One of the first social rules children learn is the painful necessity of sharing. After the shock of encountering other wants and needs as strong as their own, a child who hands over stickers and sweets to their peers is praised. Yet for adults in the UK, sharing and caring, a glib rhyme that packages an important truth, is no longer a priority. “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers,” writes Susan Sontag in her essay on observing others’ suffering, and Britain has tolerated inaction about inequality for so long that a shared responsibility for one another’s wellbeing has eroded. If only the housing stock of the UK were more evenly distributed, for example, there would be no housing crisis; no child would even have to share a bedroom. Instead, we now live in a poor little rich country: “A rich country where the average person lives like a poor person.”
Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at Oxford University, fluent with statistics as well as stories, describes this shift as a choice that society could reconsider. Inspired by the 1964 documentary Seven Up!, which followed 14 children born in 1957, Dorling’s book enters the private worlds of seven typical five-year-olds – born in the autumn of 2018 – who represent today’s spread of family income in the UK. These range from “Monday’s child” Anna, an average representative of the bottom 14% of children who has “less than a large posh coffee” spent on her needs weekly, via “Thursday’s child” David, whose dad incessantly worries about his insecure income, to “Sunday’s child” Gemma, daughter of successful corner shop owners yet her father feels the pinch and is flirting with far-right ideas. As a group, children entering primary school in the UK – for whom the most significant ABCs are austerity, Brexit and Covid-19 – have never had it so bad. Not since the Great Depression has the UK been so unequal, home as it now is to the greatest concentration of poor children in Europe.
