Britain has long been in a destructive cycle of high inequality and high poverty. How do we break it?
Join us at 6pm on Thursday 9th December for the launch of Stewart Lansley’s new book The Richer, The Poorer, How Britain Enriched the Few and Failed the Poor – a 200-year history (Policy Press).
In The Richer the Poorer, Stewart Lansley charts the rollercoaster history of both rich and poor – and the mechanisms that link wealth and impoverishment.
The book shows how Britain’s model of ‘extractive capitalism’ – with a small elite securing an excessive slice of the economic cake – has created a two-century-long ‘high inequality–high poverty’ cycle that shows no sign of abating.
- What impact has the process of personal enrichment by the few had on the livelihoods, life chances and incomes of the many?
- Has it been right to treat poverty as a distinct condition, independent of the way the economic cake is sliced?
- And just how do we break Britain’s destructive poverty/inequality cycle?
Joining the discussion will be Baroness Ruth Lister, Labour member of the House of Lords, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at Loughborough University, author of Poverty (Polity, 2nd ed. 2021) and vice-chair of Compass, and Barry Knight, co-chair of the Compass Board and author of Rethinking Poverty (Policy, 2017).
Stewart Lansley is a Compass Associate and a Council Member of the Progressive Economy Forum.
Compass has always believed that much greater equality is a cornerstone of a good society and underpins all our thinking and activism.
With Britain the second-most unequal of rich nations and poverty rates heading higher, RSVP to join the debate on one of the key political issues of the decade: how to build a more equal society.