Shattered Nation: how to save Britain from becoming a failed state

Past event: 23rd August 2023

What needs to be done to stop Britain becoming a failed state and is Scotland providing some answers?

Professor Danny Dorling, the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at University of Oxford joined us in Edinburgh to preview his new book “Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State".

This event explored how Britain lost its role as Europe’s leading economy, made itself one of the most unequal countries and whether policies such as the Scottish Child Payment, universal free school meals and the absence of university tuition fees in Scotland are preventing things getting worse.

In "Shattered Nation," Dorling discusses the need for progressive plans for change to help us tackle inequality, social and political polarisation as well as the economic challenges and repeated crises that have left so many struggling to afford decent housing and the basics of a good life.

The session was chaired by Assa Samaké-Roman, a journalist and newspaper columnist from France who lives in Edinburgh. Assa covers Scotland's politics, culture and society for the French-speaking media (Radio France Internationale, Radio-Télévision Suisse, Le Figaro, Politis). She is also the co-founder and editor of La Revue Écossaise, a new francophone magazine about Scotland's ideas, culture, history and politics.

This event was supported by News Direct.

Jonathan Portes on Immigration policy: challenges for the UK and Scotland

Professor Jonathan Portes spoke at the David Hume Institute on “Immigration policy: challenges for the UK and Scotland”.

Professor Jonathan Portes is a Senior Fellow of the Economic and Social Research Council's "UK in a Changing Europe" initiative, based at King’s College London, which promotes high quality research into the complex and changing relationship between the UK and the European Union. His current research concentrates on issues related to immigration and labour mobility, both within the European Union and outside; and the economic implications of Brexit. Jonathan's latest book is called 'What Do we Know and What Should We Do About Immigration?'.

He has spent most of his career working as a civil servant, serving as Chief Economist at the Department for Work and Pensions from 2002 to 2008 and Chief Economist at the Cabinet Office from 2008 to 2011. He led the Cabinet Office’s economic analysis and economic policy work during the financial crisis and on the G20 London Summit in April 2009. From 2011 to 2015, he was Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

A copy of the slides from Jonathan’s presentation is available for download here:

Nicholas Macpherson on economic policymaking in a UK outside the EU

Baron Macpherson of Earl's Court served as Permanent Secretary to the UK Treasury from 2005 to 2016, serving under three Chancellors and managing the department through the financial crisis which began in 2007. He joined the House of Lords in October 2016.

The event was sponsored by Baillie Gifford and took place on 13 November 2017.

Brexit, Trump and the ‘deaths of despair’ – Sir Angus Deaton’s David Hume Lecture

By Jane-Frances Kelly
How do we explain the high levels of support for Brexit in the UK and Donald Trump in the US? Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Sir Angus Deaton, offered a possible explanation in his David Hume lecture Prosperity and inequality: from the Enlightenment to BREXIT and Donald Trump.
At the event, hosted by the David Hume Institute and the Royal Society of Edinburgh Sir Angus was accompanied by his wife Anne Case, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Policy also at Princeton. Their ground-breaking collaborative research on the high mortality rates among middle-aged white Americans underpinned many of the lecture’s arguments.
Although he has lived much of his adult life in the US, Sir Angus was born and brought up in Edinburgh, ‘a wonderful city in which to read, and to dream, and to explore’. At the age of ten his family moved to the Borders, where he spent some time at Hawick High School.
There, along with another former pupil, the theoretical physicist Sir David Wallace (who was in the audience), he was one of the ‘two brightest boys in the class’ – but not the smartest pupil; that was a girl ‘with whom we were locked in competition’. She became a doctor.
Turning to his subject, Sir Angus described today’s world as a difficult and uncertain place, characterised by continued faltering growth and breakdowns in familiar political arrangements. It is true that, since the Enlightenment, human progress has moved many of us from destitution, ill-health and premature death to long life and high material living standards. But as in the film The Great Escape (from which Sir Angus borrowed the title of his recent book), progress only some have escaped, leaving others behind. Progress itself has been an engine of inequality.
Looking at the role of inequality today, Sir Angus commented that in the US (as in the UK), inequality is increasing alongside low economic growth. This low growth means that fewer people prosper and flourish, and more get left behind with scant prospect for advancement.
Progress is not just about money, of course: health is just as important, if not more so, and the rich live longer than the poor in all countries, including ours. Sir Angus provided an analysis of the causes of mortality for different age and ethnic groups in the US since 1990, published last year in a paper co-authored by Anne Case.
A forensic drilling down into the data drew audible gasps as it revealed that, contrary to the trends for Hispanics and African Americans, mortality has been sharply increasing among whites in the US.
The increase in deaths, particularly pronounced in those with a high school education or less, has primarily been caused by suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning (particularly from opiate overdose), and alcoholic liver disease.
Speaking of the many people who are dead who would otherwise be alive today, Sir Angus called these ‘deaths of despair’. Following the publication of their paper, the Washington Post compared the location of the deaths with voting patterns in the US primaries, and showed that they are geographically correlated with votes for Donald Trump.
How do these findings compare to our experience in Britain? Sir Angus cautioned against over-facile comparisons between the US and the UK and that racial and ethnic issues in particular are very different. In the UK there has been an increase in drug and alcohol poisoning since just after 2000, but the effect is much smaller than that in the US. Similar political dissatisfaction was expressed in the recent Brexit referendum, however.
During question time, one member of the audience wondered whether the recent increase in political engagement in Scotland might be a protective factor, pointing out that Scotland voted to remain in the EU. On the other hand, the Scottish independence referendum provided an opportunity to vote against the status quo, one to which voters in the rest of the UK did not have access. Further research is clearly required, and the Scottish context was suggested as fertile ground for inquiry.
A final striking thought: Sir Angus wondered whether unfairness, rather than inequality per se, makes people most dissatisfied, and whether the widespread rent-seeking that characterises our economies is one of the major – and legitimate – causes of the kind of the kind of discontent that results in voting for Brexit or Donald Trump.

Hear Sir Angus’s lecture here: