For too long, Britain’s ills have been treated like an inevitability. We have no idea how we got here and if we only put our mind to it we can figure it out.

But to solve the problem requires true understanding of how the problem came about. This follow up paper to The Temper Trap, authored by Stuart Donald, is the first of its kind to make a direct link between the levels of inequality seen in Britain today and our first-past-the-post voting system.

Drawing upon 40 years of data on regional deprivation and voting trends, Lifting the Lid draws together Margaret Thatcher’s accentuated Parliamentary majorities in the 1980s, neoliberalism’s direct part in creating this country’s extensive regional inequalities, the Brexit vote and now the level of support we are seeing for the right-wing populists in Reform.

If you have trouble downloading the report or receive a message saying ‘spam detected’, click here.