valuable member of society is to spend money.

Organising society

We are now consumers first and human beings second. And our rights, both axiomatically and in relation to others, naturally must be ordered as such. Healthcare is the clearest example of this: the right to universal healthcare is second to the right to choose the quality of care you want. It is no surprise, then, as the recent analysis of the state of the NHS shows, that better healthcare outcomes are directly linked to wealth, or that poor mental health is more prevalent in poorer communities, or that rates of obesity in children are greatest in the poorest communities, etc., etc. This is one way to organise a society on a small scale, and it might survive for a while, but on a global scale in the nuclear age, it is surely unsustainable. For one thing, it is simply antithetical to human nature. In their book The Dawn of Everything, David Wengrow and David Graeber recount the first meetings between the indigenous American population and the European missionaries who came to save the poor savages who had not heard the Word of God, and who knew nothing of the Western Enlightenment and the new Age of Reason. The replies of the inhabitants of the various communities share a common theme. Father Pierre Biard, for example, was a former theology professor assigned in 1608 to evangelise the Algonkian-speaking Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia. He wrote that, “They consider themselves better than the French: ‘For,’ they say, ‘you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour. They are saying these and like things continually.” And Brother Gabriel Sagard, a Recollect Friar, wrote of the Wendat nation that, “They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.” Or as the ‘unusually brilliant’ Wendat statesman, Kandiaronk, put it: “Do you seriously imagine… that I would be happy to live like one of the inhabitants of Paris, to take two hours every morning just to put on my shirt and make-up, to bow and scrape before every obnoxious galoot I meet on the street who happened to have been born with an inheritance? Do you really imagine I could carry a purse full of coins and not immediately hand them over to people who are hungry; that I would carry a sword but not immediately draw it on the first band of thugs I see rounding up the destitute to press them into naval service?”²⁵ This is not to say that such indigenous peoples are especially noble, or represent some Utopian ideal lost since our banishment from Eden, but rather to show that the absurdity, and inherent wickedness, of a civilisation based primarily on the individual and material wealth above all else, is clear to anyone not conditioned to see it as normal. And, as the book argues, that there are other ways to organise society than the enlightened tradition of holding private property as the sacred basis of all civilisation.

So, why the riots?

Returning to the initial question, then, of why some poor white people in the UK recently decided to riot, the question is not, ‘Why?’, but rather, ‘Why is anyone surprised?’. Or perhaps even, ‘Why are more people not rioting?’. The answer to the latter question is simple: it is almost impossible for an individual to take collective action in modern society. An individual revolting is merely a criminal or a lunatic, and there are prisons for both. As cities become larger and gentrification (or, progress) drives house prices up, and as governments and councils neglect social housing in favour of the profitable private market, poor communities are broken up and forced to move the nearest affordable place, wherever that may be. Take the example of Hackney. As reported in The Socialist Worker, the Labour-run council wants to close primary schools because of diminishing pupil numbers, despite the fact that a consultation found 95% opposed the planned closures.²⁶ And despite the fact that smaller class sizes are beneficial for children. But “school funding is tied to enrolment numbers – less students enrolling means less government funding for education going to the local authority.” No money; no rights. This is the age of the consumer. If you want a better education, be rich. As Dave Davies, National Education Union joint branch secretary said, “The main reason why Hackney and other boroughs such as Lambeth have a significant problem with falling enrolment is prohibitively expensive housing costs forcing young families out of the area.”²⁷ Since 2010, Hackney council has sold twice as many council houses as it has built. So while, according to an LSE report²⁸, it “has become an extremely popular location” for workers in central London, with a high standard of private rentals, it is also, “a local authority with one of the largest homelessness problems in the country, twenty percent of which is concentrated among young people.” Even so, the report adds, “many employed people find it too expensive and have to move further out. This inherently means that lower income households and individuals can only remain in the area if they already have security of tenure or other form of support.” This division by wealth not only generalises across society, but is inherent in it. It forms the very basis of our politics and our culture. In the face of such meaningless and contemptuous dislocation of poor individuals from their communities, any meaningful form of collective action becomes near impossible. Especially in a culture where these problems are not considered particularly worthy of the elite media’s attention. At least not compared with the real issues, like whether it is acceptable to receive an email outside of working hours, or how artificial intelligence might replace a substantial number of jobs in the field of marketing.

Once any form of protest is likely to happen in those homogeneous communities where the sense of solidarity is strong, in which there is a shared history, a common culture, and the collective loss can still be seen and discussed, if not entirely understood. And, of course, where the people are the poorest, and the resentment at being members of a subclass in the democratic society of the consumer is most clearly felt. Well, any rational person who has a clear picture of the country, even if he or she knew nothing about the most recent riots, would surely conclude that the former industrial centres and forgotten towns in the North West, North East and Wales are the most likely places to find any repressed feelings of anger and abandonment. That is, those communities who within a couple of generations have lost a culture and way of life centred around industry, community and solidarity, from which they derived meaning and purpose, and in which they found a level of democratic control and bargaining power (not to mention that human sin, pride), and found it replaced by chain supermarkets, desolated high streets, poverty, drugs, crime, and precarious meaningless work; who have seen their children born with little hope of escaping the unfortunate punishment of their birthplace, and see no hope of a return to of what has been lost: “How green was my valley then, and the valley of them that have gone”. And all the while to be told that they are privileged, that their plight is of no concern to the new socially conscious generation who live in the lovely cities far away (or in the case of London, the lovely neighbourhood around the corner), that their cries are simply those racist cries of the ‘white working class’ and therefore not worth our attention, not worth our concern. If you’re white and poor in Blyth or Middlesbrough, for example, and you want something better, what’s the solution, what is the advice? What do the adverts command you to do? Join the Royal Navy, of course. Is it any wonder that in such a climate minorities will be played off against each other? That such a disaffected and disenfranchised mass of people will inevitably blame, not the actual abusers of power and privilege, but their fellow sufferers. But such is the history of power.

Notes

1. Thompson, E. P. (The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage Books. Random House. pp. 62-63

2. Zinn, H. (2013), A People’s History of the United States. Routledge. pp. 84-85

3. Ibid. pp. 57-58

4. Thompson, E. P. (The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage Books. Random House. pp.

5. McKay, Lawrence. (2020), Political Discontent Across English Regions: The Role of Economic Grievances in the North South Divide.

6. Ibid. pp. 3

7. Rönnbäck K. (2018), On The Economic Importance Of The Slave Plantation Complex To The British Economy During The Eighteenth Century: A Value-Added Approach. Journal of Global History. Vol. 13(3):309-327. doi:10.1017/S1740022818000177

8. Zinn, H. (2013), A People’s History of the United States. Routledge. pp. 84-85

9. Agrawal, S, & Phillips, D. (2020), Catching Up Or Falling Behind? Geographical Inequalities In The UK And How They Have Changed In Recent Years. The Institute for Fiscal Studies.

10. Johnson, P, Joyce, R, & Platt, L. (2021), The IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities: a New Year’s message.

11. Ansell, B. & Gingrich, J. (2024), Political inequality, Oxford Open Economics, Volume 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/ooec/odad043
12. Blundell, R. (2022), Inequality, Redistribution and Wage Progression. University College London and Institute for Fiscal Studies. Economica. Volume 89, S160–S177 doi:10.1111/ecca.12425

13. Giupponi, G. and Machin, S. (2022), ‘Labour market inequality’, IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities. pp. 13

14. Ibid., pp. 43

15. Ibid., pp. 45

16. Action For Children. Where Is Child Poverty Increasing In The UK? Available at: https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk/blog/where-is-child-poverty-increasing-in-the-uk/ (accessed 31/10/24)

17. Ansell, B. & Gingrich, J. (2024), Political inequality, Oxford Open Economics, Volume 3(1), pp.  4

18. Ibid, pp. 13

19. Zinn, H. (2013), A People’s History of the United States. Routledge. pp. 465-457

20. Ibid, pp. 345

21. A. J. P. Taylor. (1992), English History 1914 – 45. Oxford University Press. pp. 146

22. David Harvey. (2005), A Brief History Of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. pp. 57-63

23. Giupponi, G. and Machin, S. (2022), ‘Labour market inequality’, IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities. pp. 37

24. Day, H. & Garrett, C. (2024). Dimensions of Inequality: The IFS Deaton Review Attitudes To Inequality. Oxford Open Economics, Vol. 3, i80–i87 https://doi.org/10.1093/ooec/odae009

25. Wengrow, D. & Graeber, D. (2022). The Dawn Of Everything. Penguin. pp. 36, 52

26.  Tom Foster. Workers launch campaign to fight school closures in Hackney. Socialist Worker. (20 September, 2024) Available at: https://socialistworker.co.uk/news/workers-launch-campaign-to-fight-school-closures-in-hackney/ (accessed 1/11/24)

27. Ibid.

28. Dargan, S., Merrick, A., Edge, A., & Whitehead, C., (2024), Homlessness Among Young People In Hackney. London School of Economics. pp. 3

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