Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of A Failing State

In Oxford, houses in a former council estates are now too expensive for University staff. MIddle England is now a patchwork of haves and have-nots who rarely mix. Once affluent suburbs are now unproductive places where opportunity has been replaced by food banks. Pre COVID, Child health expectations and life expectancy rates dropped as a result of poverty for the first time since 1945 Britain is broken, but how did we become so divided? In A Shattered Nation, leading geographer and author of Inequality and the 1% shows that we are growing further and further apart, and shows what we can do about it. In 1942, the welfare state was based on repelling the five giants - want, squalor, disease, idleness and ignorance - but these spectres have now returned with a vengence, and impacting every aspects of our lives, threatening to turn the United Kingdom into a divided failed state. By visiting sites across the islands, and exploring the social fissures that have emerged, Dorling exposes this new geography of inequality. Urgent, timely and shocking - A Shattered Nation offers hope for an exhausted country.