The (very busy) man who tells it like it is
Danny Dorling: Three books in four months
DANNY Dorling is a very busy man.
He’s published three books since February, is a professor at three universities, advises politicians and the World Health Organisation on social policy and he’s the national media’s first call on population and inequality issues.
He’s also got three kids, a pile of essays to mark and a talk to give at Waterstone’s on his latest book.
Frankly he’s all over the place, which, as Professor Of Human Geography at the University Of Sheffield, perhaps he ought to be.
“If it’s about somebody, somewhere then I’m interested,” he jokes in the book-strewn academic jumble of his sixth floor office in the university’s geography department on Bolsover Street.
His latest book, Bankrupt Britain, his 28th in 20 years, has just been released and he’s fired with enthusiasm for it – if not for the 100-plus essays he has to grade before he goes on holiday tomorrow.
Bankrupt Britain is described as the only social atlas to show the effects of the recession on Britain geographically over the last three years. In detailed colour maps it shows how economic, social and environmental issues have been affected since the 2007 banking crisis, 2008 economic crash and the 2009 credit crunch.
“It shows that Britain accounts for half the credit card debt of 15 European nations, plus mortgages,” said the 43-year-old professor, who cycles to work from Crosspool every day.
“It’s about why we end up in so much debt when other countries tend not to.”
So why do we?
“Economists Robert Frank and Ben Bernanke say one of the main reasons is because of the gaps between us we are always spending more to keep up with the average. Inequalities in society have increased since the 1970s and we tend to stretch ourselves, getting a bigger mortgage so we can live in an area with the better schools, spending that bit more on a holiday so we end up going somewhere we can’t really afford.
“As a country we also spend more on advertising which feeds the feeling that we need to get something we don’t have.
“We keep pushing it and we end up in a spiral and our society is more unequal than the rest of western Europe, Canada, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan. Other countries also pay higher social security benefits because people think ‘I might need that one day’ and don’t mind.
“The 1,000 richest people in this country are 25 per cent better off now than they were a year ago and the top ten per cent are also doing well.
“The gaps between the rich and the rest are growing.”
An hour with Danny Dorling, darling of the political left, is like a tour of human geography past and present.
He appears to be one of those rare individuals who can immerse themselves in the infinite minutiae of their subject and still retain a visionary overview.
Conversation ranges from Nick Clegg’s knackerdness and the California Goldrush to Lloyd George, comprehensive schools, the Full Monty and immigration.
But he comes back to Sheffield.
“Sheffield is a very unequal city but when you move around the country everyone thinks their city is the most unequal,
“Sheffield is no more unequal than, say, Oxford, and is less unequal than Leeds or London.
“At its widest people in certain neighbourhoods in this city can expect to live 20 years longer than those in other neighbourhoods. Between averages it’s ten years.
“Sheffield is seen as a poor town but actually it’s average.”
Originally from an estate on the outskirts of Oxford, Dorling studied at Newcastle University and worked in Bristol and Leeds before coming to Sheffield in 2003.
“I think Sheffield is a hidden gem,” he said.
“In this job you can end up almost anywhere and I feel really lucky to be living in Sheffield and bringing up a family.
“Maybe I’m just at that time of life where I want to be settled but that’s how I feel.”
But he doesn’t see the city just through rose tinted spectacles.
“My worry is that a high proportion of work in Sheffield now is military work.
“We think we are still making knives and forks but we are actually part of the arms race.
“If Sheffield was to be booming in 30 years time it would be because people are building arms.
“We don’t shout about it because of what it is. This city’s future is so far away from what I would like it to be. I would like to see a time when we acknowledge that we don’t make knives and forks any more.”
‘We live in very strange times - it’s not a conspiracy, it’s a mess’
“WE live in very strange times.”
One of Professor Dorling’s lecture hall catchphrases that sum up his original take on the world.
“I don’t believe in easy conspiracies, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s a mess and it’s unsustainable,” he says to describe the way politics and society have fundamentally shifted in recent years.
“If I had sat down in front of you three years ago and said that the Government would cut university funding by 80 per cent and that they would also take out £81 billion from the economy you would have told me I was a conspiracy theorist.
“You can’t keep increasing the debt on young people with such as university tuition fees. In effect the Government is transferring the debt from all of us to youngsters. We’re virtually privatising the national debt.”
There are even darker forces at large, according to Professor Dorling.
“There is a growing voice in the south that says we can’t afford the north any more,” he said. “The idea is that they let places die and people can move to the south-east for work.
“That’s the ‘I’m all right Jack’ attitude of some politicians.
“They won’t try to make it happen in the next few years but it would only take 10 to 15 years of managed decline.”
Sheffield should be a beacon
HE’S blown it now.
Professor Danny Dorling has told the world about his love for the ‘hidden gem’ that is Sheffield.
Professor Dorling is an expert on Human Geography at the University of Sheffield and he let the cat out of the bag in one of his latest books; So You Think You Know About Britain?
Let’s hope no-one notices.
This is what he said:
“There is a city in the North, a third of which is national park.
“This city has uncrowded trains that arrive in London in just over two hours.
“Unlike in Manchester it doesn’t rain much and people still say thanks to their bus drivers.
“There are traffic jams on only one road and only then for part of the year.
“You wouldn’t want it becoming like Hay or York so I shouldn’t really be telling you this but it is the place where, despite hard times, more people decided to stay and call it home during the last recession than any other badly-hit northern town.
“It is the city of the Full Monty and it is the nearest metropolis to the colliery village used for the basis of the film Brassed Off.
“It is the city that received more spending cuts over the summer of 2010 than any other – in a cruel test of Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s loyalty.
“It is the kind of place that a less cut-throat, less depressed, less divided Britain could well emulate – where a higher proportion of children grow up to attend university each year than do children from Britain’s most affluent large city, Bristol.
“This is because education in Sheffield is more equally distributed and, in a less divided country, what is commonplace in places like Sheffield would be nearer the centre of our thinking everywhere else.”
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Thursday 23 February 2012
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