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The York Policy Engine lecture: Are we any closer to solving inequality?

By Alexandru R

In October we had the pleasure of attending a public lecture at York University organised by the university in collaboration with The York Policy Engine (TYPE). The panel included a broad range of speakers who were all academics of the highest order in their respective fields. This included Professor Kate Pickett who is a Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Health Sciences whose research interests are in research interests are in the social determinants of health and health inequalities, Professor Richard Wilkinson is a researcher in social inequalities in health. He is emeritus professor of public health at the University of Nottingham and Professor Danny Dorling is a social scientist whose books include Inequality and the 1% and All That Is Solid. He is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. They were being interviewed by Matthew Taylor who is Chief Executive for the NHS Confederation, the membership organisation that brings together, supports and speaks for the whole healthcare system in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The first two speakers mentioned co-authored award-winning and bestselling The Spirit Level (2009), The Spirit Level at 15 (2024) and Act now: A vision for a better future and a new social contract (2024). The latter speaker mentioned wrote books such as Inequality and the 1% (2014) and his most recent title – Seven Children (2024) – where he creates seven different fictional children based on the analysis of millions of statistics representing the social class structure in the UK.

The speakers started out by addressing the ever-growing inequality problem and how there is a growing disconnect between those who are well off and those who are not. They attempted to show this by relating an experiment where they asked relatively well-off individuals to estimate incomes of lower classes. They failed miserably to do so, by overestimating, sometimes as much as a £10.000 surplus.

The conversation then turned a lot more general to the point where they attempted to evaluate the past governments of the UK since 1979 when Margaret Thatcher’s premiership ended. The interviewer focused on how the Conservative government from that period managed to lower child poverty rates the most out of all the following governments. At this point, Professor Danny Dorling, author of Seven Children took the stage and related his disagreement of independent schools and how only 7% of students attends schools such as these. He continued by stating that their number should be greatly reduced, they should be taxed, and he fundamentally disagreed with them. However, he still saw a necessity and did not believe in completely closing such schools. The floor was then open to questions which took the conversation to all sorts of odd places, like whether Britain should return the Kohinoor diamond to India.

Following the end of the panel discussion, feeling a bit out of place, we swiftly got out of there, sneakily hiding our school coats. In the end, the panel concluded that although a change in government was inevitable as Conservatives were already tired after almost 15 years in government. However, they also concluded that Keir Starmer, the current PM, has a long road ahead and would need more focused intervention in areas such as child poverty for which they have not taken any measurable action.