In 1973, Britain was the second most equal large country in Western Europe, and now it is the second most unequal of any country across the entirety of Europe. It has all of the hallmarks you expect to see in very unequal countries, including a life expectancy that, today, remains lower than it was in 2014 (other than briefly in 2019). There has been an explosion in food bank use since the Conservative- led austerity programme began, university tuition fees were tripled in 2012 and have risen twice since. Britain is now also one of the places in the world with the least affordable housing. What this has done is to raise impenetrably high walls segregating people and places – sometimes quite literally walls in the gated communities that shield the wealthy, who have mostly grown so much more wealthier, from the poorer, who are getting poorer. A polarisation has always existed – but the degree of polarisation has not been so wide as it is now for almost a century.

One of the compelling points made in this book is that the conventional wisdom and taken- for- granted assumptions that politicians draw on to try to fix the problem are often part of how the problems came about in the first place. It is clearly of little use to keep rehashing the same old solutions that are based on flawed logics and will do nothing to fix these entrenched divides. A new way of looking at the problem, and a more radical set of solutions that gets to the heart of what reproduces division, is needed – which all necessitates picking apart some of the fundamental bases of how we live and function as a society and economy.